29 June 1932 Visions Seminar LECTURE VIII
You remember I mentioned the fact that there were passages in St.
Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, concerning the sanctity of the body, and Miss Taylor has taken the pains to look them up.
She quotes extracts from three different verses: “Therefore glorify God in your body
and in your spirit, which are God’s.” Also: “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you … and ye are not your own.” The third one is: “The body is … for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”
And Mrs. Bretherton found a verse in the fourth chapter of Ephesians: “But
speaking truth in love may grow up in all things into him, which is the head, even Christ; from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body into the building up of itself in love.”
Then the passage I had in mind myself is found in the twelfth chapter of the first book of Corinthians, from the twelfth to the twenty-seventh verse.
Now here is a question, but first I should like to ask Miss Hannah why she asks it-in what connection?
Miss Hannah: Because you said Christ had completely fulfilled his personal life, and so was able to go over.
Dr: Jung: Oh no, his individual destiny, not his personal life.
Obviously he fulfilled his individual task.
Miss Hannah: But does that not include the personal life first?
Dr: Jung: One cannot make a theory about it.
There are certain people whose individual task is not the ordinary personal life; sometimes a person is meant to be a monk, for instance.
Miss Hannah: He is really meant to be?
Dr: Jung: Yes, there are such cases, and they are of worldwide occurrence, for there are not only Christian monasteries, but Buddhistic and Lamaistic monasteries, and there were temples in antiquity where priests lived the consecrated life.
Also there is the fact that many married people have no personal life.
Miss Hannah: It seems to me that Christ begged the question of the body.
Dr. Jung: But he was crucified, his body played a very great role.
Miss Hannah’s question is: “I should very much like to know how Christ lived his personal life so completely without marrying?”
That is the question of an enfant terrible, but I must confess I have asked myself the same question-how Christianity would have turned out historically if Christ had been married and had seven or eight children to feed, a family to support.
Things might have looked a bit different then.
And other people have asked that question, though perhaps not in such a very direct form. In George Moore’s book, The Brook Kerith, for instance, the life of Christ is described after his crucifixion and his resurrection.
It is supposed that he was not quite dead when his body was removed, and
that he recovered and took up his human life afterwards.
St. Paul wanted to preach Christianity, and the disciples of John the Baptist said:
“But Christ himself is here, he did not die.”
The idea is that he went back to the simple life of the brethren of that order, the Essenes.
As I remember the story, Christ showed the scars of his crucifixion, yet even then
Paul would not believe it.
So our question is a sort of criticism, yet we cannot look at it from such a personal angle, we can only state that Christ fulfilled his individual task, and therefore his life-his individual task-became such an important symbol.
Moreover, we know precious little of his personal life, one must always keep in mind that the Evangels were written, not by the apostles themselves, but, as proved in Greek texts, by disciples of the apostles; that is, they were written a good deal later, according to certain traditions which were handed down.
It would be like writing the history of Napoleon seventy or a hundred years after his death, according to the reports of people who were supposed to have known him.
One cannot imagine a very reliable history being produced under such conditions,
so we may be sure that we really know very little.
Also, the historical facts alluded to in the New Testament do not allow any precise localization in time.
Therefore the doubt has arisen whether Christ did not live nearer 100 B.C., Mead has written a remarkable book about that; certain facts would substantiate that hypothesis.
But we must assume that his individual task was fulfilled.
You see that might easily be true, because the psychological needs of human beings two thousand years ago were totally different from those of today.
The one-sided spiritual life was then an absolute necessity, while in our days the ascetic existence no longer conveys life; it is dead.
A similar doubt appeared earlier than Christianity, in the question of the historical origin of Buddhism.
Buddha began his career as a worldly man and was later converted to Brahmanistic asceticism; he became a fakir, a saint, and mortified his body for many years, until he experienced enlightenment.
Then suddenly he understood that that was wrong.
And it was at that time that he preached his famous sermon in the garden of the gazelles at Benares.
He taught that the two ways, the way of the world and the way of the ascetic, were both errors, but that there was a middle path, the noble eight-fold path, the right thought, the right action, the right meditation, etc.
But he never said what the right thought, the right action, the right meditation were.
You see, it must be right psychologically, it must fit.
So he discovered the path in between-not this and not that.
But Hindu psychology was entirely different from ours, their truth was a very different truth.
For us it seems to have been a historical necessity that we were taught as we were.
If people had not been ready to accept such a teaching it would never have worked.
It is like the power of suggestion.
It is generally thought that anybody can be hypnotized-you have no headache, you no longer suffer from such and such a pain, etc.-with no consideration of the fact that an unconscious inner readiness to accept such a suggestion must have grown up.
If the subject is not ready, and really inclined to accept a suggestion, one may try one’s best to hypnotize him and it will never work. And there are very particular reasons why people are ready.
For instance, I remember one of my first successes in psychotherapy.
A woman of about fifty-eight came into my clinic on crutches and said she had suffered from a terrible pain in her leg for seventeen years.
She told me a long story about it with much lamentation, and finally I said: “We
must do something about it, I am going to hypnotize you,” whereupon she turned her head over to the side and went off into a somnambulistic fit.
I thought it was queer but I let her alone, and she talked on and on queer dreams-through a more or less complete experience of the collective unconscious.
This, of course, I only understood afterwards; at the time I simply thought she was delirious.
But I began to get frightened, I had about twenty students round me to whom I had to demonstrate hypnosis, and I thought: “Now I am in a mess!”
And I prayed to God that he would perform some miracle in her favor because I felt pretty well out of my depth.
After half an hour I saw that I must get her out of it, because it was really a fit.
So I tried to wake her. It took me about ten minutes but finally I succeeded, all the time having to save my face, to show a face of iron to my students so that they would believe me to be on top of my business.
When she came to, she was dizzy and confused, and of course I said: “I am the doctor, everything is all right!”
Whereupon she exclaimed: “But I am cured!” -and she threw away her crutches and
walked.
I just blushed. I said to my students with a very red face: “Now you see what hypnosis can do!”
But damned if I knew what had happened.
That was one of the experiences which turned me away from that field, because it might have turned out wrong just as well.
I could not understand what had happened, but that woman was completely cured, she just walked away and was happy.
I begged her to tell me how the thing went, because I assumed that after twenty-four hours she would have a relapse, but the pain never returned, and I just marveled at the
grace of heaven.
The following term I was still lecturing at the University, and the same woman turned up again at my first lecture.
This time she had a terrible pain in her back, which had started only a short time before. It occurred to me that it might be connected with the fact that I had reopened my
course.
Was it not an arrangement to see me and have a nice spectacular treatment?
So I asked her when the pain began and what had happened to bring it about, but she could not remember.
I concluded that perhaps she did not want to remember the date, that there might be something disagreeable in connection with it, but she said there was nothing, she
could not explain it.
Then the idea suggested itself that she might have read in the paper the announcement of the reopening of the clinic, and finally I wormed it out of her that the pain started on the very day and hour when the newspaper with that particular announcement had been delivered at her house.
Then I saw the mechanism for the first time, but I still did not understand how I had cured her, for a miracle had been worked, so I kept her after my lecture in order to inquire about her life.
It turned out that she had an idiot son who was in my ward in the clinic.
I did not know it because she had married a second time and had another name, and he was the child of the first marriage.
As he was the only son, she was naturally always looking for a more satisfactory one, a
son who was promising and intelligent.
I was a young doctor, so she took me on as the second son, she said to herself: “I will perform a miracle for him, it is well worthwhile for me to do something for him.”
And that is what she did.
She did all she could to create a great bubble round me.
She brought me my first patients; my practice of psychotherapy was started because a mother put me in the place of the son who was no good. In that case it fitted perfectly because she was absolutely ripe, like a bomb to explode, to get cured in that spectacular manner.
Doctors often try in vain to cure people, who are later cured at Lourdes and such places.
They are usually people who don’t think it is worthwhile to be cured for a mere doctor, but it pays to be cured for the glory of the church; they demonstrate to the whole world the glory of God’s grace.
That was the psychology of the early saints, like St. Simeon Stylites, who stood on one leg upon a pillar for seven years.
Of course, he sat down and slept between-times, but his entire occupation consisted of
standing upon one leg, and thousands of people made pilgrimages to see him on his pillar and to marvel at the power of the spirit that helped him to do such a stunt.
Those fakirs in India can do extraordinary things, and by their demonstrating the power of the spirit, they acquire such great merit that they well deserve to be called saints.
For it is tremendously important for humanity to be impressed by the power of the
spirit, to believe in it; otherwise they cannot live their lives completely, they degenerate into animals, into flatness and dullness.
So the suggestion that was produced by the life of Christ was just the right suggestion in his day.
And we ask such awkward questions nowadays simply because Christ is for us no longer an indubitable symbol, it does not work as it did at that time.
That question could not have been asked then, for such a life was only possible in those days if the spirit had so much power that one could sacrifice one’s whole personal life to it.
The effect was immediate, as you know; within a few centuries whole towns in the East were depopulated because people went by thousands into the desert, where they lived and finished their lives as hermits.
That shows how ready people were then to depart from the ordinary form of existence.
You don’t know what man is capable of. If anything which fitted the moment as that did should happen now, you would probably see very similar phenomena.
We are never safe against such extraordinary events.
If the right word could be said, or if the symbol could be found that expressed the greatest need of our time, you would see that people would be gripped for a few centuries, and they would never ask the questions that could undo such an effect.
Such questions would be asked two thousand years later.
Now I have asked Mr. Baumann to sum up the vision of the Pegasus and the cross, to fit it into the usual curves.
It is useful to study that rhythm again.
Mr. Baumann: The vision starts where the patient is mounting the winged horse. I have put the horse, which means libido, below in the Yin (1) because, even if it is a Pegasus rising, it really means the powerful libido of the unconscious.
Dr. Jung: That can be substantiated by the fact that the horse carries her up in the air, so it starts below.
And the black clouds hovering over the earth and the vultures are Yin.
In Egypt, for instance, vultures were supposed to be of female nature only, they had the idea that there were no male vultures, and when the female vultures wanted to be impregnated they simply opened their beaks whilst flying and were impregnated
by the air.
Also they eat the decaying bodies of the dead, so they are obviously Yin birds.
Mr. Baumann: I have made the black clouds mean danger, it is the archetype, an awkward situation (2).
Dr. Jung: That would be all right; first the beginning, the attempt, and then the archetypal dangerous situation.
The rider and the horse were pursued by black vultures, but Pegasus passed through the dangers, and so she arrived at the top, at the white city (3).
Mr. Baumann: There she sees the staff with the star, which points to an
individual way (4).
Dr. Jung: Yes, and we did not speak of the particular quality of the staff as the symbol of the leader, it is a guiding staff.
That symbolism is in the Psalms, and the Prophets speak of Yahweh as the staff, the guide, in the uncertainty of life.
So the star is also the guiding principle, and that would be a positive result of this curve.
There is the rising, the attempt, and then the archetypal danger, and at the top comes the vision of the ultimate goal.
That is a very beautiful movement.
Mr. Baumann: Then comes the woman lying crucified on the earth (5).
Dr. Jung: Crucifixion means paralysis, fixation, a condition where she is quite down on the earth, and from that there should be a new start, a deliverance.
What we want now is the dangerous moment, the archetypal situation.
Mr. Baumann: Pulling the staff out of the breast of the woman could be the dangerous situation, she might die by bleeding (6). And the healing of the wound would be resurrection, at the top (7).
Then I take her remark, “Too long have I fructified the earth,” as showing a new relation
to the chthonic principle (8).
Dr. Jung: That works, the fructifying of the earth, the deserted streets and the separation of the body-soul from the spirit-soul.
Mr. Baumann: The deserted streets, a place without human beings, without consciousness, I have put in the Yin (9).
Mrs. Sawyer: The dangerous situation would be the separation of the body-soul from the spirit-soul.
Dr. Jung: Yes, that would cover it, and the end would be holding a staff on the end of which was a golden star (10).
That would fit in beautifully. Mr. Baumann: Then I put the patient leading Pegasus in the Yang, representing the unconscious libido submitting to the guidance of consciousness
(11). In the beginning I have the horse in the Yin, and here it is in the Yang, but it is a different situation.
There she is mounting a very wild horse that flies up into the clouds, whilst here she is leading the horse quite peacefully, so it is the same symbol used in a different way.
And holding the staff with the star means holding the jewel of new light, pointing to new goals (12).
Dr. Jung: That is quite convincing.
Mr. Baumann: I found that the patient seemed to have reached a rather high level of consciousness, mounting with Pegasus right up to the sky. Even the woman lying crucified on the earth is quite conscious of the situation and its sense. She seems to have come to an end of a certain part of her development.
Dr. Jung: That is quite possible, so the whole movement would take place on a higher level in general.
Now we will go on to the new vision.
At the end of the last one we were dealing with the mysterious figure of a man who suddenly appeared, a sort of Dionysus again.
He then went into a cathedral and discovered the skeleton, whereupon he kicked over the altar and left.
What has happened really is the separation of the ka soul from the ba soul.
Those are old Egyptian concepts: the ka soul is the substantial terrestrial soul; and
the ba soul, represented as a bird-man, or a bird with a human head, is the spiritual soul.
They are like the kuei and the shen in Chinese metaphysics, which separate after death, the kuei being the physical soul and the shen the spiritual soul.
The kuei is the ghost-being that precedes or follows death, and the shen disappears into the Yang principle, one could say; it goes up to the light, to the spiritual worlds.
The ka is supposed to be a sort of heavy substance and therefore the dead were given
a little ladder in order to climb out of the grave and up over the horizon into heaven; the ka is supposed to remain in the grave as a ghost, it hovers round until it decays in the wind and rain and air.
You see, this separation has led here to the reappearance of the principle of Dionysus.
First he was a wild animal, and then he transformed into a man, who entered the cathedral and demonstrated that that form was dead.
Now what do you think will happen next?
The patient herself is in a dissociated condition, the spiritual soul separated from the physical soul, and then comes the image of the antique god, no longer quite like
old Dionysus but very near to him, who demonstrates that the church is empty.
What will this performance lead to?
Mr. Allemann: It should lead to the reunion of the two souls.
Dr. Jung: Yes, it is unnatural that her bodily soul should walk in another direction from the spiritual soul, the two should be together.
If they separate, it should happen only after death.
So we might expect something like a reunion.
That fellow ought to do something about it. Now who is he really?
Mrs. Baynes: He is another psychopompos who is going to lead her.
Dr. Jung: Yes, an animus form appearing under the disguise of a god, as the animus can easily do because of his divine qualities.
It is owing to these divine qualities that women are so completely under the spell of the animus, utterly helpless victims of his power, and of course the more they identify with him the more they are done for.
The same thing is true of the anima.
They are gods in the antique sense of the word.
Spitteler calls the anima a goddess; she is really a queen, her power is indubitable
and overwhelming.
And when the animus appears in his divine form, he has just that quality, he is the stuff out of which the gods were made.
As people advance in consciousness and understanding, they discover more and more what an extraordinary power the animus represents.
It is a miracle if a woman can escape it.
It is like the power of a neurosis, a phobia, or a compulsion.
You think such a symptom is morbid and should not be, you despise it and think it is ridiculous, yet what seems so ridiculously small and unimportant is perhaps the most important thing in your life.
It hinders you in every moment, it spoils your life, yet you go on saying it is nothing but a neurosis, a perfectly ridiculous symptom.
It is as if you regarded the Great War as merely a regrettable mistake on the part of certain people.
Or as if an insignificant little beetle suddenly increased in such enormous numbers that it ate all the food in the world, and you cannot understand how such a small thing
could be the cause of all that destruction.
But that is the neurosis, and you make the tremendous mistake of not realizing that what is apparently so insignificant is really a great power.
And so it is with the animus and the anima.
They are divine as the ancient deities were divine, having the quality of being beyond good and evil. They can never be envisaged from any moral point of view.
Now this is the positive animus, he appears in his divine garment, as it were, acting as a psychopompos and doing what this woman should be doing by herself.
She is in an incapacitated condition because the two souls are separated from each other, and then the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, the two hands do not work together.
So here the animus is assuming the role of the Self, one could say, that factor which should be in the center and which should rule and coordinate all our actions.
It is very important to see what he will do now in order to bring the body-soul and the spirit-soul together.
Miss Taylor: He would go down.
Dr. Jung: In that case we must assume that he has been up somewhere.
What was his last action?
Miss Taylor: There was the enlightenment where he showed that the Christian church was no more.
Dr. Jung: There he was on the surface of the earth, corresponding to our actual consciousness, and he simply stated the fact that those symbols, as they are preserved in the church, don’t work any longer.
Mr. Allemann: He has to form a new symbol.
Dr. Jung: Yes, and would he descend in order to produce a new symbol?
Where does the new symbol start?
Mrs. Fierz: I should say he would go up because he is in such an awkward situation, and also he is looking back to the past.
Dr. Jung: But if you follow your heart, if you let your heart speak in the matter, what does it say?
Well, he goes down [plate 2 5]. He descended into a dark cave.
There was water upon the floor of the cave and many strange monsters floated therein.
As he gazed at them they reached up great tentacles and sought to draw him down.
They pulled his head down until it touched the water.
So after the demonstration of the emptiness of the church symbolism, he drops into a great underground darkness.
This is to be understood in a very human way.
You see, when the animus does such a thing, it means that the shadow falls upon you in the conscious, you yourself feel empty, dark, disorientated, you usually suffer from a depression.
Everything has sunk down into the unconscious, and that dark cavity is in the body, it is
the abdominal cavity of the plexus solaris.
I mention that because something will turn up to substantiate what I say.
Now, when you overthrow a world of convictions, your whole Weltanschauung,
it really means destroying a world.
For the world is just as we see it, we know of no other world than that which we see; and that is naturally restricted, it is not a perfect or complete world, it is only what
we perceive.
The breaking down of a Weltanschauung has always produced a general revolution, a time of catastrophe, a complete upheaval, not only of political and social conditions, but also of economic conditions.
The time of the Roman Caesars in the first centuries of our era was such a time of transformation, when the old economic system was overthrown.
Slavery, the old form of labor question, was then the great problem; in the reign of Augustus about three-fifths of the entire population were slaves, merely pieces of property; they were not considered as human beings.
Consequently they were, of course, perfectly lawless people.
No one had any idea then of paid labor, one bought somebody who worked for one.
That was naturally an impossible situation, and it led to a slow upheaval of the economic system.
The condition was mitigated in the Middle Ages, but the Roman bishops still had house slaves, despite the fact that they were Christians.
So the destruction of a Weltanschauung, hitherto firmly believed and apparently an eternal truth, is by no means a simple matter.
You may think that it is perfectly simple to throw away the superstition that there
is a god who is in some way responsible for this world; you cast away that idea and think nothing has happened, that it is more or less indifferent.
But a psychological change has occurred at the same time.
As long as you have the conviction of an all-powerful being who rules your life, your condition is quite other than if you deny it.
For then you no longer pray to that being, and inasmuch as it really exists, that factor then enters yourself.
You call it your superstition and refuse to accept it, whereupon you become God yourself-you function as if you were God.
You assume that you have such-and-such convictions, and produce such-and such
views, instead of understanding that God has given you a certain idea for which you ought to thank him.
And that leads into the condition of our actual world; our neuroses are due to that.
We suffer from the inflation of the white man, but naturally the inflation will be pricked
and we shall collapse.
Here we have a description of what happens when the actual Weltanschauung is overthrown.
Instantly the animus disappears into the darkness.
Hitherto he has been in the world, for the spiritual world of the Middle Ages was well ordered, everything was in its place as God had designed it, like a piece of fine architecture.
It was a sort of hierarchy with God himself as the supreme being; then there were lower steps where angels were sitting; and down below were children and humanity
in general.
So everybody was well provided for and in the right place, and the animus was identical with the right condition, he didn’t make himself a nuisance anywhere.
But as soon as that state comes to an end, down he goes into our unconscious.
Now, if it is a positive animus he does not create a neurosis as he otherwise would.
In this case one could assume that he was going to bring up some contribution to a new symbol.
That is of course a tremendous enterprise, one could be passionately curious about what it might be. But it is not so simple.
The animus alone is quite incapable of bringing up the symbol, he is only capable of bringing up a symbol, presumably the symbol that fits her psychology and that will lead her on to further development.
Then her further development will join on to the development of others, and again to others, and the ultimate result of all the development will produce the symbol.
You see, a great symbol is an entirely collective thing.
The animus alone can never produce it; what he brings up is merely an approach, or an approximate attempt, at creating something like the symbol.
We have to be very modest and careful in that respect.
But of one thing we can be sure; when the positive animus descends into the real collective unconscious, something positive will appear.
The text continues: He saw a golden fish which shouted in a loud voice: “Behold the
wall of the cave.”
The man looked up and saw upon the wall of the cave a golden disk.
With a mighty effort he pulled himself free of the monsters and ascended from the cave.
This is the end of the vision.
I told you that the cavity into which he descended was the abdomen, and on the wall of the abdomen he now beholds the disk of the sun, which would be the plexus solaris.
Why, under these circumstances, just as she has given up her old Weltanschauung,
should the fish call her attention to the plexus solaris?
Mrs. Stutz-Meyer: Is it the place of union?
Dr. Jung: You think it is the place of union between the body- and the spirit-souls?
One could say the first and most primitive accumulation of ganglia, of nervous tissue, was the visible imprint of a psychical fact upon matter.
So this disk of the sun is really the umbilicus, the neighborhood where the world of psychical things touches the body; it is nature’s first attempt at a brain, the first attempt at the concentration of living processes into a sort of central office from which ultimately consciousness arises.
From that system the other nervous system arose indirectly, and the two systems are still in connection; there is a sort of cooperation between them, they function together despite the fact that they have a very different way of functioning.
This scene in the first place refers tothe nervus sympaticus, and that is very mysterious, we will not pretend to understand it for the moment.
But what about the fish?
Dr: Reichstein: It is something like the diamond that brings the light from below.
Dr: Jung: The disk of the sun is gold and the fish is gold too, so there must be an analogy or a connection between the two; both are a sort of light apparently.
Dr: Reichstein: It is the same idea as the jewel which was brought up from the sea.
Dr: Jung: One could say, as the fish was supposed to bring the golden ring of Polycrates, or the jewel, from the depths of the sea, so this fish might bring up the sun.
But how can we prove that?
Mrs. Sawyer: Is it the old symbol of Christianity?
Dr: Jung: Exactly. Christ as Ichthys has now descended to the underworld.
That is the old animus form, and it is still golden, still luminous, and it points to the new sun.
It is like John the Baptist saying in reference to the sun or Christ: “He must increase but I must decrease.”
Here is the Christian symbol, the fish, pointing to the sun which is rising.
Another connection with the sun is in the Jonah motif.
The sun, before it rises, is always supposed to be in the belly of the fish; then the fish is
overcome, its belly is slit open as it is landing on the shores of the East, and out comes a new sun, the hero.
So this is a hero myth.
The old hero is now in the depths of the sea, but out of the sea rises the new deity that
is identical with the plexus solaris.
How do you explain that identity?
Mrs. Sawyer: It is consciousness working from the unconscious, I mean the most conscious way being the unconscious way.
Dr: Jung: The beginning of future consciousness is in the nervus sympaticus, that is its origin, but how would it look in. that condition?
What form would it have?
Answer: A serpent.
Dr. Jung: It would be some sort of insect or worm probably, a coldblooded or wormlike animal with a merely sympathetic nervous system.
That is about the lowest form we can imagine.
So the beginning of the new thing would be exceedingly inconspicuous, easily crushed, just a little vermin, and therefore it can easily be mistaken for something else that also starts from the plexus solaris, a neurosis, for instance.
There is hardly any neurosis without disturbance of the nervus sympaticus, and all
cases of hysteria have something wrong in that region-indigestion, sexuality, and so on.
A neurosis, therefore, you can call a vermin, a thing that should not be.
As a rule the new thing appears as something which apparently should never have been born, and this is confirmed by ancient wisdom, by the messianic prophecy of Isaiah, for instance, which I have so often quoted.
The new thing has no beauty, it is most insignificant, most despicable, so it can easily be misunderstood as a neurosis.
But a neurosis is also the beginning of a new way, it can be understood as a revelation ratee, because consciousness was too stupid to grasp it.
The wrong way was really just the right way.
This is the motif in ten thousand fairy tales, as you know; in all the thumbling stories what seems to be the least and the worst turns out to be the best.
Now, that vision of the disk on the wall of the cave is sufficient to inspire the animus to a mighty effort to free himself from the monsters, and he ascended from the cave.
We discover here, as I said, the old myth of the great whale monster out of which emerges the hero, the new sun.
The hero is the human appearance of the sun, they are identical; he is supposed to be a son of the sun, the son of heaven, and his countenance is sunlike.
That myth is repeated here as a new truth, it lives again.
The sun has set, it is quite dead, it has disappeared into the water, but it will appear again in a new form.
In a cave under the sea where nobody would expect it, in complete darkness where no human eye can see it, there the sun is rising.
So this moment in the vision really means the coming up of the new point of view, the new symbol in her unconscious, yet she is not consciously aware of it.
Our time is soon up but I want to give you an idea of the first effect of the rising sun, that you may have a certain idea how the story will continue.
The next vision is:
I saw two rings of gold upon the black ground. One ring was smaller and was encircled by the larger ring. Within the small ring lay a male child as though in the womb. (That is, in the center.) It was surrounded by amniotic fluid. I wanted to get to the child which
held out its arm toward me but I could not seem to step over the outer ring.
What does she describe here?
Mrs. Crowley: The birth of the savior.
Dr. Jung: The hero child is born.
These are the golden rings that radiate from the sun, and within is contained the hero child.
The rings are haloes round the divine child.
Dr. Reichstein: It is a mandala.
Dr. Jung: Here the mandala psychology begins. Now why a mandala?
Simply through the fact that the sun has risen.
When the sun rises, one quite naturally begins to produce circles, that is the natural expression, and here it is as if a child were born within the circles.
The thing that attracts a woman most, a little helpless child, will draw her in; she must
reach that child in the center, because that is the most precious thing, the treasure.
That is the way the mandala psychology comes into existence.
We have here the whole story of it, the birth of the new symbol as the rising sun the
mandala being the disk of the sun-and the vision of the child in the center of the mandala to whom the woman is drawn.
This is the unfolding of the sun that is born within, invisibly.
Then it is as if it were causing a peculiar kind of emanation, which one cannot describe otherwise than by making circles.
They are the haloes of saintliness, of divinity.
And the halo of light, forming a magic circle around one, has the protective significance of such symbols. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 771-784
George Moore (1852-1933), Irish novelist whose The Brook Kerith (London, 1916)
imaginatively created Jesus’ life after the resurrection.
- R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? An Inquiry into the Talmud Jesus Stories, the Toldoth jeschu, and Some Curious Statements of Epiphanius (London and Benares, 1903). Jung refers to this book in Dream Analysis, p. 412.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
