Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
15 November 1933 Visions Seminar LECTURE VI
In our last seminar we were discussing the objectivation of the star symbol. A picture of that vision would look about like this: The star is pale blue, and it is within a circle which holds in check a sort of halo of red and black teeth.
That is quite obviously the flower symbolism.
It is the very naive first perception of a picture like certain Hindu chakras where such indentations also occur; this is the way in which those chakras first came into existence.
One wonders why just such figures, but they naturally came to pass in this way, and one
sees that every part of a chakra has its own particular meaning.
The petals of the lotus, or padma, are not interpreted as the name implies, but
probably originated in such symbolism.
It also means the power of the magic circle, holding away the intrusions of the psychological surroundings.
Now what would be the psychological environment or condition outside of the mandala?
Mrs. Baumann: I think it must be the fire that usually surrounds the mandala, and the circle of black is the circle of death; red and black always go together, and now they have been pushed out.
Dr. Jung: Yes, one sees that in the Lamaistic mandalas.
These chakras of the Tantric yoga are all felt or perceived from within, the center of experience is within and from there it emanates; from that standpoint, therefore, the vision, or emotion, the thing that comes out, its emanation, is an unfolding, like the unfolding petals of a flower.
But one can also place oneself outside the mandala, and then one feels that the mandala is the place of protection against incoming intrusions or assaults, and in
that case these indentations would be the important active element; they would try to pierce the mandala, to penetrate it.
In the psychology of the Tantric chakras or mandalas, only the inside is powerful, and it is as if the surrounding world or the collective unconscious, had become utterly inactive, it hardly exists.
But here the colors are particularly important, the red and black are the colors of the underworld; all the powers of fire and darkness are trying to penetrate, and the mandala is to keep them off.
This condition is, one could say, specific to our patient’s condition and to the condition of the West in general.
We can concentrate less upon ourselves than the Hindu Yogins who were presumably the inventors of such mandalas.
But in Lamaism, the Tibetan form of Buddhism, you still find, as Mrs. Baumann has pointed out, traces of the original condition in which the yogin had to defend himself against the powers of darkness and fire, because in many Lamaistic mandalas this circle containing the petals or jagged teeth is represented by flames.
It is not fire in every mandala, but in those which I have seen that is usually the case.
Our Western knowledge of the Eastern mandalas is very incomplete, however; only very recently have we begun to pay attention to them.
Then outside that is another zone, also a circle, in which the powers of destruction are represented.
There one finds scenes of the burial ground where the corpses are destroyed by demoniacal monsters or birds, or where living people are tortured, flayed or their entrails torn out.
The burial ground generally symbolizes the world of death and decay which to the Buddhist is this real world; this is the world of illusion, of misery and suffering, and therefore the general aim of Buddhism is to escape from this world.
Buddhism is very similar in that respect to Christianity.
I don’t mean the optimistic, athletic, healthy-minded, kind-to mother Christianity, which plays such a role in these days, but the real Christianity, where people were really convinced that this world was only the nursery to prepare for eternity, and that all we did here was miserable and incomplete, that we were living in a sort of preparatory school for the life to come.
You see, that is like the Buddhistic idea.
Now usually outside this circle the Absolute begins, the eternal world.
The Tibetan mandala is generally embedded right in the middle of the horizon, and below is the underworld with demons and flames and all sorts of horrors.
The wrathful deities are below and above are the benevolent deities; usually the other alternative is understood.
And among the gods below, as well as among the gods above, are the great teachers who are just as good as the gods, called the Yellow Hats and the Red Hats, the two different schools of Tibetan Lamaism.
That alternative comes from the fact that in Buddhism the gods have a more relative position.
It is quite possible, for instance, that in the next incarnation you will become a god, there is no difference between yourself and a god excepting that as a god you have greater tasks and you live very much longer.
To be a god is not even a very sought-after position, because it takes so terribly long to get out of Maya; the gods have to wait longer before finding their redemption in the non-being, for even gods must be born in the flesh and become human in order to be redeemed.
When Buddha was born all the gods were assembled, and when he died all the gods came to his deathbed, because they were in the position of disciples to him as the highest being, as the man who had completed his course and so could vanish so utterly that he would never return.
The Mahaparinibbana Sutram, the book of the Great Disappearance, is an epically grand narration of how Buddha enters the different states of ekstasis, and goes through them, forward and backward; these are all still illusions, but finally he enters that state from which there is no return, the state of Nirvana or complete disappearance.
The lower world is also represented in mandalas simply as the earth, with the great mountains of the Himalayas, and above are usually the three great teachers of Mahayana Buddhism; and the wrathful deities are the same as the benevolent deities, because the gods are neither benevolent nor wrathful, and can therefore appear in both forms.
Even Kuan Yin, the goddess of kindness, has an infernal form in which she appears like a most ghastly demon of the underworld. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead also, the gods are relative, they look as you expect them to look because they are relative to you, they are not absolute.
So the Buddhist idea is that god has no absolute value, but is always relative to man, because the last decision about the fate of the cosmos is given to the small acute consciousness of man, the balance of the world rests upon that-a point of view which is highly psychological.
Now this circle of suffering or the terrors of the burial ground, which symbolizes the world, is a remnant, as I said, of that original condition where the mandala was a means of protection, and not a symbol of the manifestation of the powers of the soul, as in the Tantric yoga.
Probably the original form is the one where the indentations of the lotus really meant an intrusion of external powers.
Have you a clear idea as to what the intrusion of the external world, of these black and red teeth, really means?
Dr. Harding: Have we not an illustration of it in the vision, where the patient has gradually built up an inner life in her analysis, and then on going back to America she feels the intrusion of all sorts of things which threaten to destroy her?
Dr. Jung: Yes, but what are those destructive powers? How do they look in everyday life?
Dr.: Barker: Collective values as opposed to personal ones?
Mrs. Sigg: The critical intellect perhaps destroys the forms of the symbols.
Mrs. Baumann: It is like the story of the father and the little boy and the ass. Is that not an example where he is overcome by an outside force of opinion?
Dr. Shaw: Are they not her own conflicts bursting through and upsetting her?
Dr. Jung: Yes, but that is all theory. Could you not give me some very practical examples from real life?
Dr. Barker: What the man next door says.
Frau Durer: Perhaps her family does not agree.
Dr. Jung: Yes, what papa and mamma say about it, or perhaps the husband.
Then all the far and near aunts are very important, and children are extremely important for mothers; the opinion of the daughter or the son is tremendously authoritative, it is almost fatal if a child does not agree.
So one is usually surrounded by great authorities, telling one what one ought to do.
Now we have abstracted all that and called it animus, namely, the great system of opinions which women assume exist in reality, because occasionally a woman falls over a judgment which really does exist: somebody has once said it, or she read it in the newspaper.
But in most of the cases the animus is a system of opinions which do not exist in reality, she only assumes that they exist because she projects them; and the funny thing is that that opinion is somewhere, but surely not in the person into whom she projects it.
One can say the same about men who project a certain anima quality of feeling into objects of their particular preference, where it is quite certain that they do not belong; he supposes that they exist, and they do perhaps exist somewhere, but the anima projection usually does not fit.
Therefore we have the concept of an anima.
These red and black teeth are, in reality, then, most banal opinions of the near surroundings, those general social conditions, relations to institutions, the power of the ordinary world.
For instance, a friend tells you that he has found an interesting book which you must read, and you find it is quite against your own convictions; yet you are completely floored, you think you must be all wrong because that book speaks with ten thousand voices.
Or perhaps you go to a congress or a public meeting, and the man who delivers the lecture has convictions which you have thrown away long ago; perhaps he is preaching about eternal life and eternal damnation, which of course you don’t believe in, but at the end of the lecture you go home and are not so sure whether that man is not right, you think there may be something in it after all, and you begin to wonder what will happen to you when you die, whether you won’t get into hot water or boiling oil.
Those are the red and black teeth, and curiously enough no reasonable conviction is any real help against that onslaught.
But these magic concepts like circles or mandalas, symbols, do give you protection. Do you know why?
Miss Hannah: Because a reasonable conviction is merely the opposite, and a circle is composed of both.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. The irrational, the magic concept, is an entirely different thing, an inner thing.
For instance, you might be absolutely convinced that what people say about spooks and haunted houses was all bunk; but go alone into a haunted house and you nearly die in a cold sweat despite all your marvellous convictions.
They don’t help you one bit, it is as if they did not exist; that fear gets you by the neck and you on’t know what is happening to you.
But symbols, magic figures, and such things do have a peculiar effect; that is the reason why, as Miss Hannah said, they consist of both sides, not only the side of reason, but also the side of so-called nonsense-of incomprehensible, dark, evil things perhaps-and they work.
That comes from the fact that those fears do not start in consciousness.
A haunted house is like any ordinary house, only it has the peculiar quality that when you are alone in it and it is dark and cold, you get the creeps and you cannot explain why.
You may explain it by saying you have been told that the room was haunted.
But why are you so suggestible?
Or perhaps you have never heard of it but it still affects you.
There is nothing you can lay hands on, it is absolutely invisible, yet it fills you with the terror of the unknown.
That happens to the primitives all the time.
There are certain places in nature, as in streets and towns, that give you a shivery feeling; you usually rationalize it, you think the neighborhood is unfavorable, it is too moist or too shadowy.
But the primitive tells you the reason, he says an uncanny place in the jungle, for instance, is a ghost place and he will avoid it by all means.
And if you happen to be left there by yourself, then that thing, whatever it is, gets into you.
To say to yourself that you are probably suggestible and have fallen under its spell, is absolutely inadequate because you must explain why you are accessible to this particular atmosphere.
The primitive is more logical and does not evade the question, he is quite positive, he says he is influenced because the place is filled with bad magic.
Our rationalistic explanation does not take away the fear, it does not help us in the least; therefore we had better take into consideration that there is something in our relation at least to that place which needs attention.
Whether it is that the place is full of ghosts, or whether one feels ill there, is all the same, only in the one explanation the main emphasis is on the place, in the other on one’s own disposition; whether for a subjective or an objective reason, then, is indifferent, because the result is like dying.
The point is that there is an odious corpse which has to be dealt with.
So the only appropriate answer to a primitive thing-which does exist in us-is an equally primitive magic ritual, and this proves to have an empirical effect.
I know by experience that these things work where reason does not. It is as if your unconscious were just waiting for that color or figure which pleases and satisfies and fulfills it.
You may say to the unconscious: “Now look here, be reasonable, there are no burglars about, there is no danger of fire, it is perfectly safe”; or if you hear a noise in the night you may ring the bell for the servants and put the lights on; but all that won’t cure the neurotic fear.
We call it neurotic fear, and the primitive would say there was a ghost in the room.
I don’t know. But at all events good reasoning won’t cure a neurotic symptom.
Of course, you cannot just buy such a mandala in a shop and put it on your wall and worship it, that won’t help you because that is rational.
You must work magic-it is a special creative work-as primitives, in order to produce a magic effect, to free a place from ghosts, for instance, work magic.
They dance perhaps, and dancing is not a pleasure to them, it is really work, they dance until they are exhausted; even if they never apply energy for any other purpose, they surely apply their energy and patience for magic purposes.
So such a thing only works when you produce it and you must not produce it cheaply.
If you are clever with your hands you may make a design-naturally anybody can draw a circle and fill it with his imagination-but that won’t work, that is rational; it must be
the right thing, it must fit.
The trouble about magic is that the disciple may produce all the paraphernalia and yet miss the one vital point.
That idea is contained in a most psychologically significant story of the disciple who knew that the master could make gold and asked him to tell him the secret.
And the master said yes, but not at once, only when he was about to die would he tell him.
So when the master was about to die he called his disciple and said: “Now the moment has come to tell you how gold is made, take a pen and a piece of paper and write it down.”
He dictated the whole process, and the disciple put down every word carefully.
Then the master said: “This will surely work, but there is one condition, you must not think of a rhinoceros during the procedure.”
The master then died and no sooner was the corpse out of the house than the disciple went to his kitchen and began the process, faithfully, according to the rules, saying to himself: “Now don’t think of a rhinoceros, don’t think of a rhinoceros!”
So he never produced gold.
You see, the thing cannot be imitated rationally, it must be just the right thing, and that can come about only through your sincerest and best effort to make it as fitting as possible.
If it is in any way a concession to tradition or opinions, if you cheat yourself anywhere by routine or by an easy assumption, magic won’t work, but it works most certainly when
it is your sincerest effort; the magic effect or the magic procedure is really only another word for your sincerest effort.
That turns the trick.
You see you might say, “Oh I simply make an effort,” but that would be merely rational. In making your effort you must include the nonsense with the sense, because a dark corner in your nature is nonsense; that is, you may think it is nonsense, but another voice says just the reverse.
Completeness belongs to the nature of your best effort; it must contain the irrational as well as the rational, the unconscious as well as the conscious attempt.
Therefore magic means are often exceedingly grotesque.
Think of the magic medicine of the Middle Ages, for instance, or the secrets of the alchemical kitchen, or the contents of magic amulets-like the ground-up bones of a bat-it all seems the sheerest nonsense, but that simply proves the sincerity of the effort.
And the means are legitimate inasmuch as they represent acknowledgment of assistance from the other side.
To try to do the thing alone is just bravado; au fond one knows one cannot-one needs God’s assistance-and since we are not gods we have to express our best attempts in the form of the greatest nonsense.
Such attempts are applied to different ends, of course.
Certain people have tried to secure the rarest plants which they had to seek painfully in the most remote places; they had to be exceedingly careful not to miss the right moment and not to do the wrong thing, and that was their best effort.
Or your best effort may become visible in the smallest things; if you can be sincere and serious in an absolutely small and unimportant matter, just because it is important to be sincere and serious, you turn the trick.
This is to be seen in psychotherapy.
In the actual treatment it often does not matter what you say, but what you are matters a hell of a lot; it does not matter that you make very brilliant interpretations of dreams, or that everything is filed in the right kind of system, that you give everything the right name, but that you make a sincere attempt counts.
You see, for your rational mind it is important to know that the whole thing makes sense, that it is really a sincere attempt; and to your unconscious it is utterly important that its apparently nonsensical irrational character is fully acknowledged.
So if the unconscious should demand the bones of a bat, never be afraid to choose the bones of a bat; anything is possible.
Now all this is white magic because it is worked for or on yourself, or against the powers of the unconscious that attack you.
But you can apply the same means against other people; as you can influence your own
unconscious, so you are able to influence the unconscious of others.
That is black magic, because it is used for a power scheme.
It is possible and rational, you can influence other people by suggestion, for instance,
and such magic works inasmuch as suggestion works, for your attitude surely has a definite influence upon other people.
But you must always remember that when your magic works, you are the first victim, you first receive its evil effects as well as its benefits.
If you work evil against someone, it will quite certainly come back to you.
Dr. Reichstein: I want to ask whether there are two stars in this vision, the blue one coming afterwards?
Dr. Jung: Yes, the pale blue star is a transformation of the former one.
She said: “Then I knew that I could only pray to my star. I took it forth from my breast and laid it on the ground and knelt before it.”
This star is the basis of the flame in her heart, it is the little flame in the center of
the anahata chakra where there is the first inkling of the psychological non-ego; it is what the romantic school call the blue flower, or the precious pearl, there are a thousand symbols for this star or flame or light in the breast.
She then took this center out of herself and objectified it, she made a vision of it, and in the moment when it came out into the open, the red and black teeth appeared from all sides, as if it were attracting all the powers of the demoniacal world.
Then the star changed and took on that pale blue color-I don’t know what color it was before, perhaps a white light-and in that aspect it held in check those incoming penetrating powers.
Now I want to tell you something which Dr. Adler has just told me.
He said that if a Cabalist is going through a wood at night and something uncanny happens-nothing real but something out of the dark world that he goes round the place where it happened in a circle, shutting it off and thus combating the evil influence.
You see the circumambulatio is also in a sense combating something; walking round the stupa, for instance, is not always an act of worship, it may be an act of destruction.
Do you know another example where it was an act of destruction?
Dr. Barker: The walls of Jericho.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the Jews went trumpeting round and round, till finally the walls came crumbling down.
Well, when you have seen the real Jericho you don’t wonder. It was a very small place, built of mud bricks, and about the size of the Lindenhof here.
So when they trumpeted so hard of course the walls came down-perhaps they were musical and could not stand it.
You see this cabalistic example is such a magic performance, making a mandala for the sake of destruction.
A very interesting contribution. Now why is this star pale blue?
Mrs. Sigg: Because pale blue is the color of the distance. And it reminds me of the “Sermones ad Mortuos”4 where the star is at an immeasurable distance. So it might be a hint for her that the thing which is seemingly very near is very distant.
Dr. Jung: That is absolutely true.
For its magic effect consists of the peculiar secret of that star. Now where do the black and red colors of the assailing powers come from?
Mrs. Crowley: We have always associated black with the earth. And red would be passion, or blood which is identical with passion and emotions of all sorts.
Dr. Jung: Yes, black would be muladhara, and manipura is red.
In the manipura chakra, the dark grey petals would be the darkness of the smoke, which is the volatile essence of the fire, rising into the air from the red triangle which is presumably the pot on the fire.
These are powers which have come up from the darkness of the underworld, the emotional world below the diaphragm.
Then pale blue suggests the bleu horizon, the blue of the French uniform, the color of the faraway distance; also, it has the quality of thin air, or of the ether, the thinnest of all gases, practically nonexistent.
And in the anahata chakra, the smoke that rises from the passion, the burning up of the black earth below, is gathered up inside and begins to form the subtle body of the star. It is not yet luminous, but in visuddha the luminosity comes out.
There it is no longer a star, it is a circle, a mandala contained in a triangle, and there the white elephant appears again; the elephant was below in muladhara, but in visuddha it is high and luminous.
And round that inner circle is the pale blue circle of the sky.
So the pale blue star symbolizes an attitude of remoteness; if one removes oneself from the black and red teeth there is no danger, they cannot attack one.
The Mara episode in the Buddhist legend is a beautiful parallel to this. Mara is the devil who comes with his hosts to attack Buddha.
You probably know the traditional way of representing this in painting and sculpture: In the center under a sort of decorative tree, the bodhi tree, is the chair or throne upon which Buddha is supposed to be sitting, and from all directions come all the devils with all sorts of weapons.
But the throne is empty, there is nobody there whom Mara could attack.
So those red and black teeth are the teeth of the devil; he tries to get at this woman but she has removed herself. That is the great distance.
One appears far away, out of reach of the flames and storms of the earth as a star in the heavens.
That remoteness is a perfectly possible psychological condition.
If it did not exist in us, we would never have arrived at the idea.
And since it is a psychological experience, that symbolism occurs very frequently, it even enters our colloquial speech.
One lifts oneself above things, audessus de la melee, one is above suspicion, etc., one has, in other words, a faculty of lifting oneself out of the turmoil, one is able to remove oneself.
The central symbolism in the Buddhist teaching is this Mara attack upon the Buddha that is no longer there; they all assume that he must be sitting upon his throne, and he is there in a way, yet he has removed himself.
How to remove oneself, or the idea that one should be removed in order to be master of one’s own passions, is, then, a central teaching in Buddhism.
As long as one is submerged in the passions, one is just boiling in the pot of manipura; therefore one must lift oneself above the diaphragm and then one is already away, in that moment already the star begins to appear, in the little light which is meant to become the white mandala with the white elephant of visuddha.
That pale blue star expresses not only anahata prevailing against manipura psychology, but in its remoteness, in its pale blueness, something beyond anahata appears,
visuddha, and beyond that, ajna, and beyond ajna, Sahasrara, which is all star or flower and whiteness, light-immensely far away.
So through the onslaught of the black and red it is as if the star increased in power; the
more Mara attacks the more Buddha disappears, and the more he takes on the quality of a remote star.
And this woman says the circle grew stronger and more distinct, which means that the protection is increasing in efficiency.
Then she goes on: Crying with relief I put the star back into my breast knowing that it
had grown in sureness and power. I began to walk down the path.
You see a magic rite d ‘entree has occurred here.
Her task was to walk down the black path into uncertainty and adventure.
Naturally she was afraid and hesitated.
Then in order to assemble all her powers she performed a rite d’entree, that worship of remoteness, producing the remoteness in herself in order to be free from the onslaught of all the dangers of the path.
For on that downward path, she is going into the darkness of the unconscious where she is no longer herself really, where she is changed into a sort of demon and where demons will assail her, and there she needs great remoteness in order to be protected against the influence of the destructive powers of the unconscious.
Now having finished this rite d ‘entree, she is apparently prepared to meet the risks of the darkness, but no sooner is she on that way down again, than: “Suddenly a black horse thundered by.”
A book called Die andere Seite by Kubin contains a remarkable parallel to this, a nightmare horse.
Mrs. Baynes: Was Kubin’s horse not a white one?
Dr. Jung: Yes, so here it must be a black one.
Things are apt to be the contrary with women, what is white in men is black in women; I am sorry for the fact but it is so.
Whatever it is, it means nothing particularly good that the horse is black. In the other case it was an added terror that that horse was white; white can be as terrifying as black; and when a black shadow crosses your path at night you are as much frightened as when you see a white figure hopping about among the graves.
Now Kubin’s white horse meant what?
Mr. Allemann: Fear, panic.
Dr. Jung: It is the personification of panic, but what does that fear come from?
Mr. Allemann: From the unconscious.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but you see it is energy, the horse symbolizes positive instinctive animal libido, but domesticated, carrying its rider.
The rider and his horse are a unit: man in the saddle, mastering his libido and being tremendously efficient, going on four legs instead of two, adding all that animal power to his human existence.
So the rider on his horse has forever symbolized the complete man.
If the horse here were riderless, it would mean what?
Mr. Allemann: It would be libido stampeding, like the buffalo herd.
Dr. Jung: Yes, as if the energy had changed its quality.
Energy is naturally positive, so a man should be on that horse in a positive way, being
efficient, productive.
Otherwise it would be entirely negative.
Dr. Harding: Would she perhaps be trying to withdraw from the world in the wrong way? Because in that case she would be forced back into the world.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. When you move toward your libido you move with the stream, you have no stream or current against you; but if you move against the current, you feel it and are filled with panic, you are overpowered.
So when you go against the current of your libido, it is as if you were living a life in which the quality of the energy had changed, and then you are assailed by fears of being attacked by a lion, or persecuted by mad dogs or raging horses.
That always means that you have deviated from your course, that you are not in tune with your libido, you are not floating with the river but trying, foolishly enough, to swim against the current.
Now this black horse is by no means riderless, in contradistinction to Kubin’s horse in The Other Side.
In the ghostly town where he is living, which is the collective unconscious, there is a peculiar uncanny feeling, and he discovers the reason to be that a mad white horse is galloping through the underground cellars of the town, never finding its way out-a life that got lost in the tombs of the collective unconscious and went mad.
It was a warning to the man Kubin; he was deeply caught in the unconscious and there was a moment of danger, when he might not have been able to climb out again, that he would go mad.
There is always the danger connected with the collective unconscious that it really pulls you to pieces.
For to get into the collective unconscious, you must dissolve the mandala and open gates that are never open.
So you must be exceedingly careful not to lose the one light you have in you which is the center.
We were discussing that symbolism several months ago, the wheel that was blocking our patient’s way, with the many hands trying to catch her.
That is such a symbol, a mandala in connection with powers that try to seize you and tear pieces away from you.
This can happen, it is a sort of schizophrenia; the victim is torn or blasted into bits, and those bits disappear into the nowhere.
That Kubin’s horse had no rider was a dangerous sign, because a riderless horse is quite without control and anything can happen.
You may remember a case I once published of a young girl about sixteen years old who was suffering from muscular atrophy of the spine.
It was in the beginning of the illness and there were also hysterical symptoms, so her people were not certain whether the diagnosis was correct, they thought there might be a psychogenic cause, and therefore I was consulted.
I thought it looked like atrophy but in order to be sure I asked the girl whether she had dreams, and she said she had terrible ones, and among them was this exceedingly typical dream: she was at home (they were living in the fourth story of the house) and she heard a noise and, getting up, found a mad horse galloping about in the apartment looking for a way out; suddenly it discovered that the window was open in a corridor looking out on a yard behind the house, and it made for the window and jumped out.
She heard a thud, and saw that the horse was completely smashed upon the pavement four stories below.
This is a most destructive and uncanny dream, but of course one must always confirm it by other dreams, and as there were several others which backed it up, I knew for certain that it was the end, it meant death.
For this was the organic physical libido, one could say, which was threatened or which was going to break loose; the horse was riderless and quite mad, which means self-destructive, as her body naturally was, it was about to stop its functioning.
You see, such a disease starts from God knows what kind of wrong functioning of the body, and as the body was going to destroy itself, so the horse was going to destroy itself, getting out of human control.
Now in our patient’s case the horse is not riderless, it has not gotten out of human control.
She says: “Upon him rode a shaggy naked man. From the waist down he had the black fur of an animal.”
Who could that fellow be? He is not quite human.
Mrs. Crowley: It sounds like a Pan.
Dr. Jung: Yes, we have already seen that figure in an earlier vision, she painted a picture of herself worshipping Pan [plate 8], a sort of faun with hairy animal legs.
Here it is more like an ape because she says nothing of hoofs, and he would cut a strange figure on a horse with a he goat’s hoofs; besides, he could jump off and run as fast as the horse.
So it ust be a sort of ape-man but with a thoroughly demoniacal character.
You know, the devil is represented with hairy legs too, looking like a Pan.
What does it mean that the rider of the horse is not exactly a man but something in between? Suppose a smart American should appear on that horse, what would you say then?
Mrs. Crowley: It would be a very conventional attitude, but here it looks as if it were a demon from the emotional side.
Dr. Jung: Yes, but what would you say if such a conventional attitude prevailed in the unconscious?
Mrs. Crowley: It would be a very collective attitude.
Dr. Jung: Is that a usual thing?
Mrs. Crowley: Most unusual.
Dr. Jung: Well, an unconscious conventionalism would have more to do with the personal unconscious, that might happen; riders have appeared before in these visions, soldiers and heroes upon horses, and it meant that the animus in a human form was controlling the horse.
But here an apelike thing is in control. Now when a human being is controlling the horse, what would you say?-quite apart from conventionalism, I misled you by my smart American.
Dr. Adler: Everything quite in order, controlled and normal.
Dr. Jung: Yes, things are then more or less normal and ordinary, you can trust them.
But if the controlling power is a sort of ape, what would this be in contradistinction to the man?
Mrs. Crowley: It is a dangerous condition, there is a certain amount of destruction, it is a great emotional force.
Mr. Allemann: The unconscious forces are directed by demoniacal influences.
Dr. Jung: But there is a difference between animal and demoniacal; a demon is not an animal and an animal is no demon.
Dr. Harding: Her animal power, her libido, will not go out into human manifestations, but into the animal world, because all the human energy has been withdrawn into the star.
Dr. Jung: I would not even say the animal world. It would be human too, something impish. We have no real definition of an imp, but it would be called in German a Kobold or Waldschratt, an elemental.
Now man would not talk of those things if they did not exist.
Naturally they show themselves in a psychological way in human psychology.
These things live chiefly in lonely places, in woods, remote valleys, lakes, trees, caves, mountains, and rivers, and somehow they get into man, they possess him partially and play all sorts of tricks upon him; if anyone is a sort of natural trickster, it means that he is possessed by an imp, he has that impish quality which consists in doing a thing just wrong.
You have perhaps had servants who were possessed by imps, and then they say, “Oh, I thought Madam would like it this way.” You see that is the imp, he just cannot do it right.
You discover people in analysis also who are apparently quite all right but just not right enough; there is always one corner where they go wrong.
They speak very nicely and kindly, but they know it is a trick.
They are the tricksters among human beings, they distort the words just a tiny bit, because they have no souls; there is something peculiarly soulless about them.
Now we don’t know where that comes from, but it is quite possible that one of the mothers of the tribe had intercourse with an imp, who made her instantly pregnant, and from that time on the imp remained in the family, it became a family of tricksters. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1165-1179