27 November 1930, Visions Seminar, Lecture VII
27 November 1930, Visions Seminar, Lecture VII
Today we shall not lose time with theoretical explanations about the functions. We should continue our symbolic pursuits.
You remember that the first picture in the series of visions was the head of a ram in very intense, swift movement; the ram was charging and was suddenly stopped by the spear of an Indian thrust at his forehead.
The patient had in the beginning a series of eight visions which were entirely static fragments-and here for the first time we encounter movement, and a swift strong movement at that, denoting that energy has entered the images.
The static vision is always dead, it contains very little energy; if more energy enters, the images show independent, autonomous movement such as we see here.
That means tremendous progress because they then have a life of their own and will continue to develop.
As long as they are static they will almost certainly have no continuity; only occasionally would the patient catch a flash of life, a sort of snapshot.
But as soon as there is movement, there may be a continuous flow of images, developing into a logical sequence, and that naturally leads to the drama.
It is then more than an inconsistent flow of pictures; it shows a rise and a fall, complication and culmination-it is drama.
And as drama, it catches the individual, the individual is sucked in, as it were, and enters the game.
The patient herself will play the assigned role in the drama.
She will really be part of the mystery play, and she will be transformed.
As long as she is merely watching the images, she is detached; she is perhaps interested but it is not like playing an assigned role.
As one of the figures in the mystery play, she will be serving the drama, and she will then know a higher power, the power of the drama.
That was the idea of the antique drama, a sort of ritual which one could call a mystery of transformation; it seized upon the individual, or the individual assimilated it and became transformed.
It was like the mystery of transubstantiation.
Here at last movement takes place, and we must now interpret what that movement means.
We start in very much as we always do in analyzing dreams.
You remember that whenever we tackle a new dream we look back to the dreams before, or at least to the last dream, in order to get a sort of basis from which a judgment becomes possible.
But this is not a dream, this is a product that has come about in the waking condition, and therefore we deal with it somewhat differently.
We have to consider the admixture of consciousness.
We spoke last time of the fact that such a vision is a sort of halfway product of unconsciousness and consciousness.
The last dream was about the bull and the saint and the atmosphere of the war, and one sees no connection between that and this sequence of fantasies or images.
This is due to the fact that dreams really come from the unconscious sphere and are not due to any willed conscious impression, though there is always a certain amount of the atmosphere of consciousness in any dream; otherwise we could not be conscious of them.
We are never quite certain whether the dream we remember is as it actually was in the unconscious.
Just what a thing is in the unconscious we shall never know, but we can know something that is associated with consciousness.
So if anybody should advance the theory (and mind you, that theory has been advanced) that dreams are due to the interference of a remnant of consciousness and otherwise would not be at all, or that they are twisted by that interference of consciousness, I should say it might be so.
Nevertheless, that admixture of consciousness is very small in comparison with the consciousness in these images; therefore we may assume that dreams are really derived from contents which are much lower down than the contents of such a fantasy.
That dream of the bull and the saint refers to a problem which is far below-or beyond-the consciousness of the patient; it is an anticipation of thoughts which will come again in the mystery play, but very much later.
At this stage we cannot be at all sure where it has come from.
To find its starting point we have to go back to the ideas that are expressed in the static visions, and those derive from dreams originally, the first thing being a development which took place in the unconscious.
Right in the beginning, there were dreams that prepared the first vision.
You remember the first vision was the peacock, and then came the symbol of the rising sun or the sun-man, the man with the halo.
The halo or nimbus expresses the sun-man, and therefore the Roman emperors were characterized by it.
But the saints are the real sons of the sun, they are crowned by the sun’s rays.
In the Mithraic mysteries, for instance, the initiate was crowned as a sun god, he was made into Helios, into the sun god himself, and worshipped as such.
There were different degrees of initiation, and these were usually called by animal names, as the Christians were called the fishes in the net of the Lord, or the lambs in the flock of the Shepherd.
The followers of Artemis were called arktoi, the bears.
And the followers of Mithras were called soldiers and lions and also heliodromoi, which is a particularly interesting designation.
It means literally sun-runners; they were supposed to be sort of angels with halos and golden wings, symbolizing the flight of the sun through the heavens.
The Egyptian and Babylonian sun discs had wings in order to express the idea of the sun flying like a bird.
The sun-man in our patient’s static vision derives from the peacock; the peacock is like the unfolding of the sun, the sunrise, and therefore it is a symbol of spring and resurrection.
All this is in a way an anticipation of things which are now going to happen; so under this aspect we may understand the first movement that shows in this new series of visions as spring or resurrection symbolism.
Where do we find the ram as a symbol of spring?
Dr. Baynes: The ram is the astrological sign of Aries.
Dr. Jung: Yes.
Now astrology may be quite unknown to your conscious mind, yet to your unconscious it is very intimately known; because the fundamental ideas of astrology, the signs of the zodiac, for instance, are projections onto the skies of our unconscious functioning.
Of course the constellations have nothing to do with our earthly whims.
It is surely not as that famous admirer of science, particularly astronomy, believed.
He said: “It is wonderful what the astronomers have discovered; they now know how heavy the planets are-how can they weigh them?-and they know of what chemical constituents the stars are made; but the most astonishing fact is that they even know the names of the stars.”
Somehow they could ask the stars what their names were!
I wonder how the constellations could influence us in such a wonderful way, not realizing that we have unconsciously projected all those facts into them.
It has nothing to do with the stars.
The qualities of the different months of the year, in other words, the signs of the zodiac, are really the projections of our unconscious knowledge of time and the qualities of time.
It is as if there were profound knowledge in our unconscious, based merely upon unconscious experiences, that certain things originating at a certain time of the year have certain qualities; so by that empirical knowledge stored up in our unconscious, we are always more or less adjusted to the time.
We have plenty of evidence that we can judge things by the time when they originated.
A breeder of cats, for instance, will tell you that cats born in the spring are different from cats born in the fall.
And a connoisseur of antiquities will tell you that certain objects must date between 1420 and 1450, say; anything that originated then has the quality of that time.
An astrologer has merely a more detailed knowledge, he is able to tell you that a thing originated in such and such a month without any further knowledge of the qualities of the object.
He might be able to tell you that you were born when your sun was in such and such a position and when your moon was in such and such a position, simply from observation of your typical qualities.
That is an absolute fact.
Anything that has originated at a certain moment has the qualities of that moment, and it will retain those qualities for an indefinite length of time.
Hence arises the superstition that a ship built or launched at a certain moment has such and such a fate; if it is launched at an unfavorable moment, it has the unfavorable qualities of that moment.
Seamen are very careful to observe the attendant circumstances when a vessel is launched, to discover whether the moment is lucky or not.
There are all sorts of stories about unlucky vessels, like the Titanic, several misfortunes had befallen her before the last fatal disaster.
So spring is characterized by certain qualities expressed by Aries, the Ram.
Then the Bull is the next sign after Aries, so we could say Aries is more or less along the line of the Bull.
The Bull has always been looked upon as a symbol of fertility, the accomplished form of generative power, all nature bursting forth with an irresistible rush.
Aries is also a fertility symbol but smaller, only a beginning.
I explained in a former seminar that the different stages of religious dogma are based upon astrology.
The time of the sacrifice of the bull god was about 2,150 years before the Christian God, the length of one platonic month.
And the end of Aries was reached about the time of the birth of Jesus, a very uncertain date, perhaps 100 B.C.
That is the lamb sacrifice; Christ is the lamb of God and represented as such in early catacomb pictures.
There he is even depicted with the horns of a ram; he is the ram. So Aries was the sacrificed god.
Now if, in two or three hundred years, or about 2,150 years after the end of Aries, a new symbol should be produced, it would be a sacrificed fish, because ours is the age, or the platonic month, of the Fishes.
The Ram as a spring sign symbolizes the first shoots of green that come up from the earth.
The symbolism of the zodiac originated in the south, most probably in Mesopotamia, so it would be the green shoots that appear there after the winter rains.
There are no snow signs in the zodiac, because there was no snow in the country where they originated.
The rainy season was in February and March, and in February comes the sign of Aquarius, represented by a man with water jars.
That is the rain god, and then follow the Fishes.
When Aquarius has poured out a flood, then fishes may be found in that water; fish are like seed in the fertilized earth, or like sperm, they are seed thoughts; they always mean unconscious contents.
So the earth is fertilized, and then come the first green shoots, then the Ram leaps up.
I call your attention to this symbolism because later on we shall find in the Hindu psychology a sort of theory of these phenomena.
There the god in his origin is called the green leaf, and I have a number of pictures by patients in which they symbolized the first intimation of the independent autonomous movement by a green leaf, or a green shoot, or a plant which unfolds perhaps two leaves.
In the teaching of the Sufi, who practice a form of Mohammedan mysticism, a sort of secret teaching, it is said that God appears in three forms.
The first is that of a man, like anybody, but one must recognize him, and only those people who can chant the chapters of the Koran are able to recognize him.
Then one must step up to him and say, “SalemAlaikum,” Peace be with thee, and he will say, “Alaikum Salaam,” and all one’s wishes will be granted.
The second way that God appears is as a pure white light, not like a flame, not like a fire or a lantern, but a pure white light.
And to explain the third form, my head man smiled and picked up a blade of grass, saying: “God can appear like that.”
I told you about the same idea in the Eleusinian mysteries, where the birth of the god was announced as in the Gospels, but the god was symbolized by a head of green wheat.
The priest at midnight appeared and announced the sacred birth: Brimo the strong has brought forth Brimos the strong, which means that the earth, the mother, has brought forth the strong son.
And he shows the head of wheat as the son of the earth.
Iacchus, who is supposed to be born in a winnowing fan, is the grain of wheat itself.
This idea was wonderfully expressed in Egypt also, in the form of the green Osiris, which they made as a kind of spring charm.
In the British Museum there is a bedstead which was used at that time to make the green Osiris.
The bed was covered with canvas on which the outline of Osiris in the mummy case was drawn, and then they covered those lines with wet sand filled with grass seed; so in a few days the seed came up and formed an entirely green Osiris, expressing the idea of the renewal of life, the resurrection from the dead.
Also there is a painting of the mummy case of Osiris, the god of the underworld, with wheat growing all over him, out of his body and out of the mummy case.
And, you remember, the reason why the Host in the communion must consist of wheat flour is because Christ is the son of the earth.
These ideas are all parallel to the idea of the Ram, the first swift movement, the first shoot.
Then this independent, autonomous movement in the patient’s unconscious is checked by a spear, and you remember we had the symbol
of a spear pointing to the moon.
We were somewhat in doubt whether it was an arrow and decided that it was a spear.
But here the spear comes from the hand of the Red Indian and it checks the movement of Aries: the first growth is checked by the spear.
Now who is that Red Indian? My patient is an American woman.
Dr: Nordfeldt: The animus.
Dr: Jung: Naturally, a representation of the unconscious mind, which means the relatively primitive mind.
These unconscious figures like the anima and the animus are always inferior in comparison with the conscious; what they are in themselves, God knows, we don’t know.
So that Red Indian would represent her unconscious opinionating, which checks that movement, represses it.
What would the spear mean in that case?
Miss Hannah: The superior intellectual function?
Dr: Jung: Not necessarily.
It is the typical weapon of the primitive man which is directed against that growth, that independent movement.
The spear-or any other kind of pointed or cutting implement-symbolizes la qualite tranchante of the intellect, so here it must mean a piercing or dissecting opinion aroused in her by that manifestation of blind impulse.
Instantly there is an animus reaction: oh, it is nothing but this or that, cutting the thing down if possible.
That is the way the animus works, and it is exactly the way the anima works, only the anima does not use a weapon; she works in the feminine underhand way.
It is not a square deal.
What the anima does is not in the least like a man’s work, it is woman’s work, secret and venomous; so a man’s feelings kill his creative
impulse by a sort of secret admixture of poisonous substance, a sort of resentment, which destroys the impulse from within.
Women do not understand how Eros can have such an effect, but it has.
Well, in this case the reaction of the unconscious is the animus, and here you see that tremendously interesting fact in the structure of the unconscious, the yea and the nay; first there is the creative impulse, and then comes destruction.
Also you can see the diversity of the figures of the collective unconscious. It is like a stage upon which many figures appear, the noble
hero and the villain and the wonderfully virtuous person, the king, and the beggar, and so on.
Now the effect of that animus reaction is that the ram instantly vanishes, as it naturally would.
Such a nasty opinion was aroused that the impulse was destroyed on the spot. The next image is the Indian lying down beside his spear.
One could say that his work was now done, so he is taking a rest.
One doesn’t know exactly what that means, but it is obviously a passive situation.
One very often sees that when the animus has reacted and everything has been trampled flat for about twenty kilometers in circumference, he just takes a rest; left all alone, he is bored to death and goes to sleep.
Then people are utterly bewildered, they don’t know what has happened, why everything is dead and quiet.
But when the animus succeeds in killing the creative impulse, he cannot rest long, because the creative impulse then goes into himself.
You know it was the custom in certain Red Indian tribes to eat the brain or the heart of the enemy they had killed, in order to assimilate the strength or the wisdom or the cunning of the enemy.
This idea comes from the fact-again a fact of psychological observation or experience-that when you destroy a thing you inherit its spirit.
If you admire somebody very much, if it is an intense relationship, you most certainly will get an effect from the object of your love.
If you love God, God permeates you. If you hate him he permeates you too, only the effect would be different.
So when the Indian killed the ram, he suppressed that particular manifestation of energy, but it has not disappeared from the world.
It is still there and it gets at him within; he becomes somehow identical with that energy.
You see, when you kill an animal, you become an animal, you behave like an animal.
Therefore the next thing is that the Indian leaps to his feet, jumps on his horse, and gallops away; he takes over the power which he suppressed in the ram.
It is quite possible that the blind impulse in the ram should be killed; things happen like that in nature.
For instance, say a wolf eats a sheep. Is that right, or is it wrong?
Naturally the owner of the sheep will say it is wrong, yet the world knows it is right; it happens like that, things feed upon each other.
So when that man kills the ram it just happens like that in the unconscious.
One may think the animus should not have killed the creative impulse, but he can always contend that the impulse was entirely blind, and why should he not kill a blind force?
Since he has eyes or a superior mind, he is allowed to suppress that inferior thing.
Now we cannot argue with the animus, we simply have to accept the fact that things have happened in this way, that the blind animal impulse was suppressed and the spirit went into the animus, who then had the same amount of energy which was manifested before in the ram.
All that swift movement is now in the animus and his horse. Then what would you say about the fact that this horse is black?
Dr. Baynes: Is it not just the idea of elemental power which might be destructive?
Dr. Jung: Why elemental?
Dr. Baynes: Well, there were some peasants who reacted to a thunder storm by talking about the idea of black horses in the sky; it is the destructive elemental power.
Dr. Jung: Yes, and black has always the connotation of evil. A black horse means a demonical horse.
You remember the horses in Plato,s the charioteer driving the black horse and the white horse, the black horse being always unruly.
It is what they call in China the Yin side, which is connected with the idea of evil; it is not necessarily evil but it often appears as such.
It is the feminine side and you know what has always been said about women.
And she is always the symbol of temptation.
That woman in Paradise was most compromising; Adam accused her of having made the fatal blunder.
So if we associate the idea of evil with the Yin side, the black horse is simply an expression of this legendary fact, about which we could speculate for a long time.
At all events the blackness of the horse has the connotation of something evil, also chthonic, and most certainly unchristian.
Therefore the devil and all sorts of evil spirits ride a black horse, it is always somewhat uncanny.
The good man would never appear on a black horse, he must be on a white one if on a horse at all.
So the black horse in this picture means a chthonic, elementary power; it is simply a new form, but the direct derivation of the ram power.
One is reminded here of the dream of a young man, a student of divinity, which I have quoted before.
He knew nothing whatever of analysis, and he had a very interesting and complicated dream about a white and a black sorcerer.
I will skip part of it and only repeat the legend which the black sorcerer told.
He said: “I come from a country where there is an old king who is about to die, so he has been seeking a suitable burial place for himself.
In that country there are many tombs, beautiful sacred places, and one of the oldest and most beautiful had never been tampered with.
A legendary virgin was supposed to be buried there.
The king found that this very monument would be suitable for him and gave orders to open the grave.
The workmen who opened it found bones inside, but no sooner had the air and light touched them than they suddenly crumbled and transformed into a black horse that galloped away into the desert.”
Now the black sorcerer had not been there when it happened, he was only told about it, and he said to himself that it was unusual, and he should look into it.
So he went to that tomb, and then followed the hoofprints of the horse.
They led through the desert for days and days, till finally-beyond the desert where green land began again-he found the horse peacefully pasturing.
Then something very strange happened. He had the feeling that it was a place where something was to be found.
And there he found the keys of Paradise.
That virgin who had been buried since time immemorial is the anima; and the old king is the ruling idea, the old god.
The student of divinity was rather neurotic, twenty-two years old and tormented with doubts.
The unconscious said: The old god is dying and something is going to happen because he is entering the place where the anima lies, the unconscious; anything that dies here disappears and reappears there in the unconscious.
The virgin plays no special role now, as she did in the Gothic age where there was space and air enough for creative powers.
Here, the old form of religion is going to die, and there is no space, no air to breathe.
So the king recedes into the underworld and up comes the anima, who first manifests in the form of a black horse that gallops away to a distant place.
Now that is the same black horse, but in the case of our patient it is not the anima, but the dynamism of her animus; horse and animus are practically the same.
The horse is the energy that had been in the form of the ram before the animus killed him.
The animus acquired that force, which is now in the black horse moving swiftly away; he is obviously applying the energy he has gained from the ram.
And the horse takes him to a very remote place, a desert surrounded by black mountains where there is a black pond.
There the impetus of the horse comes to an end, it dies, the impetus the animus gained from killing the ram having now done its work, having carried him like a projectile to a certain place far away.
Now when the horse dies, what would be the next effect? I told you that energy cannot disappear.
Dr. Baynes: It changes its form.
Dr. Jung: Yes. No other animal comes up in the place of the horse, but this energy goes now directly into the animus.
So the Indian is the only figure that is still performing here; he stands on the shore of the pond and looks for the sun.
But the sun has set, which means that consciousness has set; it becomes dark.
Then the animus suddenly undergoes a strange transformation.
He turns into a Chinaman and kneels down beside the pond and bows his forehead to the ground three times.
Here we see that the power of the horse which has gone into the Indian is a chthonic power, an elemental power which would most certainly seek the earth.
The black mountains are, of course, black earth; the black pond is a deep hole in the earth-one might call it the womb of the earth-and the animus, that black power, leads the Indian to the entrance of the underworld, the pond, and turns him into a Chinaman, of the race which is probably closest to the earth, which is absolutely identical with that yellow earth, and whose philosophy, one could say, is the philosophy of the earth.
And the Chinaman bows his head to the ground; that is, he lowers the seat of his consciousness, his mind, down to the ground, establishing thus a close connection with mother earth.
This is very significant because the conscious type is intellectual, here tending more towards intuition; therefore the reality standpoint sensation-is, as it were, below the horizon.
The development of this woman’s intuition and sensation is about equal; the emphasis upon one or the other fluctuates, the scales are evenly balanced; of course, feeling is always the inferior function.
So here, while she is still in her intuitive function, her animus is seeking the function of the earth; he is obviously worshipping the earth principle.
This is important teaching, which is presented in a clear and readable series of images. The meaning is quite unmistakable.
It is like a drama enacted before her eyes, leaving it up to her to draw her own conclusions.
In such a case I always ask myself: “Now who has had that thought?” It is obviously a logical sequence, leading up to a certain definite result.
Had she that thought which is trying to show her her way?
Of course we cannot accuse her of having invented it consciously because that is just the thing which is unconscious to her.
It is as if she had entered the oracular cave, say, and the voice from the rocks had spoken to her, giving her symbolic teaching of what to do, or telling her what events were to come.
Or as if some intelligence behind the screen were at work to put her onto an entirely new track of which she had not thought before.
Here is the illustration she made of the impersonal part [plate 1].
Here are the black mountains and the black pond and the dead horse.
The gesture of the Indian shows that the transformation of energy has taken place; it is in his head now because the horse is dead.
The next vision is not illustrated, but I will show you now the picture which the next vision leads up to and explains [plate 2].
It is a woman with no mouth, consequently with no speech, and with no nose, so no intuition. It is the earth mother.
Dr. Baynes: There is a Siberian myth in which the sun in its journey across the heavens is drawn by white horses, and when it reaches the
west, it changes to black horses for the underground journey. I thought the Chinaman might have something to do with that idea of the setting
sun, where the horse dies and there is a transformation of energy.
Dr. Jung: Well, China is the far East, the place where the sun rises, Japan calls herself the land of the rising sun, and the Chinaman is the
antipode to the white man; what is black with us is white with them.
Dr. Baynes: If he represents sensation, he would be a rising sign in the psychological world?
Dr. Jung: Yes.
Prof Demos: You asked the question: Who had that thought which was revealed in the pictures?
Dr. Jung: Will you answer it?
Prof Demos: I should like you to do so.
Dr. Jung: I would know a great deal if l could answer that!
Now in the next vision the white bird we have just seen appears, although this is not the one that the picture was meant to illustrate.
You noticed perhaps the peculiar shape of the white bird: that long, stretched body has very much the appearance of a flying fish.
A white bird flew down and lit upon the top of the Indian’s head.
He tore it off and ground it underfoot with his heel.
Then all became dark, it was night.
The clouds parted and the face of God appeared.
He said: “Now you must wander until you find again the white bird you have killed.”
Slowly the Chinaman and the Indian walked round and round the black pond.
Then suddenly from the black water rose up a swan and behind the swan a hand. For a long time the Indian and the swan gazed at each other.
The swan said, “Lo, I have come unto you.”
Then the Chinaman pushed the Indian into the pond and the black water closed over him. The pond grew long and narrow.
At one end stood the Chinaman, at the other end stood a crane.
After a long time the Indian emerged where the crane stood. He was covered with black water.
The crane said to him, “Wipe the tears from your face.”
The Indian then sat upon the bank with his head bowed low in his hands, for he was very weary.
After a while a camel came along, and the Indian mounted upon the camel and rode out into the desert.
Soon they came to an Indian wigwam where the Indian went to sleep.
When the dawn came he looked out and beheld three flaming crosses in the sky.
To this vision I will add the one that followed:
I beheld a great white bird. Then the bird changed into a dark hawk which darted to earth, snatched an egg in its beak, and then flew up again.
Again I beheld a white bird with the wings outstretched. It flew down to a woman in blue, sitting like an ancient statue.
The bird lit on her hands. She held one grain of wheat, which the bird took in its beak and then flew up again into the sky.
I called your attention to the gesture of the Indian holding his head, which is not quite explained through the contents of the first vision.
The act of touching the ground with his forehead in the transformation of his personality into a Chinaman might have to do with it, but I feel that that gesture was not quite justified by those contents.
But here we see that he was holding his head because the white bird had lit upon it, and obviously the Indian was very brutal: he tore the bird off and ground it underfoot.
One concludes that this bird must be very disagreeable to the Indian. What do you think about that? What is a white bird?
Answer: It is again the ram, only in a different form this time.
D1: Jung: Yes, the energy has passed out of the Indian again.
One could say that the generative power was exhausted at the end of the vision.
You should think of this series of visions as sort of spiritualistic seances.
The patient herself called her condition when seeing these images a trance.
Dhyana is the word applied to that state in the East, it has exactly the same meaning.
You notice in spiritualistic seances that there is always a great deal of talk about a certain power created by thought, which is stored up and used by the spirits to manifest in moving physical bodies through space, as tables are lifted in to the air, for instance.
That is all done by a strange power of an almost physical nature, which is supposed to be part of the medium as well as of other participants of the seance.
Very interesting experiments have been made in order to find out the nature of the power, but it is most mysterious, most elusive; though we have very definite facts, we are still far from understanding it.
We would say it was libido, a form of psychological energy.
Of course, psychological energy does not exist, it is a concept, but in the physical or phenomenal equivalent of energy in these conditions we find the same peculiarity, namely, that this creative power is after a while exhausted, and then everything sinks back into the condition it was in before.
So only for a time can the Indian assume human form, say, or creative, autonomous activity, and then it dissolves.
At the end of the vision before, the bowing down to the ground might be just as well the disappearance into the ground, which means into the body; that generative power is again dissolved into the physiological process, as if it had never existed.
And then in the next dhyana or trance condition it comes up again in its animal form, as it was in the ram.
The ram is chthonic; it symbolizes the fertility of the earth.
The ram appears also in the Hindu system as the lord of the fire zone.
And according to old astrological tradition, it is associated with the planet Mars, which is supposed to be fiery and impulsive, manifesting suddenly.
That form was checked by the animus, but here the creative force is again appearing in the animal form.
This time it is a bird. What would that denote?
Mrs. Crowley: The spirit.
Dr. Jung: Yes, spirit and thought.
In the Tantric system the ram is a force that is located in the abdomen, while the bird has to do with the head; winged things inhabit the head, thoughts flutter about like birds.
Now why is that bird form so disagreeable to the animus?
Mrs. Wickes: It would kill his opinions. It is really spiritual thinking as opposed to animus thinking.
D1: Jung: Yes, and what is the usual interpretation of the white bird?
Mr. Reichstein: The Holy Ghost.
Dr. Jung: Yes, a white bird alighting upon a person means the Holy Ghost to anyone with a Christian education.
And why is he giving the bird such a bad welcome? He ill-treats the Holy Ghost.
Dr. Baynes: He is a primitive.
Mrs. Wickes: It would destroy his own way of functioning. The animus opinion could not withstand the Holy Spirit.
Dr. Jung: Well, the Red Indian is a very unholy chthonic animus, and the Holy Ghost is too much of a contrast.
Also, it would mean the Christian element, and the Red Indian is not supposed to be a Christian.
Moreover, he is riding a black horse and is in a very dark place, so we have reason to believe that the Holy Ghost would naturally be hostile to him.
Therefore he destroys that form, he grinds it under his heel, and then darkness falls, as if the white bird had meant a source of light.
Complete darkness ensues, which is exactly what one would expect, for in extinguishing the light of the Holy Ghost, he has eliminated the spiritual element altogether.
The next event is rather conventional.
The clouds part and the face of God appears, which means that the sin against the Holy Ghost has been committed and the Indian is cursed, like Ahasuerus who rejected his Lord and has to wander until he finds the white bird again.
This woman has apparently surrendered to the powers of evil, to a sort of devil who is an eternal enemy of the spirit.
The devil is always represented as the darkness itself; he has not the ram’s head, but he has the horns of the he-goat and the goat’s hoofs; he is half animal, a sort of satyr.
In the Middle Ages he was also a phallic god.
So the devil is an incarnation of all imaginable chthonic things, and it seems as if the Red Indian were of like nature, but much mitigated. He is not the devil himself.
He appears, rather, as a primitive, a man who is quite pagan, who clings to the earth; therefore he resents white birds or any kind of intrusion from above.
Now the two figures, the Red Indian and the Chinaman, walk round the black pond. In the vision before, the Red Indian was turned into a Chinaman; he suddenly lost his identity.
Here he remains himself and the Chinaman has become an independent figure.
So we may assume that these are two forms of the animus, the primitive Red Indian and the civilized Chinaman.
This comes from the fact that the patient has read a certain amount of Chinese literature and was particularly fond of Laotze and the Taoist philosophy, and that produces a certain kind of animus opinion.
We are apt to be tremendously pleased with such Eastern philosophy; the sayings of Lao-tze are most impressive and we like to quote them, not realizing that we are putting on a garment which does not belong to us.
How can we express ourselves through Lao-tze?
It is impossible, perfectly preposterous, because we are not Chinamen.
You have certain opinions if you are a woman, and certain feelings if you are a man.
We have an excellent expression in German, Anempfindung, which means a sort of mimicry.
You feel and sense a thing as if it were your own, when it is really not your own.
It is like a self-deception: you put on a disguise. You think you are the real article. You would like to believe it, but nobody else believes it.
That is what has happened to this woman.
She is a very serious person, and if I should say to her that it was all self-deception, it would not be quite true, for that is the only way in which we can assimilate such things.
We cannot help seeing a great beauty in Lao-tze-it is extraordinarily impressive.
Yet what it does to her is to form animus opinions which are not genuine.
They have not risen out of herself; they do not express a clear fact in her psychology.
They are only beautiful words and images which she puts on.
A woman may put on the garments of a queen, but she can only put them on legally when she is a queen.
And so we cannot put on Lao-tze. We can do it with a light touch, as a sort of mental carnival, three days in a year perhaps, and then afterwards we vomit that is the fourth day of carnival.
Of course, we might go about the whole year long in such a disguise, with such an assumption.
There are people who die in it. Well, that is the best they can do.
The reason why the vision uses the figure of the primitive is because that is a very genuine article for an American woman.
The Chinaman is a philosophy animus-an assumption.
He plays his role, and it is not exactly a swindle, of course, but it is an opinion, a thing that can be changed or that may disappear.
Opinions are just garments, and if they happen to be exotic garments, it only means a bit of mental carnival.
Now these two figures are concerned with that mysterious pond.
Her primitive mind is concerned with the entrance to the underworld, the chances of going deeper into the black water, which means into the
womb, the place of rebirth.
And the Chinaman is interested in her philosophical opinion, for her interest in Chinese philosophy through Laotze means that it is some sort of an expression of her unconscious.
Chinese philosophy has formulated certain concepts of the unconscious, but we have not formulated them, we have just borrowed them.
The pond is like a mirror, so the two figures are crystal gazing, they are contemplating the water, concentrating upon it.
Also, walking round it expresses concern, as, in worshipping at a shrine or in sacred precincts, people walk in a procession around it.
And it must be in the way the sun moves, or it would be most unfortunate; if it were done contrariwise it would be working an evil spell on the place.
That was the ceremony used by the Romans when they were founding a new town.
They drew a furrow round it, the circumambulatio, always going round to the right like the sun or the hands of the watch.
Then in the center they made a hole in the ground called a fundus, where they buried fruits or other things as a sacrificial offering to the chthonic godsin order to propitiate the genii of the place.
Later on the fundus became a sort of treasure-house or a temple.
There is still the foundation of a Roman castle a few miles from Zurich-near Pfiifficon-with the fundus in the center; it is one of the very few Roman castles where the foundation is almost completely preserved and the fundus still in excellent condition.
The circumambulatio was supposed to have a fertilizing character.
Therefore in Switzerland and in the Tyrol there are still places where every year in the spring or early summer, the priest and the people go in
a procession on horseback-even the priest on horseback-with flags and so on, round the estates of the community.
That is called the Grenzumgang, riding round the boundary lines of the community, and the priest blesses all the fields and houses and cattle.
This simply means psychical concentration upon the estate and in that way fertilizing it; psychical concentration means putting creative libido into the ground.
It is very old symbolism.
The old gods of the boundaries of fields were of a phallic nature, like Priapus. You can still see such obscene phallic figures in Egypt.
So the rite of circumambulatio means a fertilizing of the center.
Here, the Indian and the Chinaman fill it with life through their contemplation.
Then something happens in the center, the water becomes animated by a certain thought, the swan, the white bird again.
The white bird was ground underfoot, crushed into the earth, and it disappeared.
It was dead. But by this magic rite up it comes again, this time transformed, no longer a bird of the air but a bird of the water.
And behind the swan comes up a hand. Well, that is dark, our material does not allow a safe interpretation of the hand.
Later on that symbolism occurs again, with the idea of either pulling something down or creating something with the hand.
The Indian and the swan obviously do not recognize each other at once; therefore they gaze at each other as if they had seen one
another in a former life-until the swan begins to talk.
That is again a very important point: the fact that often, when a vision has a tendency to remain static, if you concentrate upon it, it begins to move or to talk.
It might remain quite silent and mute, but if you concentrate sufficiently, the picture begins to talk.
The more you concentrate upon that creative energy, the image, the more you animate it with actual life.
Of course, the more you fill the image with life, the more you lose your own consciousness, and therefore the dhyana condition, the trance, has the effect of a contraction of the field of vision, a sort of abaissement du niveau mental, or a retrecissement de la conscience.
There is a loss of realization of yourself while you realize the life of the object all the more.
So through that gazing at each other, the life from the Indian goes over into the swan and makes the swan talk.
That is almost a technical procedure; if a person feels that a figure is not living, he should concentrate upon it in order to bring it to life.
I will tell you a story about an experience of my own when I was quite a little boy, before I went to school.
Every Sunday I was allowed to spend the morning with an old aunt who had a quaint old room with beautiful engravings on the wall.
I always looked at these with intense interest.
One was a picture of a vicarage in the country, and the parson was coming out in his robes to go to the Sunday service; he was just shutting the
door and about to go down the steps to the street.
I looked at him very hard because he was such an interesting old chap, and once I discovered that he began to walk down the stairs.
I called to my aunt: “He is walking!” Of course, she said it was impossible. “But I have seen him, sure enough he is walking down the stairs!”
And every Sunday thereafter, that was my great pleasure-to stare at the old parson till he walked down the steps.
If you look at a picture long enough it will move.
If not, it is your mistake, you do not put yourself into it.
That is the reason why the ancients were quite convinced that the figure of the god answered or moved his head, although the idol was of stone.
People paid high fees to be allowed to climb up a ladder and whisper in the ear of the god, for then they were sure he would hear and reply, or at least nod his head.
There were innumerable cases where the picture or the idol responded to the worshipper.
The swan now uses a strange, rather biblical phraseology: “Lo, I have come to you.”
That is, of course, the Holy Ghost-it is impossible to kill the Holy Ghost.
But here we see that spiritual element appearing from below, out of the blackness of the waters of Hades.
What does that mean?
It is of tremendous psychological importance in this case.
Prof Demos: One becomes spiritual through entering into Hades; it is a kind of union of opposites.
Dr. Jung: We must look at these things from the standpoint of consciousness, and this woman’s consciousness would assume that spirit was above, and that there was no spirit in matter.
Here for the first time she becomes aware of the fact that spirit can also come from the earth, and it is the same Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost is by no means only an air bird, he is also a water bird.
Dr. Baynes: It is a resurrection symbol.
Dr. Jung: A resurrection symbol from below, the spirit of the earth this time, not of the air. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars, Page 107-123