16 November 1932 Visions Seminar Lecture II
Here is a question from Mr. Allemann: “Is not the act by which the patient gave her eye to the earth mother a specifically feminine way of becoming conscious of the other sex in oneself? Her seed (the eye) is taken into the womb of the Goddess and something will grow out of it. Is not the male counterpart the taking in and patient ripening of a seed a
God has planted into man? (Silesius: !ch will Maria sein und Gott aus mir gebaren. Eckhart: Gott kann nur in der Seele geboren werden.)”
That is perfectly true, it is the specific difference; the corresponding experience of a man is always the conception, receiving the seed as if he were a woman, but his brain is his womb.
With a woman it is very different; she gives her eye as the seed and the goddess takes it.
Mrs. Baynes: We drew the parallel between the two male gods who had to give their eye in a different way.
Dr. Jung: Yes, Osiris lost one eye because the evil aspect of Set blinded him, there it is the idea of conception too.
And Wotan sacrificing one eye to Mimir would be the exact parallel to this.
It is peculiar and I cannot explain it.
It looks as if that symbolism had not been invented by men, that is the funny thing.
Here I can only contribute a statement made by Tacitus that the Germanic women were all very wise and gifted with second sight, so it is possible that in very ancient times, perhaps in the time of a matriarchy, women had a greater influence on the formation
of the myths.
Later on in history one sees that the Germanic women definitely influenced the fairy tales, which are really old myths; all the famous German fairy tales were made by women, they are full of feminine symbolism.
It is possible that Grimm’s fairy tales were once great mythical epics, but it is also quite possible that it was just the other way round, that those fairy tales existed first. In primitive folklore, for instance, the little fairy stories of the hawk, or the tortoise, or the snake, are very much like Grimm’s fairy tales, but with the difference that one
doesn’t see in them the admixture of the great epic.
They are just what they are, whereas in Grimm one feels the mythological images behind; there can be no doubt that they are degenerate or diminutive forms of
the great mythological epics.
So I think that in those very remote times, feminine psychology played a great role, and it is quite possible that the Wotan myth is a remnant of the original feminine imagination, which was then transformed by poets, men who had heard such stories from their mothers.
Mrs. Sawyer: Are there not several words in German where the gender is just the opposite in other languages? Is not the sun feminine?
Dr.Jung: Yes, and the moon is masculine, while in French, for instance, the sun is masculine and the moon is feminine, le soleil and la lune.
That might be such an influence too,
I don’t know. Six hundred years ago the moon was also feminine in Middle High German: diu Mane, not der Mand.
We will now go on with our visions.
The situation at the end of the first volume was that our patient sacrificed her eye to the earth mother.
Then she entered the circles, she accepted the child, and she said to the child, now grow as the tree groweth.
This is a magic wish.
She bestows the power of growth, she delegates her own libido or mana to the child; so
she renounces her own growth in favor of the child.
In other words, she invests her own libido in the path of the left hand, in the impersonal
way.
Now it is a curious fact that this second volume is called The Twelve Circles, from which we may conclude that she is now really within the circle, that she has entered upon the path of the left hand and is developing on that inner side.
In the first volume we were outside the mandala, and now we are apparently within.
What would be the difference between the two ways?
Dr. Bertine: In the first way the visions appear almost like movies on the
screen without a clear sense of her own contact with it, and now she senses this as having to do with her own soul.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. The first volume consists chiefly of pictures projected into space or onto the wall, and she is more or less out of them.
They have a certain life, they live and move, but they are projected, removed.
She has her reserved position quite to herself, she is outside it.
She is just as much in the picture as one is at a movie, one may laugh or be angry or
weep but one is not really in the picture.
Whilst within the mandala one is caught.
Just as ghosts and devils are prevented from entering the magic circle, so the sorcerer is caught within it; he is protected by the magic circle, yet he is also caught in it.
Outside the mandala one is under no particular obligations, one can move about; this woman can look at these things without being forced to accept them, and there is
always the possibility of her running away.
You have seen how again and again she has tried to get away, and again and again she has been forced back.
She had to go through a number of rites that brought her nearly to the center; there were blood sacrifices, drinking the blood, and bathing in blood, or in the water, a long series of preparatory rites in order to enter the mandala.
And at the end she enters and she accepts the child, she bestows life upon it, she gives that child confidence to live, renouncing her own growth in favor of the child’s growth.
She seems to be now caught in the circle, and in that case everything from now on should happen within the magic circle; that is, one may expect an inescapable
situation, things then become unavoidable, whatever they are.
Naturally that would work itself out in her personal life too; it means that she would have to accept a certain situation in life.
It is absolutely indifferent what it is, for anything in real life can become an unavoidable
fact.
You can accept the position in a more or less provisional way, promising yourself to get out of it when things become too hot; or you can accept it for good and forever, and then you feel that you have embarked upon an unknown sea, you are in for it, and that makes all the difference in the world.
You know there are many people who always live life provisionally.
They say: “Provided that things conform to my conditions, I will live.” If not, they commit suicide or something else.
They never embark upon a situation as if it were absolutely definite and never to be altered.
Of course there is nothing in the world that will not change; life is not a standstill, if you live it, it will change.
But you have to accept such situations as if with the definite certainty that they will not
change.
If a thing is really not changeable, you still have to adapt to it, you cannot escape it.
So you cannot escape the development within the mandala.
If you try to get out of it you are immediately the prey of the evil ghosts outside; they will tear you to bits, it will be a catastrophe if you evade that chosen fate.
It would add nothing at all if you knew the particular fate of our patient, it would even be wrong for you to know her personal life, for if I told you she had to accept such and such a situation, you would say: “Ah, that is the thing one has to accept!” -which would be a great mistake because each person has something quite specific to accept.
But since we are always in doubt-and we like to be in doubt because we like to live the provisional life-we are always eager to find an example.
If someone has a conspicuous fate, if he is healthy and successful, we think that is what we ought to accept.
But that is a mistake and it is most misleading.
You can be sure he had to accept exactly as much as you, but not the same thing.
It is probably quite different.
Just what you want to escape is the thing which you have to accept.
Now the first vision has a title, as have all the subsequent visions as far as I have made out.
Formerly they had none, but now each vision is a little story with a title, and that has a definite meaning.
What does it indicate?
Mrs. Fierz: It tells what the story is about.
Dr. Jung: Yes, it gives either the whole meaning or an important aspect of it.
And when the title is all-embracing, it is like a definite round frame, as the circle is also a frame.
This story is called: “The Valley of Factories”[plate 33].
It begins: “Again I approached the precipice and looked down into the valley of factories.”
That she is approaching the precipice once more means that she is returning.
This is a formula that one also encounters in a famous German poem.
Mrs. Sigg knows it, she is the specialist in that field.
Mrs. Sawyer: She is coming to the unconscious again.
Dr. Jung: Yes, where the world is at an end; where the unconscious begins.
You see, when she reached the inner circle in that last vision, it was rather definite, she might have had the idea that things had come to an end.
But then she found that she had not reached the end, and therefore she says: “Again I approached the precipice.”
What is the parallel in Faust?
Mrs. Adler: “!hr naht euch wieder schwanhende Gestalten”?
Dr. Jung: Yes, that is in the dedication.
Goethe worked at Faust all his life, and this poem was written when he was approaching the problem of the second part of life, so it is about the unconscious.
The opening words of the translation are:
Once more ye come, ye wavering forms that passed In earlier days before my troubled sight.
Shall I endeavor now to hold you fast?
In that illusion do I still delight?
Out of a misty shadowy domain Ye crowd about me! Good!
Then take full sway, For as in youth my heart is stirred again
By magic breath that round you seems to play.
You see it is the same idea. And what is the meaning of the valley of factories?
Mrs. Sawyer: It seems to be a place of production.
Mrs. Fierz: It looks like manipura, the fire center.
Dr: Jung: Yes, there are boilers and funnels and smoke.
It also reminds one of the volcano.
Mrs. Sawyer: But it is now man-made.
Dr: Jung: Exactly, one could call it an artificial volcano.
Mrs. Fierz: There is some control over it.
Dr: Jung: Yes, it is now harnessed, the elementary powers of the fire and seething waters, or the process of creation, are caught and shaped by the hand of man.
The valley of factories is the human transformation of volcanic powers, of manipura.
So the gap between the first volume and the second would be that gap between manipura and anahata; this woman is probably standing upon the diaphragm looking down into the belly-manipura.
But manipura is changed. By what act was it checked and caught and chained?
Miss Hannah: Entering the circle, and giving her eye, accepting the impersonal life.
Dr: Jung: Yes, bestowing her life upon the child, giving up her own personal life.
Manipura is an entirely selfish center, where one says: “I have such and such an emotion, !hate and I love and I am angry”; where one is torn to bits, where one is oneself a flaming, explosive furnace.
But if you can use all that fire, you have chained it; that is the sacrificial act.
Also, by entering the circle, you become human, you are not the wild and raging animal that you were in manipura.
So she has now arrived at a higher point of view, we may assume that she is somewhere in anahata.
And what is the characteristic feature of anahata in comparison with manipura?
Mr. Allemann: It is the first center of consciousness and of feeling.
Dr: Jung: The first center of objective consciousness, where you can see that you are under an emotion.
People who are just moody or grouchy are in manipura, but those who say: “Don’t talk to me, I am grouchy today,” are in anahata; that is just the difference.
In the one case manipura unchained bursts forth, spreading over everything; in the other case, circling round manipura, the human being looks down saying: “That
fellow is in a very bad mood.”
He can inform people politely: “I am spitting fire, don’t approach.”
Now that is a superior being.
This is symbolized in the chakras by the fact that you can see the Purusha, that is the
characteristic feature of the three upper chakras; while in the lower three you are nothing but ego in the clutch of elementary powers.
Above the diaphragm you become aware of the Purusha, the Theos Anthropos, the
god-man, Adam Cadmon.
When Christ said he was the son of man, that meant really the son of the god-man.
Certain sects believed in the Theos Anthropos, the man-god, or the god in man.
It is most interesting that Christ, who was called Theou hyios, the son of god, called himself the son of man; it is exactly the idea of the Purusha; if there is any doubt as to
the possible Indian influence on Christianity, the proof of the influence might be just there-that Christ designated himself as the son of the Purusha.
Now she continues: “I saw in the sky the figure of a being surrounded by a great light.” What about this?
Mrs. Sawyer: It must be the Purusha, and that would be the white light of consciousness.
Dr. Jung: Yes, detached consciousness.
Now you see why I put so much stress upon the knowledge of the chakra system; it gives us a chance to get these things into order.
Dr. Reichstein: Was not the child also a kind of Purusha?
Dr. Jung: Yes, in the child form, covered up by elementary powers.
It is the first green shoot in the center of muladhara.
The child is the beginning, and it is first in the form of a seed or an egg; then in the water, in svadhisthana, it grows; in the fire it develops; and out of the fire-or the smoke-of manipura, rises the subtle body, the Purusha.
That is also very alchemistic symbolism. “In his upraised arms he held a flaming bow.”
What about that?
Mr. Dell: It suggests Apollo shooting arrows of fire that reach the goal; taking aim would be directed consciousness.
Dr. Jung: That is very good, that is true.
The head of the figure is surrounded by light, so it could be a sun symbol, like Apollo with his far reaching arrows.
And that would be a perfectly good symbolic explanation of the fact that he carries a bow.
But we must think of the Hindu psychology and mythology too; it looks very much like one of the Indian gods, who carry weapons and implements of all sorts, it is even like a
Shiva.
I have an androgynous figure of the dancing Shiva carrying the bow of Kama, the god of love; he also is equipped with the bow like Eros, the Amor.
Mr. Dell thinks that the bow and arrow indicate reaching a goal, and that would naturally be ajna, or sahasrara, the highest center, the thousand-petalled Lotus.
Were you thinking of the upper centers as the goal?
Mr. Dell: No, I was not thinking so far. I thought more generally, that it might be psychic thoughts that reach far and have effect without touching anything-an immaterial effect.
Dr. Jung: But if particular emphasis is laid upon the bow as a weapon as Apollo uses his bow-what would be its object?
Mrs. Fierz: To hit other people. To me it looks like a symbol of relatedness, like the bow of Eros.
Dr. Jung: I bet the people who are hit by those arrows don’t feel particularly related!
Dr. Bertine: It is his way of overcoming darkness.
Dr. Jung: Yes, shooting a ray of light into the darkness.
Miss Hannah: One has a feeling that all these Indian gods and goddesses are armed against one another, even in the chakras.
Dr. Jung: That is an idea too. Let us assume that it is so.
Then this figure of the Purusha would be armed against what?
Miss Hannah: Against the female.
Dr. Jung: To protect himself against the influence of the female, meaning herself?
Well, we shall see how the vision continues.
There is another aspect. “Stars fell from his head.”
That shows his cosmic quality, that he is really a cosmic figure, and of course the Purusha has that cosmic aspect.
The typical Indian formula about the Purusha is: “Smaller than small he dwells in the human heart, the size of a thumb.
Yet greater than great he covers the earth all over two hand-breadths high. ”
He covers everything, a sort of layer all over the world like an inundation. “His
lower body was a snake which reached down into the seething earth.”
Mrs. Baynes: I think that is a terribly mixed figure, because the top part, the Logos, should not be joined to the lower part; the snake should not be there.
Dr. Jung: But it is.
Mrs. Baynes: That is why I say there is something wrong.
Dr. Jung: Things are bound to be always a little wrong, they are not clearly distilled yet. It is a monstrous being, human above, and below is a snake reaching into the uttermost depths.
If you express that in the terms of the chakras what would it be?
Mr. Allemann: The yoga tree.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the child has grown into a peculiar tree which is human above and snake below who will surely poison you.
That is the manipura condition; when you have that point of view, you are inside of the monster.
But when you come through the diaphragm you are outside of the monster, and then
you can see that what really held you was that divine being, which appeared to you, when looked at from the inside, as a big snake.
That is the reason why this being is monstrous.
Now, do you know a parallel to that symbol, man or sun above, and black serpent below?
Mrs. Baynes: There is such a figure in Gnostic symbolism.
Dr. Jung: Yes, it is the Gnostic symbol Abraxas, a made-up name meaning three hundred and sixty-five; the number value of the letters amounts to the sum of three hundred and sixty-five, the number of days in a year, and the Gnostics used it as the name of their supreme deity.
He was a time god.
The philosophy of Bergson, la duree creatrice, is an expression of the same idea, that time and creative power are absolutely identical.
That thought was not invented by Bergson; he calls his philosophy an intuitive philosophy, but his intuition was a sort of cryptomnesia, he took it over from Proclus,9the Neoplatonist, who said: “Where there is time, there is creation.” Time and creation are the same.
Dr. Bertine: Do you think the fact that this snake figure is male has something to do with the woman’s psychology over against the female Kundalini?
Dr. Jung: How do you know that this snake is male?
Dr. Bertine: It is a man.
Dr. Jung: It is a man above, but we don’t know the sex of that serpent below-it might be an androgynous god.
You see the gods are beyond these petty problems, we don’t know what the sex difference may be in eternity.
Abraxas was the creation of the Gnosis, a widespread philosophic movement which began before the Christian era and continued in the early centuries afterwards; it was the most serious competitor of Christianity, and it was only by the most desperate efforts of the church that it was finally extinguished. Certain elements were infused into
Christianity.
In the Epistles of St. Paul, who was a Gnostic to begin with, there are a number of traces of that, in the idea of the thronoi kai archai, the principalities and powers, for example. Thronoi means thrones, of course, but here it means more ruling ideas, and archai means principles.
The archai were understood as beings something like the aiontes.
The plural of aion which means an eternally living principle.
Near the altar of a Mithraic grotto was usually found a statue of the Deus Ieontocephalus, the god with a lion’s head encoiled by a snake.
He was called Aion, and he was the equivalent of the Zervan Akariina, which comes
from the old Persian Zarathustran religion, and means, literally, the immeasurably
long duration.
The archaiwere also called archontes, meaning the ruling ones, and they, like the aiontes, were sort of metaphysical principles, more or less personified, and a good deal like what we would call archetypes, or the Hindu samskaras.
Now the idea of Abraxas would be the sum total of all these samskara powers of the archetypal world.
Just as this archetypal world of the collective unconscious is exceedingly paradoxical, always yea and nay, that figure of Abraxas means the beginning and the end, it is life and death, therefore it is represented by a monstrous figure.
It is a monster because it is the life of vegetation in the course of one year, the spring and the autumn, the summer and the winter, the yea and nay of nature.
So Abraxas is really identical with the Demiurgos, the world creator. And as such he is surely also identical with the Purusha, or with Shiva, because Shiva is Purusha in the end, and Shiva is the creator.
The figure which our patient describes here would therefore be an intuition of the divine principle that is black serpent below and light above, human and divine, the first experience of the divine being when one reaches beyond the diaphragm.
The phrenic mind has gods too (phren is the root of the Greek word meaning mind), but the Greek gods have human forms.
In Homeric times, when the whole mentality was phrenic or emotional, the gods were exceedingly human and beautiful, they had very positive qualities.
Then towards the beginning of our era those old gods began to peter out, they just decayed, they became weak and ridiculous, and then a notion came up like that Abraxas, which one could say was an artificial philosophic creation.
The philosophic school of Alexandria is probably the cradle of the Abraxas idea.
The first attempt of that kind which we know about, earlier than Abraxas, is Serapis.
That is a complicated story but it is well worthwhile to study how Serapis was produced; it was an entirely artificial product of the philosophic and religious mind.
The gods then lost their original character of manifestation.
You see, the old gods just revealed themselves, they simply stepped into human society as finished beautiful figures, they were not invented, they appeared, they were conceived as sort of visions; whereas these gods, the Greek Serapis of Alexandria as well as Abraxas, show clearly that they were made by man.
The very name Abraxas shows it; how three hundred and sixty-five could be a god is almost unimaginable to us, but it is not incomprehensible to a passionately philosophical mind that takes its ideas as manifestations of the gods.
Ideas then took on the divine quality, while before they were mere human thoughts, embodied in the beautiful gods that lived happy and marvellous lives on Olympus.
But when Greek philosophy got underway, those gods began to pale, they vanished like the stars when the sun rises, and the next form of the god was a human invention.
.
Mr. Allemann: Does not Mithra show the real crossing even better than
Abraxas through the killing of the bull?
Dr. Jung: It shows the dynamics; and the Christian sacrifice of the lamb
shows that too. The twofold aspect of the deity is to a certain extent
evident in the Mithraic story also, because one often gets the idea that
Mithra was the bull as well-as he really was.
The plural of aion which means an eternally living principle.
Near the altar of a Mithraic grotto was usually found a statue of the Deus leontocephalus, the god with a lion’s head encoiled by a snake.
He was called Aion, and he was the equivalent of the Zervan Akariina, which comes
from the old Persian Zarathustran religion, and means, literally, the immeasurably
long duration.
The archaiwere also called archontes, meaning the ruling ones, and they, like the aiontes, were sort of metaphysical principles, more or less personified, and a good deal like what we would call archetypes, or the Hindu samskaras.
Now the idea of Abraxas would be the sum total of all these samskara powers of the archetypal world.
Just as this archetypal world of the collective unconscious is exceedingly paradoxical,
always yea and nay, that figure of Abraxas means the beginning and the end, it is life and death, therefore it is represented by a monstrous figure.
The Theos Anthropos is also such a philosophic idea.
One could say it was not Greek at all, but the Greeks in Egypt produced him.
In the course of that transformation of the Greek mind, they lost the original
form of the god as a finished being outside of them, like a man not living in a town perchance but on top of Mt. Olympus.
It was at that time that the Christian god appeared, but he did not express an intellectual or philosophic idea exactly, he expressed the idea of love, which is a feeling.
Christ was just the counterpart of the philosophic gods.
When he said that God was love, he was attributing the divine quality to a feeling
condition, whilst the Gnostics and parallel cults, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists,
for example, worshipped philosophical concepts.
Plotinus and other Neoplatonists thought that god was fire, or light, or creation
and time, which was all philosophic or intellectual and had nothing to do with feeling.
Christianity emphasized feeling, and the feeling principle won out; the Christians persecuted the intellectual interpretation of the deity till those concepts were practically extinguished.
For instance, Paul was in some respects more intellectual than the church of Peter, the
Gnostic influence is particularly obvious in the Evangels of St. John and St. Paul; yet it was the church of Peter that more or less destroyed the Gnostic streak in Christianity.
Now this Abraxas idea shows exactly that condition which prevailed at the beginning of our era, the transition from the phrenic mental condition to the anahata condition, the crossing over the boundary line of the diaphragm
Mr. Allemann: Then Mithra is the number three hundred and sixty-five?
Dr. Jung: Well, inasmuch as Mithra was a time god too.
The cult of Mithra appeared in Rome at about the same time and became simply
another Gnostic cult, so an important part of Mithraism consisted of the philosophical teaching; it succumbed to the Gnostic influence very much more than Christianity.
In those days Christ ranked with Bacchus -or Dionysus-and with other Gnostic gods, he was on a par with Abraxas or Mithra.
Mr. Baumann: In the former visions we sometimes met this being, half god, half animal, and I think there is a difference between the archetypal conception of it, and the philosophical or poetical conception.
Dr. Jung: Well, the first apparition of this thing was the perception of a deity, but in the antique way.
The patient encountered the god as a finished Pan-like being, an elementary demon of the woods; while here it is a philosophical concept.
Mrs. Sawyer: But the figure buried underneath the sphinx was half human and half monster.
Dr. Jung: That was the same figure, but it was also in the antique phase, it was seen from afar and had not yet the philosophical quality.
She made a picture of this god later, which she likened to the figure of Abraxas.
Abraxas is usually depicted as a god with a cock’s head, holding in one hand a shield or a whip, and in the other a sword; he also is armed but not with a bow, that is the patient’s own invention.
Then his legs are two black snakes, the feet are snakes’ heads that are raised up on
the sides, and usually he has an extra arm.
The cock’s head means that it is the sun bird, the bird that announces the rising of the sun.
That god symbolized the rising sun above, and the black serpent, the darkness, underneath.
Mr. Baumann: You have sometimes mentioned two figures in the Upanishads, one eating the fruit of the tree and the other looking down.
Dr. Jung: That is the same aspect but within the personal sphere.
Man is like that, he eats the sweet fruit of the earth, and on the other side he is more or less conscious and looks down upon it.
He can be quite identical with the one, and then he is merely the eating of the fruit, or the fruit that is eaten.
Then he is in the condition below the diaphragm which is characterized by absolute fascination with objects; he is the food, he is the eating, and the drinking of the wine or the wine itself.
That wine is a god explains why the gods have human form!
It is because the human being is absolutely drawn out of himself, he does not exist,
he is merely the process below the diaphragm.
That is phrenic mentality. Above the diaphragm he can say, this is nothing but wine, this is no god; there he feels his own function and so he is divine.
The deity has disappeared but it reappears in that miracle of consciousness, and so the
god becomes a philosophic idea.
The mana quality, which was at first in the objects of man’s desires, has now migrated over into the ideas that helped him or that forced him to be conscious of having such and such a mood.
Mr. Dell: In Homer there are both phrenes and the psyche. When the hero is killed, the phrenes leave him by the mouth or above, but that which goes to the lower regions is the psyche. I could never understand that.
Dr. Jung: It is exactly the same in Chinese philosophy, where the shen, which is the animus or mind, corresponds to the Greek phren, and the kuei is the female.
Shen is the masculine soul, the heavenly soul that goes up to the gods; but the kuei soul is female, it sinks down to the darkness and becomes chthonic; it is the ghost, the spook, that is left on the earth when a man dies.
You see, the Chinese understand the human being as consisting of two parts, like this symbol.
The lower abdominal spirit is the kuei soul, or the anima, and that corresponds to the psyche.
The ghostly element is indicated in the Greek word psycheis, which means cold and humid; it is etymologically related to psyche, of course.
Mr. Dell: It means the image of the man which forms his personality, it is that principle which is in his appearance. But it must be fed blood.
Dr. Jung: In Homer the psyche kai eidolon must be fed with blood before it can speak again.
So they assume that Hades, the home of those cold shivering souls, is dark and cool, a shadowy place, a Yin place.
The Negroes I have observed also think that; Ayik is their name for this cold spirit of the night, they say he is a breath of cold wind and that he is evil.
When you are going through the woods or over the prairies, he suddenly comes against you, and you feel cold and shiver; that is the psyche, the ghost of the night, the spook that comes like a cold breath.
It is an interesting fact that in a spiritualistic seance one actually does feel that puff of cold wind before the materialization takes place.
So these ideas come from the fact that since times immemorial, humanity has had the
same spiritualistic experiences.
Such phenomena are age-old and are based on definite experiences; that cold air is a fact, it is not mere imagination.
When I was a student, I investigated these matters to a certain extent, and I felt that puff of cold air myself.
Also a strange smell of ozone is peculiar to those phenomena, which comes from the scientifically established fact that the air is tremendously ionized; the amount
can even be measured.
Now this separation of the two souls is like the Abraxas figure; it is the same statement, namely, that we consist of both the bodily and the mental factors.
The mental factor is lifted up above the diaphragm, and the other is below; as if our higher part were going up to heaven, and the other part going down into the earth where it decays after a while.
The kuei soul, according to Eastern and Greek ideas, is not immortal, it may hover over a grave for a couple of centuries, but most certainly it will slowly decay; it loses its form and vanishes as the shen is disappearing into the light of the heavens.
Now our patient continues: “When I beheld this, the little flame from my breast rushed forth and sought to merge with this figure.” What has happened here?
Dr: Reichstein: Is it the unio mystica?
Dr: Jung: A sort of unio mystica, but described in psychological terms, what would it be?
Dr: Reichstein: Her ego self united with the universal Self.
Dr: Jung: Well, it makes an attempt.
Her ego self shows a vivid desire a flame always means vivid desire-to merge into the Purusha, and to what would that lead?
Dr: Reichstein: To death.
Dr: Jung: Try to express it psychologically.
Mr: Allemann: To nirvana, where Atman and Paramatman unite.
Dr: Jung: That would be complete unconsciousness, but it would not lead to that, practically, because this figure is not yet Ishvara, it is not the supreme Paramatman, it is a manifestation of a lower order.
So psychologically what would happen?
Mrs. Adler: An inflation.
Dr: Jung: Yes, she would identify with that divine figure, she would try to express herself through it, and she would become a monster, divine above and a beast underneath.
Well, she would in fact be very much
what she has always been, only a little worse.
For you can be a perfectly nice creature as long as you don’t know it, but as soon as you know it you become awful.
You see, consciousness adds such a light, or relief, to the picture, that your bad or good qualities begin to show in a most exaggerated way, and all the more because directly the play of opposites begins, the two cannot be held together.
Your consciousness becomes so clear that it sees the difference, and then you can hardly speak any longer because when you say white, you say black in the same breath, and that won’t do, you must be able to make a difference.
But then you say: “Now this is white, it must be white,” you become emphatic, you insist.
You create ideals and principles: it cannot be black, white is white, it is a sin to call it black, it is blasphemy!
There is fighting and confusion all round, because nothing is quite white, there is a black spot at least.
So things become much worse when you are conscious of the actual condition.
If you are unconscious of it, white is black and black is white, one doesn’t know exactly; don’t look too closely and it will be all right.
That is how the primitive man manages throughout life, he is able to exist with that attitude: don’t look too closely.
But if you are conscious, you simply cannot do that any longer, and then naturally you get into a most frightful turmoil.
So if our patient should succeed in merging with that vision, she would become Abraxas, she would become a seven-days wonder, woman above, serpent below, a monstrous thing.
Then the light would not be light, nor the snake properly a snake.
There would be terrible confusion.
If anybody reaches this state, it is usually something like madness.
For when the pairs of opposites are too close together, people lose their orientation
and don’t know whether they are not upside down; they suffer from a complete loss of values and have no idea what is the matter with them.
And mind you, such a vision does not need to be very clear or obvious; even when you get into the Abraxas form you feel it only in the effects, the effects in yourself as well as the effects on other people.
Now something else follows: “The figure disappeared and the flame fell to the earth and ran along the streets-a thin thread of fire.”
You see she must have succeeded in a certain way, because she extinguishes the vision of the Purusha.
Now what does the flame running along the street mean?
Remark: The deflation.
Dr. Jung: Well, libido is running out. It is not exactly a deflation, but it is what you would like to prevent-the flame is running out of the magic circle.
The mandala should hold the thing together so that no fire escapes, but when the vision collapses, the fire runs out into the streets collectivity.
Then you are back in the former state, and the flame bursts out where you don’t want it, outside the magic circle, and then you merge with collectivity and fall down into manipura.
That is the effect if the flames are outside so that they really touch objects-you are no
longer in yourself.
She continues: Then I saw below me many little creatures like ants stamping out the thin thread of fire. Once again I turned away from the precipice. I sat alone and waited.
Now what would be the end?-leaving out the ants for a moment.
The vision stops there. What has happened?
Mrs. Fierz: She has made a regression.
Dr. Jung: Yes, she made an attempt at anahata and failed. But what about the ants?
Where did those very little creatures come from suddenly?
Mr. Dell: Ants are a fiery element themselves according to the legend; formic acid is hot and biting.
Dr. Jung: That would be an antidote, similia similibus.
But these millions of very small creatures have a special meaning.
Mrs. Baynes: Would it not be a cabiri form?
Dr. Jung: Well, something like that.
You know the vision is very great, that is a universal god, and the ant is exceedingly small but there are many of them; so it is the one big one against the many small ones.
The devil is the lord over all such small creatures, like fleas and rats and vermin of every description; so it means that when the god is not one, he is all over the place.
Moreover, the ant is an insect and has only a sympathetic system; so dropping into manipura means that one falls under the law of the sympathetic system, and that takes care of the situation.
It will put out the fire.
It might even put it out by dropping it into the water, svadhisthana.
Now the most wicked ant in Africa is a small red ant whose bite burns like fire, and the Negroes call it madJi yamoto, which means water of fire.
When red ants run over you, it is like burning fiery water running over you.
There you have this image.
So the whole thing can turn suddenly into water, and the fire will be put out by dropping still deeper down in the chakra system, by getting into svadhisthana. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 798-813