2 March 1932 Visions Seminar Lecture VII
We stopped where the patient put the piece of amber on the ground and heard it beating like a heart, and she said: “Soon the ground and the trees about me beat also. I began to feel the pulsation everywhere.”
Did you come to any conclusion concerning the meaning of that symbolism?
Mr. Baumann: I think all of nature must have changed in the Great Mother. She is back in the Great Mother where she feels in possession of blood and of life.
Dr. Jung: But the pulsation does not start outside, it starts with the amber.
The idea is that this amber symbolizes the red jewel or the heart which was shown in the ice.
That has now transformed into the transparent amber, which is like a magic stone, with the quality or the magic meaning of the heart.
And when she becomes aware that the pulsation is everywhere, it is as if the heart were a part of nature, so that it is indistinguishable whether the heart or all of nature is pulsating.
It is a sort of synchronistic phenomenon.
But your idea is quite right in principle.
Mrs. Sawyer: Is it not the Chinese concept of Tao, the life force, the life energy?
Dr. Jung: Yes, the realization of Tao has this quality of being in a sort of synchronistic relation with everything else, as if the same stream of events, or the same stream of life went through everything, so that everything has, as it were, the same rhythm, the same meaning.
Mrs. Crowley: Another analogy might be what the mystical Mohammedans describe in Sufism, a sort of transcendental essence, a feeling of the heart really, in which is reflected all the outer reality.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is the general mystical experience, the coincidence of the individual condition with the universe, so that the two become indistinguishable.
This moment in the vision is such a realization of Tao.
It is most unusual symbolization, I have never seen it couched in such terms, but it is a very excellent way of putting it.
As you must realize, it is an indescribable experience, it cannot be defined. Tao is incomprehensible.
With the greatest effort of our minds we cannot imagine a condition which would be a complete coincidence or harmony between two incommensurable things.
Our subjective condition seems to be just the contrary to an objective condition.
That incomprehensibility is allied with the fact that the mind cannot understand, nor our consciousness
grasp, a thing which is not disparate, made distinct.
Only by means of discrimination can one be conscious, whereas Tao might be formulated as the condition of things before consciousness.
So the expression, the consciousness of Tao, is paradoxical. ao is a sort of semiconsciousness -almost unconsciousness.
Therefore Tao is the beginning of things, the mother of everything, and also the crowning effect of everything; it is the beginning and the end.
But that is what we call the unconscious, where the ego consciousness simply comes to an end.
We cannot go further into the meaning of such an experience here, we simply have to take it for what it is.
However, we can discuss how such a psychological experience is connected with the flow of the visions.
Why has the patient such a realization of Tao at this moment? How did it come about causally?
It would be most valuable to know how such a very central experience could be brought about.
Dr. Reichstein: It might be because the inhabitants of this village made her feel quite alone. That she is now connected with the universe might be a compensation for the feeling of loneliness.
Dr. Jung: That is true.
She was first threatened with immediate destruction by the volcano and was rescued in a very miraculous way.
But then she discovered the rest of humanity who lived in the village, to whom the volcano was simply something that smoked, they were more or less indifferent to it.
The world at which she arrived depreciated her experience.
Of course, she did not plan to go to that village, that would be foolish; she found herself there, she was caught, which was just bad luck.
She had had a tremendous experience, and then the whole thing was blotted out by the subsequent village mentality.
She got out of the heat and into the cold, and there was absolutely nothing in between, no mediation.
But here she rescues something from the experience-the amber.
It is so small that she can conceal it in her bosom and carry it with her, but when she contemplates it, she gets into Tao.
The amber is the middle condition, this stone symbolizes Tao. Mrs. Sawyer: Is it not the same where the man and woman are surrounded by the snake? Are they not in Tao?
Dr. Jung: One could say that that was an anticipation of the making of this stone in the cauldron, which is an alchemistic procedure; the crater is really a sort of retort in which heterogeneous elements are blended, thus making the Lapis Philosophorum.
The other was not yet the thing itself; that was too one-sided, on the other side of the world, at the back of the beyond.
But this amber is on this side as well as the other side, it is just in between; on this side it is a piece of amber, and on that side it is the great mystery.
Such miraculous stones or talismans are nothing but stones in the ordinary daylight.
The argument of the Christian missionaries about idols, for instance, was that they were only stone or wood that could be chopped up, so there was nothing divine about them; they could not defend themselves, nothing happened when one cut them down.
That was the obvious fact, which is true in the daytime, but in the night it is different.
Then the idol assumes a life of its own; it is filled with its own meaning as a symbol of the nocturnal experience.
So this talisman or Lapis is a sort of token of understandable commonsense material, and thus it represents the everyday world.
She can wear it as a jewel, and people will say: “You have a nice thing there,” and she will say: “Yes,” though as a matter of fact, it is quite cheap, it is just a piece of amber.
It is perhaps a bit carved, or there may be an insect inside, it is a curiosity, and everybody will let it go at that.
Yet there is something about it which is only known to herself, and that will have a certain magic effect upon her.
Jewels have always had that magic quality, and medieval science tried to find out their individual secret virtues.
Amethyst, for instance, was good to wear against getting drunk; and the opal is still not welcome because it is supposed to bring bad luck; and one must not give pearls because they bring tears.
There are certain stones, famous heirlooms, which have bloody histories attached to them, and the fact that their owners always had bad luck was assumed to be due to their possession of that particular jewel.
Naturally in the daylight one sees that it is merely a piece of glass or a diamond that is carved, and nothing else, and one is quite satisfied that nothing like magic could dwell in such a stone.
Yet to the unconscious it has magic meaning, often due to the quality or the form.
Brooches often have a mandala form, and one certainly prefers rings that have a symbolic meaning; nobody is free from such superstitions.
For instance, this ring of mine with the snake engraved on it is two thousand years old; it is the Agathodaimon, and it is also the Kundalini serpent, and it gives me special satisfaction to wear such a historical ring, it conveys a particular meaning to me.
Of course it has artistic quality and that is very interesting, but it appeals to my nocturnal side particularly,
it expresses something unconscious, and so it is thoroughly alive and full of mana.
It is a mistake to deprecate this effect because it is not scientific, for science is just a corner of the world in comparison to the real world.
You know what love is long before you find out the science of love; it has its magic, its spell, despite the fact that there is no such thing in science as feeling.
Now concerning the face of suffering that appeared in the amber, our patient says: “I felt that I must free the face inside the amber but I could not.”
Where does that face come from?
Mrs. Baynes: Somebody said last time that it was herself.
Mrs. Sawyer: You said that it was a sort of remembrance.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but that interpretation was not quite satisfactory.
Dr. Reichstein: The making of such a stone is always connected with great suffering, there is the idea of sacrifice.
Dr. Jung: That is really the idea; she cannot come into the possession of the Lapis without suffering.
It also means individuation, which can only be attained through sacrifice.
The memory of suffering makes a stone particularly precious.
A jewel which does not remind one of much suffering, many fears, hardly has a value, because good things soon lose their glamour, while the memory of suffering has a much stronger grip on our minds.
Then there is still the fact that this face is really caught in the amber and she felt the necessity of freeing it.
That it is her own suffering face would explain how the stone came into existence, but it would not explain why the idea of imprisonment is connected with it.
Why should she be imprisoned in the stone?
So whether she or someone else is proprietor of that face, we don’t know for the moment.
We must be satisfied for the time being with the fact that it means something which ought to be liberated. Now she continues: Many snakes appeared, looked at the amber and glided away. A bull came and licked the amber, but it remained the same. Then I knew that only my blood spilled on it would break the amber.
So I cut my breast and blood fell upon the amber which vanished. In its place there stood a man bound with thongs and pierced with many arrows. I drew the arrows forth as gently as I could and freed him of his fetters.
So this is the face of suffering which has been imprisoned in the stone, and through the usual performance-she had to melt the ice with the warmth of her body before, and she is here spilling her own blood upon
the amber, which means a self-sacrifice-she is liberating this unknown man from the inside of the stone.
You see in the making of the stone a man has been included in it.
And you remember the man and woman who were encoiled by the snake, so this is her masculine counterpart that has been locked in the stone.
Mrs. Sawyer: It is the animus.
Dr. Jung: And obviously the positive animus because he appears here as the absolute masculine counterpart.
That also explains the great suffering-the fettering of her masculinity has caused her suffering.
But how did it happen that her animus was fettered and caught in the stone?
Mrs. Crowley: Because the other side of her nature had come up probably, the Yin side.
Dr. Jung: The Yin side came up, which means the undoing of the animus.
But at first it was what we ordinarily understand by the animus, and we must make a difference between the two aspects.
The animus in his real form is a hero, there is something divine about him, but usually we have had to deal with a very unreal animus, an opinionating substitute.
For this woman was beset with many animus devils, and then through the whole procedure of these visions, the process of transformation, her mind-what she called her mind-became imprisoned in the earth, in the upcoming Yin material, in the female, the mother, and slowly her animus was suppressed.
She no longer had opinions about things as she assumed they should be, but gave the material a chance to
speak its own mind.
So things began to happen to her, thoughts came to her, and she stopped having opinions about things which ought to come to her, not seeing what actually was happening.
That unreal negative animus prevents the accurate perception of psychological facts, always putting an opinion in the place of the actual perception.
As soon as a woman perceives a thing, the animus steps in and says it is something quite different, and thus the actual experience is secretly falsified.
Instead of a real experience a mere empty opinion is substituted about what it ought to be, or what it possibly might be.
Now, however, she has learned to experience objectively, to see what really happens, and that has imprisoned her animus.
The motif of the imprisonment of the animus has its counterpart in masculine psychology in the imprisonment of the anima, but that is naturally different in that it is concerned with emotions and moods.
When a man is able to make a difference between the objective situation and his mood, when he no longer allows his mood to blindfold his mind, when he can set it apart, acknowledge that he has a peculiar mood, that is the beginning of the imprisonment of the anima.
After a while he will be able to say to his mood: “You have no right to exist, I will put you into a test tube and you shall be analyzed.”
Of course that means a great sacrifice, it can only be done with blood, it requires a superhuman effort to bottle up the anima.
So I quite recognize what an extraordinary accomplishment it is for a woman to put the animus aside, to say: “I will put you into a test tube for later analysis.”
Now putting the thing into a test tube, or into a cauldron, is the beginning of the alchemistic procedure; the imprisonment of the animus or of the anima is for the purpose of transformation.
This is a real process of sublimation; there is no sublimation of sex, that is imagination.
This is a transformation, not of sex, but of forms, of experiences.
Through imprisonment, the animus becomes peculiarly changed, he is stripped of his world, for when a thing is in a test tube with a piece of cotton wool as a stopper, external influences are excluded and the thing is undisturbed inside.
And so it does not disturb one’s surroundings; in that way the most dangerous microbes can be kept in one’s room without infection, because nothing can get into the test tube and nothing can get out.
So when the animus cannot get out into the external atmosphere, he has no object, and then he has time to transform.
You see, the main point in this transformation is that you take objects away from those animus or anima devils.
They are only concerned with objects if you allow yourself to indulge in something. Concupiscentiais the
term for that in the church, it was particularly stressed by St. Augustine; or convoitise in French; or desire in English; or Begehrlichkeit in German.
It is the point at which all the great religions come together.
The fire of desirousness is the element that must be fought against in Buddhism, in Brahmanism, in Tantrism, in Manichaeism, in Christianity, and it is a term in psychology also.
You see, when you indulge in desirousness, whether your desire is toward heaven or toward hell, you are giving the animus or anima an object; they are then turned out into the world instead of staying in their place within, so what should be of the night is of the day, and what should be under your feet is on top of you.
But when you can say: “Yes, I desire it, yet I do not indulge in it; if I make up my mind to have it, I shall try to get it, or if I make up my mind to renounce it, I shall renounce it.”
If your conscious attitude is such, then there is no chance for the animus or the anima.
But if you are governed by your desires you are naturally possessed.
A woman may be possessed by a real man, but that is only because there is an animus projection, as a man may be possessed by a real woman through an anima projection.
So it boils down to the subjective condition in yourself; it is due to your indulgence in your desires.
If you have put your anima or your animus into a bottle you are free from possession, though there is of course a bad time inside and you feel it because when your devil is having a bad time, you have a bad time.
You must know whether it is your good spirit or your bad spirit, for if the negative animus is having a bad time, you can enjoy it.
Of course, he will rumble in your entrails, but you can always see that it is right after a while.
You slowly get quiet and transform, and you will discover that in that bottle grows the stone, the amber
or the Lapis. In other words, that solidification or crystallization means that the situation has become habitual, and inasmuch as the self-control, or nonindulgence, has become a habit, it is a stone.
The more it has become a habit, the harder, the stronger, that stone will be, and when it has become a fait accompli it is a diamond.
Then you are no longer conscious of your concupiscentia.
Miss Taylor: Have you ever seen a diamond? Has any patient ever got to such a point that she reached the diamond?
Dr. Jung: Oh well, I am talking of most idealistic fantasies, and you must never ask such questions-whether we have ever seen a savior or a holy virgin.
It is absolutely certain that we have not. We always talk of things we don’t possess.
If it were normal to possess a diamond, it would be very uninteresting to talk of it at all; it is interesting because we don’t possess it.
We always make mistakes on the way-everybody-but perhaps one day somebody will possess a diamond.
When one talks of such things one does not possess them; and when one possesses them, why talk?
Well then, the man who comes out of the stone is a different kind of animus.
The wrong animus has been a substitute for the real one. The real animus should not be bottled up.
The conservation of the animus inside a test tube is transitory.
It must be so until one is absolutely safe, because if one opens the bottle when there is anything still left of the old concupiscentia, out comes the evil spirit and takes possession of one, and down one goes again.
But if the situation is fairly safe, if the stone has been made, one can open it and the new animus appears.
Then one can see how he behaves and what he does. In this case, out comes that man bound with thongs and pierced with arrows; that he is bound with thongs is quite comprehensible, it is the result of what she has already done.
She had to fetter the animus, to suppress his opinionating about things, in order to take things for what they really are.
She learned to make sure what things were.
Women usually do not understand the animus at all, it is as if they were completely blind.
It is really true that there is a mental function in woman that prevents her from looking things in the face.
One hears about that again and again in analyzing men. “Oh, it is quite impossible to discuss such a matter with my wife.” “But why not? You are not living in the womb as an embryo.” “My wife cannot stand such things, she doesn’t know about them.”
And it is true, the majority of women simply won’t face realities.
I remember, not dozens but hundreds of cases to whom I said: “But why did you assume that things were so? Who told you? Why did you not ask?” And they reply: “I thought it was so.”
The whole universe might collapse at their feet, and they would never look into it.
Our patient attacked the animus, catching him and tying him down, until she arrived at an immediate experience.
The animus is a sort of film between reality and a woman’s mind, she always talks about things as they should be, so when she says a thing is really so, it is really not so at all.
She never realizes how difficult it is to establish the truth about things, she thinks truth is established by saying something.
She assumes that when I say a thing, something will happen in the world. “Why don’t you tell that to my husband?”
And if l tell it to the husband he simply laughs in my face and I make a fool of myself.
The animus is like a mist before her eyes and it needs a careful systematic self-education to penetrate
that illusive mist.
Therefore we have the man pierced by arrows as well as bound by thongs.
Arrows move swiftly and penetrate; they are like thoughts, shafts of light or of insight that pierce the veil of the animus.
A woman must make an enormous effort to pierce and penetrate because she is always held in mid-air by that mirage between herself and reality.
Our patient has in this case succeeded in piercing the mist, for this is the real animus.
She says: “I drew the arrows forth as gently as I could and freed him of his fetters.” Now why should she draw out the arrows?
Mrs. Crowley: She can take them now if they are assimilated, she can make use of them, they are her own. Would that not be it?
Dr. Jung: That is not quite the idea. It is, rather, that she should make him whole.
He has been wounded, for one has to be thorough with the animus, to use violence.
Don’t forget that to be possessed by the animus or the anima was the original condition of man.
We were all possessed, we were slaves, and we are not entirely free from slavery, the main reason being that we are making efforts all the time to get back into slavery.
We don’t know to what extent we are possessed; it is probable that our liberation is very relative.
So the suppression of the anima or the animus is an act of extreme violence and cruelty; only by being hard and cruel can one suppress these powers even to that relative degree.
And naturally the animus through such a process gets quite sore and has to be made whole afterwards.
All those attempts at tying him down have caused specific wounds which must be relieved.
It is as if one had to make the animus conscious of the fact that he is now different, he is now healed, after the very harsh treatment he has received.
Now when she had freed him of his fetters, she said: He ran with great fleetness away from me until he came to a great precipice.
Then he called like Icarus: “I will fly.” I answered: “And like Icarus you will be killed.”
Slowly and with great sorrow he walked back toward me and knelt down beside me.
So the animus tries to resume his former position in the world of objects.
He wants to jump out into space and again fill space with his illusions.
And he wants to reach the impossible, the sun.
But she tells him: “No chance for you to fly about and create more illusions, no opinionating here.”
So he obediently lies down beside her.
Now we begin the new series of visions:
I was descending many steps into the black earth until I came at last to a catacomb where lay many dead.
We are again on a voyage into Hades apparently. How does this new situation arise from the former one?
Mrs. Fierz: Is it not connected with the precipice in the end of the former vision?
Dr. Jung: The precipice suggests a drop, a descent.
The animus wanted to leap the precipice and fly up to the sky, which was a mistake.
Here it is a situation of catacombs and caves, it is under the earth.
What is the logical connection with the liberation of the animus?
Mrs. Crowley: It is again an enantiodromia.
Dr. Jung: But why the catacombs where many dead are lying?
Miss Taylor: Is it her many animi down there dead as in She?
Dr. Jung:
The graves mean Hades or the underworld, the place of shadows.
The Hermes Psychopompos, the leader of souls, is leading her into the Land of the Hereafter, to the dwelling place of the dead.
“She,” the anima, dwelt among the tombs, surrounded by mummies, in order to be near the corpse of her former Greek lover Callicrates.
And there is a similar idea in Benoit’s Atlantide; Antinea the queen had in her abode a huge mausoleum of all her former lovers.
So Miss Taylor’s idea that “She” was held down in those tombs by a form of animus, or animi, is quite probable.
But in this case it is a living woman and her animus, so we must look out for a certain difference.
The next sentence is:
I passed them by until I came to a dead man whose flesh was red. He was very beautiful and I thought he was an Indian.
In the beginning of these visions, an Indian functioned as a sort of Hermes.
It seems to be a law that the red Indian should be an American animus, because the animus is a natural phenomenon.
Mr. Baumann: It is connected with the earth.
Dr. Jung: Yes, as a semi-unconscious figure the animus is always strongly influenced by the chthonic factor, the earth upon which one lives.
If an American woman lived for a considerable time in Switzerland, she might acquire a Swiss animus, as a Swiss living in South America would acquire a South American anima.
That is no joke, it is a most astonishing fact; a man’s anima is his vulnerable sensitive side, and that is where a new continent or a strange country touches him first.
A man who has been twenty years in India or Africa invariably possesses a colored anima; such a presence explains his many difficulties; it is as if he were married to a colored woman, and that may cause no end of trouble.
And a woman living in Africa for any length of time will have a colored animus, or several.
Dr. Reichstein: How is it with children who are born in India and come to Europe?
Dr. Jung: They already have the local chthonic unconscious, whatever it may be, Indian or Chinese or Negro.
That explains the inferiority that is felt by the colonial. They are always snubbed, and there is a certain
reason for it.
Something has gotten into them, there is a subtle difference between a man born in Australia and one born in England; even in the same family there is a difference.
For instance, I know an Englishman with a very distinguished name, who was born in the colonies, but
at a very early age he was sent to England and educated at Eton and Oxford; he was properly brought up in every respect, yet he was a man with a secret grudge, a secret feeling of inferiority, because he was a colonial.
This was so marked-he was a very sensitive man-that he could hardly stand living in England on account of that little twist.
In Africa, they asked me why I came there to study the natives; they said if I studied the white man I would learn very much more.
Subsequently, that idea was absolutely confirmed. It is amazing what happens, yet it is so subtle that only the clever people who live there or imaginative writers grasp it.
There is a new novel about this problem by an English-man: a young American goes to Africa in charge of an old Africander who was to take him hunting; he looked at the boy and said: “I wonder what She will do to you”-She with a capital.
You see that is it exactly, it is the twist. I knew such a man in Africa, a man who had already been forty years in the wilds, and when he spoke of it, it was with a sort of awe, as if he were speaking of the great “She.”
Quite solemnly he said to me: “You know this is not man’s country, this is God’s country.”
He hit the nail on the head, man is not paramount there, at best he comes in entre autres.
It is as if something other than man were ruling that country, which comes from the fact that those people feel the great influence of the soil or the climate, whatever it is.
The anima is tainted; one cannot get away from it, she is always secretly getting at one. I carefully observed myself, my dreams and fantasies, and I had to admit that things may happen to one there which one would hate to admit under civilized circumstances.
It is very disagreeable when one knows too much about it. Of course the majority of people do not notice it.
I have seen many women and can judge a woman’s character more or less, and there I saw women who had been in that country for a very long time, say ten or twenty years; and they were always either suffering saints, or they were drunk, or just plum crazy.
I remember one woman, the proprietress of a so-called hotel-an adobe hut with a thatched roof eaten by termites-who walked about in a marvellous robe of lace with a lace sunshade, looking as if she were taking a walk in Hyde Park on a beautiful Sunday morning in the nineties.
The first time I saw her, she was jumping over hedges, waving her parasol at an escaping turkey, swearing like a nigger and then getting into a terrible fit of rage, foaming at the mouth and talking like a mad woman; she was indeed mad.
And I saw women with an extraordinary emptiness in their eyes, yet they were paragons of African society, with the conventionality that is typical of such places.
They were just hollowed out within, which comes from the fact that the animus goes black and disappears into the ground, and they are left high and dry and flimsy.
When those people return home, something has gone out of them, it is as jf all the sap had been drained out of them.
They call it the Indian or the African sun, but it has nothing to do with the sun, it is the soil that has affected them.
So it is almost unavoidable that the animus of an American woman should be a red Indian, because he really demonstrates the American soil; he is the older man on the soil, and as the soil has fashioned him, so that fashion conquers the soil.
A more superficial animus in the American woman is often a Negro. And the third form of their animus is the Chinaman.
That is either a very terrifying figure, or something very profound.
You see the Chinaman is behind the red Indian, because the red Indian originally came across the Bering straits from Asia, so they are of Mongolian origin and related to China-unless there were Scandinavians
there, which is very questionable. Certain Indian languages resemble Chinese.
So the Chinese animus is on the one hand a superficial, terrifying creature, the uncanny Chinaman of Chinatown, or a very remote Indian of Asiatic origin.
Moreover, the American is placed between the West-Europe-and the Far East, which gives them a very peculiar quality, particularly to the western American.
The farther one goes west, the more one finds that indescribable something, and when one comes across a Chinaman, or anything Chinese in that setting, one has a feeling that it fits, that it clicks somehow.
I really wonder what will happen there in the future, for the conditions of life in California are so very peculiar that one might expect, in the course of thousands and thousands of years, an entirely new species of man to be shaped there, and I should not wonder if the influence of the Far East would be very evident.
If there were no immigration laws, the western coast of America would become Mongoloid to a very great extent because the Japanese would pour into the country.
They are prevented from doing that at present, but if America should decay, that whole side of the country would certainly become Mongoloid, or if not actually Mongoloid in blood, it would become so through the spirit of the Far East.
This would be a most logical compensation for the particular temperament and mentality of the Californian, and really for the American mentality in general, which is characterized by incredible extraversion.
That can only be compensated by the earthlike passivity, the apathy almost, of the Eastern attitude of mind.
The American is really calling for it, so I should not wonder at all if it happened.
Mr. Baumann: I always had the idea that the anima was the sort of thing which happened to the ancestors in their lifetime.
Dr. Jung: You mean that the anima is a concentration of ancestral figures?
Mr. Baumann: I mean the things that happened to my male ancestors must be in my blood, I must have a Swiss anima. But if I go to America, what happens?
Dr. Jung: Of course you have a Swiss anima, but if you go to America, after a while your Swiss anima will take on a different aspect.
If I had stayed a number of years in Africa, my anima would have become brown.
I was there fully three months before I discovered the black taint, and then it was in a dream.
The first indication was an attempt to do something to my natural mind, which is typical of the anima.
I dreamed that a Negro barber was trying to curl my hair with curling tongs; you see, that would make my hair kinky. I was afraid because the tongs were long iron bars, very thick and glowing hot-that black blue heat-and I felt that if he only approached my head, I would be lost.
So I said: “No, you must not do that, I don’t want to have a curled head.”
Hair is of course an emanation of the head, so it meant that my natural emanation was going to get kinky, by the Negro.
And to remind me how such things happen, that nigger was not an African barber, he was the barber to whom I usually went when I was in Chattanooga.
So the Negro influence happened to me as it would happen to Americans, it was an attempt at my mind.
The anima becomes evident as a peculiar mental nuance, and the more she prevails the more a man’s mind gets twisted; and it would become more and more so, till finally she would be black.
“Going black” is the technical term.
I saw plenty of such people because one recognizes at once that the expression of the soul in the eye has changed.
There is no steadiness nor serenity in the gaze, they have shifting eyes and are possessed by a strange restlessness.
I remember a visit I paid to a D.C. in a remote part of Uganda. He had a beautiful place, and it was still quite tidy.
Usually everything gets untidy; I stayed another time with a fellow where everything was terribly
untidy, he was quite gone.
But this man kept the outer form rigidly, yet he behaved very queerly, he hardly looked at me, he turned his eyes away like a Negro who is afraid of the evil eye.
You know no Negro can bear to be stared at, all primitives instantly look away, because one might cast the evil eye on them.
The Pueblo Indians always turn their eyes away, and Negroes are particularly shifty.
One gets shifty eyes oneself, but that also comes from the instinctive necessity of being on one’s guard; one is in primitive country, there is no police, and at any moment one might be in danger.
So before I realized it my eyes began to shift.
I thought I had some disturbance in the eyes, but it was merely a disturbance of the instincts.
The unconscious was telling me to look out because anything might happen.
This man had that look in his eyes and the peculiar restlessness of the Negro.
Negroes are very lazy but they are at the same time extremely restless. In the night, for instance, they get up and sit a while by the fire, or talk a little, and then go to sleep again; they sleep nearly as much in the day as in the night.
And it is the same with many Europeans who have been there a long time, it is a real “going black.”
Mrs. Crowley: To go on with the analogy between the United States and the European, the whole of America is people with another culture.
How would you explain that extraversion which is so different from the Indian?
Dr. Jung: It is a compensation, the same thing that one finds in Africa in the form of extreme conventionality.
For instance, we had to carry, not only our dinner suits, but swallow tails and white ducks, and when we
wore the white ducks it must be a black cummerbund, not a crimson one, because crimson would mean Nigeria and in Uganda one wears black.
There is a very rigid etiquette as a compensation for the extreme looseness of the Negro.
We found that out ourselves; as soon as we were in the wilds we became very particular that our boys should be clean.
We could not dress, we did not take dinner suits when we went into the bush, but we were very strict about the cleanliness of the boys.
They liked to be as dirty as possible but when serving at table, they had to wear white turbans and white shokas, we made it a ceremonial.
And you felt that if you did not shave for one day you would never shave again.
You would get out of your own hands, you would practically lose yourself, and that is the beginning of the going black of the anima.
Now we see here that our patient has found among the dead a former Indian animus, and it is very interesting that he should resuscitate just as she had discovered a positive animus.
You see the other animus-the man bound with thongs-disappeared, and it is taken up in a very different
figure.
It is as if she were returning to the very beginning of her visions, where a red Indian on horseback led her away to initiatory adventures.
She now discovers the Indian again but as a sort of beautiful corpse; yet the flesh is red, which means that he is alive though dormant.
So the Indian is a positive animus, one that would not be injurious but that would make her adapted to the American soil.
The realization of the Indian values by an American is an asset, not a depreciation.
The red Indian has very great qualities despite the fact that he is primitive.
To be primitive is no argument against having fine values. At all events it is the character that fits the soil.
Now she continues: “From his neck I took a necklace of teeth and walked on, carrying it in my hand.”
What would this mean?
Mrs. Baynes: With that she took his mana perhaps.
Dr. Jung: Yes, teeth are usually amulets, a protection against the evil eye or other perils of the soul.
This is another variation of the jewel theme.
She continues:
A dwarf followed me and tried to snatch the necklace away but I held it firmly. I came to a fire of blue flame and I held the teeth in the fire. The teeth changed to blood-red jewels which burned my hand.
The dwarf is a figure we have already encountered several times.
It is a sort of animus of impish form; here it is probably a dwarfed abortive attempt of the animus to turn negative and to take the talisman away from her.
The teeth are the equivalent of the jewel, out of them she produces new blood-red jewels, which refers to the heart again; it is the same idea, this time connected with the animus.
Mrs. Sawyer: In one of the earlier visions, red Indians pulled the entrails out of sheep and they changed into jewels.
Dr. Jung: Ah, that was long ago, that was in the country of the Great Mother, the earth initiation.
But now she is producing the red jewel herself.
Before it was the animus, but here, though associated with the Indian, it is her own activity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 605-622
Pierre Benoit, L’Atlantide (Paris, 1919), a book to which Jung often referred when
discussing the anima concept ( see letter quoted in C. G. Jung: Word and Image, p. 151).
In the 1925 seminar, Analytical Psychology, Jung assigned it to the group for study.