Carl Jung later recounted this episode to Christiana Morgan
Jung later recounted this episode as follows to Christiana Morgan:
“I was writing in my book and suddenly saw a man standing watching over my shoulder.
One of the gold dots from my book flew up and hit him in the eye.
He asked me if I would take it out. I said no-not unless he told me who he was.
He said he wouldn’t. You see I knew that.
If I had done what he asked then he would have sunk into the unconscious and I would have missed the point of it, i.e.: why he had appeared from the unconscious at all.
Finally he told me that he would tell me the meaning of certain hieroglyphs which I had had a few days earlier.
This he did and I took the thing out of his eye and he vanished”
(October 12, 1926, Analysis Notebooks, CLM). To Aniela Jaffe, he later recalled,
“Once, at that time, I had the vision of a red clay tablet embedded in the wall of my bedroom, and on it were strange hieroglyphs that I copied as best as I could the next day with the feeling that there was something in it, that it is a message, but I did not know what” (MP, p. 172);
This may also be connected to this episode. In 1958, Jung recounted this episode as follows to Aniela Jaffe:
“I had to think about my earliest mandala pictures.
There were black magnetic iron seeds and gold seeds mixed together that had to be put into the vessel where they formed the central body, the self-
And then the story with my magician, who appeared when I painted these seeds, and then he screamed because they had got caught in his eye.
That is, he received a projection from me and it caused him pain.
That was something that I did not or could not accept, namely the figure of the magician, the shaman in myself.
That is why this figure appeared to me.
Only when I realize that I am the shaman, is he healed.
He is, so to speak, a precursor of mine, and that is why the seed fell into the right place: in his eye, which means consciousness.
It has to be removed from there.
I spared myself the pain, so to speak, of seeing myself as a shaman; then I would have also been put at one with the animals, for example, with the lions, who prowl around me in a friendly way.
The shaman has helpful animals, or-one could say: he comes on the level of the animal, but I could not understand this at that time, when the figure of the magician appeared to me” (MP, p. 334).
The reference appears to be to the mandala sequence in LN (Images 8off.), which features these gold seeds. ~The Black Books, Vol. VII, Page 149
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