14 March 1934 Visions Seminar LECTURE VIII
We have further contributions to the diamond symbolism today.
We said last time that the diamond was a carbon crystal, and Dr. Escher now says that it crystallizes in the cubic system, one of the simple forms being a double pyramid, the same above and below.
So the pyramid is really an analogy to the diamond, we were not far from the truth when we drew that parallel.
Then the word diamond-diamant in German and French-derives from the Greek adamas, which means the untamable or the invincible one, and that fits in beautifully with the symbolic meaning of the diamond.
Also it has peculiar magic qualities.
You know magic qualities have always been attributed to precious stones; the amethyst is a protection against drunkenness, for instance, and the diamond has the power of averting insanity and avoiding poison.
In the Middle Ages it was known as the pietra della reconciliazione, the stone of reconciliation, the peacemaker between husband and wife, a very good idea, and then after sixty years they celebrate the diamond wedding.
D,,: Escher: They have diamond engagement rings in England.
Dr. Jung: Yes, engagement rings are apotropaic charms against a too controversial marriage!
Now I want to mention another point.
I suppose you have read in the Swiss newspapers that attack upon my scientific sincerity, and the fellow thought he was particularly clever in suggesting that I had not criticized race psychology before the date of the National Socialist regime.
But it happens that in 1918 I published an article which I will translate to you, as it is a rather good diagnosis of the present political conditions.
I had only dim recollections of it, but it really does suggest what is actually happening in Germany.
Christianity has divided the Germanic people into their inferior and superior halves.
Through the repression of the dark side, it succeeded in domesticating the bright side and making it able to achieve culture.
The lower half is still waiting for redemption and for a second domestication.
Until that happens it remains associated with the remnants of the dark ages in the collective unconscious, and this means a peculiar increasing animation of the collective unconscious.
In the same measure as the unconditioned authority of the Christian Weltanschauungvanishes, the ‘blond beast’ the term used by Nietzsche for the fair Teutonic barbarian) will make himself conspicuous, he will writhe in his subterranean prison and threaten us with an outburst, with the most devastating consequences.
This phenomenon is a psychological revolution in each individual but it can appear also as a social phenomenon.
1 You see, that is the psychology of what is actually going on, not only in Germany but in more than half the world.
Switzerland for the time being is a sort of bastion of the Western world, surrounded on three sides
by that kind of revolution; only our French border still retains the old classical civilization; the three others are already attacked by a great mental upheaval, and it remains to be seen what the ultimate results will be.
Now we will go on with our text.
We were speaking last time of the sacrificed animus whose remains were on three sides of the pyramid.
There was the split face of a man, and the man lying face downward on the ground, and a knife from which blood was dripping.
Those are the three symptoms of a slaughter which has taken place, obviously the slaughter of the animus that was left behind.
And the Self that was left behind turned into matter, into a pyramid.
Mrs. Baumann: Does it mean then that the animus and the Self are buried together in the pyramid?
Dr. Jung: Yes. It is quite certain that it is the dead and buried Self that appears in the pyramid, as the dead pharaoh appears in the form of the pyramid.
That is the last one sees of him because his mummy is walled up inside; the old Egyptians gave a human shape to the sarcophagus itself, the head and face and arms indicating as nearly as possible the shape of the king, and then they built that outward sign over him.
Evidently the animus does not enter the pyramid-shrine altogether, because those remains of him are still outside, but there is apparently very little life left in them, so we may assume that his life also is buried within the pyramid.
When the kind of relation to the Self which the patient has had is given up, the Self then disappears in the unconscious, it is buried, and if the unconscious also recedes, then the animus is given up too, because the animus is the bridge between oneself and the unconscious.
So the bridge is also obliterated.
It is as if one had crossed a river and were walking on the other side, leaving the river and the bridge and the bank all behind.
I asked, you remember, what would become of the sacrifice, in what form the animus would reappear, and I might also have asked in what form the Self would reappear.
The part of the vision which follows is occupied with this question: What will become of the animus, and what will become of the Self, when they are left behind, when they only appear
indirectly? The answer may elucidate a more important problem.
You see it is something like the question of Plato’s eidola, those eternal ideas which he supposed to be preserved in heavenly places in their original forms, waiting for their concretization or incarnation, when they would appear and impress themselves upon matter.
So every object in this world-a chair, a human being, a house-has its eidolon, its original
image in heaven, and that is the real object.
In the Middle Ages this
kind of philosophy was called realism, meaning something quite different from what we call realism. It was then realism, in contradistinction to nominalism, which was just the opposite point of view, that ideas were only words, concepts, and not the real and only substance.
In the Platonic philosophy the real being, the real essence, is the eidolon in heaven, and what we see here is a mere appearance.
This chair, for example, is a degenerate imitation of the idea of a chair, as the human being is merely a degenerated, concretized form of the eidolon, the heavenly man, who was at once divided into two, man and woman, into such miserable individuals as you see everywhere.
So the heavenly chair is split up into thousands of funny models, like the two hundred easy chairs which Rockefeller stores in his drawing rooms.
The eidola are archetypal images which really do exist in a heavenly place, they exist in the collective unconscious, and they come to life and incarnate in every human being.
You see, it is a sort of psychological myth, it is a psychological process which happens in the development of every individual; these eternal ideas come into action and then, as described here, the original divinity of the ideas is sacrificed.
The first suffering in human life, for instance, is the discovery that the father and mother are not the one hermaphroditic god.
From that is derived the so-called castration complex of which you have heard in Freudian literature.
When the characteristics of the male sex are severed from the mother, who was the goddess, the perfect being, both male and female, when the child discovers that the mother is just a woman, nothing but a one-sided human being, the castration has then taken place, and that is a sort of sacrifice.
It is the loss of the original divinity.
The child is born with eternal ideas and lives first in the collective unconscious where the ruling figures are the dominants of the collective unconscious, and whatever happens outside-say a dog or the parents or other children-are by no means just what they appear to us.
On the contrary, they have the halo of divinity, they are magical and marvellous.
Many of us have such memories, and there are certain things which have still the magic halo of perfect significance or perfect charm, the golden halo.
Then subsequently, experience destroys those halos of the early days, and each time it is a sort of blood sacrifice.
Now whenever you come again into that sphere of the eternal images, say in analysis or through certain experiences, such a sacrifice will take place each time you return again to real life; the beautiful things are destroyed and you feel as if you were just damned.
A classical case in German literature is the effect which reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason made upon Kleist.
That was supposed to be a most revolutionary book in those days, although Kant simply said that there were certain things about which man cannot possibly know, that a man cannot know about the nature of God, for instance.
We cannot even say whether God exists, because according to its own definition that is so much beyond man that it is impossible for him to know anything about it.
This is so self-evident to us that we would not be upset by reading the Critique of Pure Reason, which is as a matter of fact pretty simple, so simple that we are always expecting to find something more complicated behind it.
The very formulated way in which it was written looks exceedingly difficult, but that kind of writing was necessary then, it needed a most accurate logical statement in order to make a problem visible.
Still in 1772 books were written about natural science in which it was thought necessary to prove that God had created the world in seven days.
Science was in those days only a means to prove the existence of God, and they were forced to the most astonishing conclusions.
Here in Zurich, a natural history was written by the famous Scheuchzer, which was very highly considered, and the whole book was to prove that there had really been a great flood in which everything was destroyed.
He found a lot of petrified shells and God knows what, on mountains four or five thousand feet up, which he considered a proof that the flood had reached that height.
Unfortunately he also found petrified fishes and said the flood must have been so great that even the fish died.
He also found a huge fossilized salamander of a species which is extinct now except in Japan, and he thought that was the skeleton of a human being, one of the witnesses of the great flood.
He made a verse about it: Betrubtes Beingerust von einem alten Sunder Erweiche Stein und Herz der heut’gen Bosheit Kinder.
That was the time in which Kant wrote, so he needed to make use of extraordinary language and most accurate and logical conclusions which seem to us quite syllogistic.
And Kleist, who was a poet and philosopher, read his book, and then wrote a letter saying that his only ideal, his highest belief had been destroyed, that he had lost everything, and then he shot himself.
He had lived in the magical world of childhood in which the whole Middle Ages lived, until he became conscious through reading Kant that man after all is confined in this world and can suggest
nothing about a world which is not his own; he can know nothing beyond himself because he is locked into his own mental categories.
This is perfectly obvious to us, but for a whole century afterwards people returned to the same old idea, that they could jump over the borderline of space and time and make assertions about things which man can never really know; they could not give up the paradise of childhood.
For Kleist this was such a sacrifice that he preferred to end his existence.
That happens in many human lives when the belief in human perfection or authority or the religious faith is destroyed; people simply cannot stand the sacrifice of the infantile paradise, they fall ill or die.
For they think because one can make no definite statements about certain matters that they do not exist; you see, they make the same mistake again.
Whether I say God is, or God is not, is all the same, I cannot make God and I cannot make him disappear, what I say is simply irrelevant. Whether I say Mount Everest is or is not, is quite futile; Mount Everest is or it is not and what I say makes no difference.
But such people still think when some body says it is not, then it is not.
So when we think those were childhood ideas which we have left behind because we don’t believe them any longer, it is just as childish as when we assumed that they were true because we then thought they were true.
The process we are watching here is exactly the same as the development out of childhood, when the child comes down out of its own golden world and discovers the so-called real world.
And the further development, inasmuch as the child begins to think, is of course always a descent; in growing, the child falls into the mire of the world, there is most certainly a sort of continuous sacrifice of the vision of beauty that prevailed in the beginning of life.
Later on, one loses it and forgets it altogether.
Only long afterwards, perhaps in the second half of life, does one discover that certain experiences have a meaning, a sort of secret meaning, which one has not been aware of before.
Therefore old people often begin to read history to discover how things came about, as it suddenly dawns on them that they mean something.
At first they were in things, everything was self-evident, as the early surroundings are self
Evident to the child, who only discovers things on the way down into this life.
The old person is on the way up again.
So the old person discovers meaning, and the child discovers material existence, and the qualities of things-tastes and smells and colors.
You remember they have that amazing magical charm which is later on lost completely.
The descent into the world, whether it is at the beginning of the existence of the human being, or whether it happens in the course of life after a phase of life in the unconscious, is always characterized by sacrifice.
Therefore people, when they are leaving analysis for a while often cling to certain things which they had better not cling to.
You know, one of the ordinary prejudices of people who have gone through a period of analysis is to think that the relation to the world and people consists in psychologizing things, they think that everything ought to be analyzed; whether they are going to a concert or taking a trip, they must have a dream about it.
But we analyze dreams not in order to learn about particular matters, but to learn about the relationship of the unconscious to these matters, namely, to learn whether certain conscious developments coincide with the collective unconscious, or what the reasons are for certain disturbances in the conscious.
It is not meant that you should live your whole life in a sort of superstitious dread of what the dream says about things, so that you cannot move unless the dream tells you to, that you must wait for a dream to tell you when to balance your household account, for instance.
I have seen the most amazing things in that line.
“But why the devil don’t you do it?” “I have had no dream about it.”
Such nonsense! It is the same thing, you see, one clings to certain ideas and is completely lost without them.
That does not mean, however, that one should throw the whole thing out of the window, that would be quite wrong, for there are plenty of circumstances in life where one had better consider the dream, really problematical situations where the dream is needed.
But whether you should scrub your floor or buy a pair of new shoes when you need them are not problems.
People who upon leaving cling to the analytical style, insisting upon everything being discussed and analyzed, become exceedingly clumsy and boring.
This must be sacrificed, it is quite clear; this style is good for analysis but not for life.
And then it looks like a terrible sacrifice, inasmuch as people are inclined to think they have then entirely lost contact with the unconscious.
You must be able to lose contact, you can never gain anything new without losing something.
So risk losing the unconscious.
You see it is quite ridiculous-to put it mildly-to be afraid that you could lose your unconscious; that clings to you so tightly that you may be just glad if you can sometimes cherish the illusion of having lost it.
The unconscious clings to you so tightly that you cannot get rid of it; no fear of losing contact with it, that is all illusion.
But it looks like that; the transition from a psychological atmosphere into the collective atmosphere of the world is a most painful procedure, no doubt, and a painful contrast, and therefore it is quite
justified to symbolize it by a lot of sacrificial blood.
Now our patient notices that green things are growing all around that animus figure, which means that he will be swallowed up, dissolved by nature, and she feels the necessity of freeing him, protecting him from complete dissolution in nature.
This shows that there is something about the animus figure which should not be lost even if he no longer functions as a bridge to the unconscious; he must still exist-it is some thing which has to reappear.
You see, if the animus or the anima could disappear completely, there would probably be no reason whatever for any sort of psychology, for only through disturbances, through certain shocks, do you become aware of having a soul.
If everything were smooth you would never discover it, it would be so self-evident that you
would remain entirely unconscious of it.
Moreover there would not be the slightest need.
Dr. Escher: I believe Kleist killed a woman at the same time that he killed himself. Perhaps there is some mystical conception in putting the anima to death.
Dr. Jung: Exactly, and that is related to the problem which we are discussing
here. The animus and the anima are unconscious factors which can never completely disappear from discussion; wherever you are, in whatever condition you are, they remain a problem.
I could even go as far as to say that without the anima and animus there would be no object,
no other human being, because you perceive differences only through that which is a likeness to the differences in yourself.
For instance, you do not perceive beauty because beauty is in the object; not everybody would see the beauty, it is by no means sure that a picture is beautiful in itself.
Some people call it beautiful, and others call it very ugly, so opinions are divided and we can never say it is beautiful in itself; there can only be a certain consensus of opinion about it.
Also, although the majority of people may say it is beautiful, we are not quite sure whether they really find it so or whether they are affected by the opinion of others.
You see horrible things in a modern art exhibition, but you read an article in the paper saying they are most marvellous, and you see people standing about, gazing at them and apparently finding them most charming, and-well, they are authorities and you are just nothing.
But those people are afraid of saying something wrong too, you meet them in the street afterwards and ask how it was, and they admit that as a matter of fact they don’t like those pictures, they consider them crazy and morbid and ugly, quite impossible.
So what is the majority in such matters?
You cannot see beauty unless you have beauty in yourself, as you cannot see ugliness without having something ugly in yourself.
And you cannot perceive a difference which is not a difference in your self.
You must have the possibility in your psychological system in order to perceive anything either parallel or different outside.
The condition of perceiving or establishing differences is given by the fact of having two different standpoints inside.
One is your conscious standpoint. You say: “I like this.” But then a voice says: “I don’t like it.”
Make that experiment, try it, it is a sort of dialectical method of finding out about your partner, your own differences.
Choose a somewhat controversial object, a modern art exhibition, or the standpoint of your wife, or of your husband, and ask yourself what you think or feel about it.
And when you find that you have a certain opinion, stand for it, back it up.
For usually people withdraw from an opinion, they are all afraid of a standpoint; it is awkward because you have a certain obligation after wards, you are quoted as saying it.
It is not necessary that anybody else listens to this experiment, you can do it for yourself in the quiet of your room.
Say, I think so-and-so, and then listen, just cock your ears to hear whether you hear another opinion. Instantly up it comes: “Oh no, I think otherwise.”
Then you ask whose voice that may be and naturally you think it is another idea of your own.
But there you are mistaken, there you become inconsistent.
You have stated your opinion before, you have made your statement according to your best knowledge, and you backed it up; and when a voice says just the contrary, you simply don’t stand for that contrary opinion; that is a strange opinion which somebody else has uttered.
And there you have the anima or animus.
It is quite simple, you are always having such discussions quite unconsciously.
For instance, you are in a certain dilemma, you are uncertain whether you should sign a certain contract, but you sum up all the pros and cons and finally a moment comes when it seems decided: “Oh well, I am going to sign the damned thing.”
But then there is another point you must think of first, and you come to the conclusion that the contract cannot be signed.
That is all played out as you walk up and down and occasionally you are heard to mutter: “No, I shall not sign that thing.”
You talk to yourself as if you were two people.
Now if you put yourself resolutely on one side, the other side is the anima or the animus.
This possibility of a dialectical method or a contradictory process is given by the fact that you can never get rid of the other point of view, what we would call an anima or animus point of view, which simply expresses that duality of sex, or the opposites, which are always within us.
We hate it, but it is nevertheless true.
You cannot get rid of the opposites by saying the other side does not exist.
It does exist; it exists first of all in yourself, you are split from the beginning, because the hermaphroditic image of man, the eidolon or the primordial being, was split when you were born.
You are outside, but inside you still have the recollection of the two, of man and woman, this side and that, the opposites.
So a person who commits suicide very often kills somebody else at the same time, as Kleist did; double suicides are frequent.
And if it is not actually done in reality, it is often done symbolically; that is, the suicide is committed under the most violent protest from the other side, often leading to the so-called automatisme teleologique, automatic actions which counteract the conscious actions.
I remember a case where a man was trying to kill himself and was prevented by hearing the voice of his mother saying: “If you do that I will strangle you!”
Another case was the man who tried to throw himself into the moat of the citadel of Spandau; a sentinel who was watching him shouted: “If you jump in I shall shoot!”
So he ran away. That was automatisme teleologique, complete nonsense you see.
Then a man who suffered from general paralysis was about to take a leap from a low open window in the fourth story, and just at the moment when he jumped onto the window sill, he said there was such a loud explosion outside that he was thrown back into the room, he said a physical force threw him back.
I know another man, a dentist with a certain amount of anatomical and physiological knowledge, who tried to commit suicide by inhaling gas, and then found himself on the floor of the room with a frightful headache and remembered what had happened.
He had locked the windows and door and turned on the gas and begun to inhale it, when he suddenly felt a most powerful hand gripping his chest and swinging him back into the corner of the room, where he fell against the wall and lay unconscious.
You see the gas was above and he was on the floor in the purer air, and somewhere probably the gas could escape, so he was not poisoned.
I told him that was a hallucination, but he was absolutely convinced that it was true and that one could see the finger marks.
He opened his shirt and there was nothing to be seen, but he still swore they had been there, and told me how deep the marks were.
The man was by no means crazy, he was simply in a desperate
situation financially and otherwise, and had always played with the idea of committing suicide-he always carried a bottle of poison in case things should go wrong.
That again was automatisme teleologique, he was most determined to put an end to his life but the voice pushed him away, and because he did not know of that other voice which wanted to live, he thought it was a miracle.
It is simply a power on the other side of which you can never be rid, there is no analysis nor any earthly means by which you could cut off the opposite.
That is the meaning of those remains of the animus which are still outside the pyramid.
Now Miss Hannah asks: “When you say it is absurd to be afraid of losing the unconscious, do you include, as being absurd, to be afraid of losing the Self, or not?”
The Self is a different consideration of course, it is not just the unconscious; the unconscious is always there, but the Self is not necessarily there.
The Self is an archetypal form in the unconscious, and you can
get out of reach of it despite the fact that you are always contained in it; you can lose the consciousness of being contained, you can go astray.
Even if you never get away from the unconscious, you can still go astray, just as easily as you can go astray in the world.
If you have lost your way on this earth, you are still on the earth, you are still contained by our
planet; and so it is with the unconscious.
With the Self it is different; then everything depends upon whether you remain conscious of the
relation to the Self.
Inasmuch as you lose consciousness of the relation you are lost, but of course you cannot say you have lost the Self, you have lost consciousness of the relationship.
The point is not the possibility of losing the Self, but losing the consciousness of the Self.
Miss Hannah: What I really meant was, is one not really afraid of losing the Self when one talks of being afraid of the unconscious?
Dr. Jung: Exactly, that is really the fear.
But you cannot lose the Self because you are forever contained in it; you can, however, lose the consciousness of being contained.
It is a question of consciousness; it is all important that you have the consciousness of the relationship.
For as far as one can make out, the purpose of the development of the human mind is to widen out, to increase, to intensify consciousness.
When you look back in to the ages, you see that what has happened since is an intensification, a widening out of consciousness.
We call that culture and-always assuming that there is a purpose in human development or in the history of the mind-that is obviously the thing people were after.
What is increase of knowledge, what is science, what is exploration, research?
One aspect is the widening out of consciousness.
Another aspect is of course values but that is also a matter of consciousness, for how can you perceive values, how can you attribute and apply values, without consciousness?
It needs a particular consciousness to have a realization of values and to apply them at all; without consciousness there are no values, there are only natural facts.
So in either case, whether you look at the development of man from a merely mental side, or from an ethical side, it always means an intensification of consciousness-it is always the question of the great light, more light, illumination, clarification.
Even religions prefer that characterization; religion formerly was a source of enlightenment, an illumination.
In the beginning of the Evangel of St. John, he speaks of the light that shineth forth in the darkness, and of the “true Light which lighteth everyman.
And when Buddha steps into the lotus three days after his birth, the light of the dharmakayas fills the universe as he pronounces the first words of the law.
And there was the light phenomenon when Moses descended from Sinai.
Light is always a symbol of consciousness; light enables you to see, light helps your vision, and that seems to be the purpose.
Surely, then, the most important thing is consciousness, without which there is nothing.
So it is always a matter of the consciousness of relationship to the Self, for according to
definition we are all in the hands of God, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Religious people believe that even the greatest sinners, even the atheists, are in the hands of God, and that the dumb animals, knowing nothing of God, are also moved by him; they are chosen by God to do certain things, as we dumb animals are chosen for certain purposes; we don’t know why or what for, we simply have to perform them without knowing, we are contained in the hands of God.
That is the religious way of put ting it.
The psychological way would be that we accept a certain psychological principle which is supposed to be more comprehensive than consciousness: that is to say, a psyche which covers both conscious and un conscious, the whole thing.
There is an enormous area of unconscious contents of which we know nothing, which only in time can come to consciousness, and the totality is expressed by the Self, by the greater thing in which we are contained.
That can never be lost, but you can lose consciousness of it, as in religious language you can lose consciousness of being led by God.
The mystics speak of being removed from the presence of God, and that is a definite psychological condition which we would call the remoteness from the Self.
That remoteness expresses it self in the complete meaninglessness of life.
The more you approach that totality expressed by the concept of Self, the more life has meaning;
you then do not even ask whether your life has meaning or not, you feel it, you are convinced of it, as you are convinced of your own existence.
But when you question whether life has any sense at all, you are what the mystics would call
Gottesferne.
Those remains of the animus in the vision are still visible, then, because you cannot get rid of the animus, which means that you cannot get rid of your own opposite, the other voice; just as you can never get rid of mankind, or of the object, it is always there, whatever it is.
So our patient has to do something about it and she says:
I seized the knife and where the knife had been, appeared a human hand with blood dripping from the finger. With the knife I cut off the hand.
Evidently the hand comes out of the pyramid-bad symbolism you see.
The living being to which that hand belonged is the animus.
Cutting off the hand is a great mutilation, so she mutilates whatever life is left in the form of the animus.
Now she says: Then I struck the pyramid with the knife. It crumbled away and I saw, standing where it had been, a man. There he comes!
The pyramid is the visible sign of the Self that once has been, or the king who once has lived, and she now destroys the pyramid. It is obviously a magic act of destruction, and she does it with the knife.
That means what?
Miss Hannah: With the logos.
Dr. Jung: Logos is too beautiful, too ecclesiastical.
I should say it was the intellect, the discriminating mind, an acute mind, sharp like a knife; she cuts in with her mind, and so she destroys the pyramid.
That is what we do; we have destroyed those things with our minds so they now mean nothing to us except historical remains.
And we have developed an almost morbid mania for preserving remains, as a compensation for their lack of meaning; we do not understand them, and instead we have a sort of historic sentimentality and preserve them indiscriminately.
Certain archaeological collections are really ridiculous, they preserve old poles and God knows what.
There is a collection in Switzerland which contains the most absurd things; they did not know what they were, but I knew, having a good power of fantasy and having had the subject suggested by one of my old teachers.
You see, those things were connected with a serious question, as I learned when I went to Africa.
Suppose you come to the desert and nothing grows there but cactus and you have a human need, what can you do?
That was a great question in antiquity; they had no paper you see.
An old professor of Latin used always to put that question to us boys: what do you think they did about it in antiquity? Did they use newspaper? But there was no paper, only papyrus, and that was
an exceedingly expensive substance which had to be fetched from Egypt and paid for very heavily. Linen? That was also expensive. Leaves? But in a town or in the desert there were no leaves. What did they do then?
So he said they always carried a little bag filled with gravel; ordinary people had just ordinary gravel and the rich people had marble.
Of course that was his joke, but they did have little sticks for that purpose.
There is a place in Zurich where there were Roman barracks, half a legion was stationed there, and in the outlets for the drainage, they found any number of those little sticks and didn’t know what they were.
And those things were preserved, along with old drainage pipes and old bottles and God knows what nonsense, in a museum two thousand years afterwards just because they were old.
Who among the living is capable of having more than sentiment in an old temple? Yes, it is aesthetic, it is beautiful, but do you understand what an antique god meant? How is it possible that they came to the conclusion that there was such a being as Apollo, or Ceres? Of course we
can be sentimental about it, but it is very rarely really experienced.
Old
Wotan has now been resuscitated, but what is Wotan to us?
He was experienced once, but it is now only historical sentimentality.
Our intellect, our discrimination, has killed all those things.
When the Christian missionaries cut down the oaks of Wotan and destroyed the poles or sacred
idols, it was their discriminating minds which said it was impossible for a divine presence to be present in such man-made figures, in such clumsy dirty idols smeared with blood; their mental knife cut them down and they were obliterated, they crumbled away.
So here the old king is gone, he is obsolete, and that is done with the knife.
This means that the idea of the Self is obliterated, sacrificed, and instead appears a man.
The man is first of all the animus because he embodies the remains of the animus, and now the animus is projected onto a real man.
So the real man is the representative of the other voice, and that has been so from the beginning of the world.
To a woman a man is that other voice, as a woman since the beginning of the world is a man’s other voice-a real woman, mind you, his wife or some other woman.
This man appears instead of the pyramid, so he is instead of the Self obviously, he embodies the Self; he incorporates not only the animus but the Self too, and that also is a truth since the beginning of the world.
The Self is always on the other side to begin with; for a woman it is in a man and for a man it is in a woman.
This explains a lot of course.
You see when somebody else contains all my most valuable possessions, it is a dangerous role; I don’t envy that other fellow who contains my possessions, they give him a hell of a time, I am sure.
The text continues
[plate 38]: “His feet and hands grew into the earth and were formless.”
Mrs. Sigg: Like roots.
Dr. Jung: Yes, he takes root, he becomes one with the earth, as it were.
So he is in danger of becoming nothing but an earthbound being.
That comes from the fact that the patient is occupied all the time with the descent into the world, and the man she meets there is the same, her opposite is also growing into the earth and becoming formless.
He said: “You have liberated me from the pyramid. Can you now give me my limbs? Can you free them and shape them?” answered: “Wait.” I went away from him and sat alone wondering how I could free the man. At length I arose and said to him: “I must sever you from the earth.” He cried out: “If you cut me off I will bleed to death.”
You see, the idea here is that something ought to be done about it.
That man is about to grow into the earth, in which case he would be completely lamed, he would become a tree perhaps, unable to move from the spot.
And she seems to feel a certain responsibility about it, that it should be prevented. What is the danger?
Mrs. Sigg: It might be that it is her task to use her hands and feet, to be independent.
Dr.: Jung: Yes, but you take it out of that projection; we must now deal with it as being in the projection.
She projects something of her Self, her most valuable possession, into the man, so her possessions are threatened with growing into the earth, disappearing there perhaps.
You see when she is no longer in contact with the animus as a psychological function, and no
longer with the Self as a psychological fact, they are then out of her hands; they are projected and appear in a material body, and there is the danger that they will be caught by the power of the earth and lost.
The question is then whether they would not disappear altogether into a sort of complete unconsciousness.
That is always the danger.
When you are in the condition of the beginning of life, in an adolescent condition of mind, you are not in possession of the animus-or the anima in a man’s case-and you have no consciousness of the Self, because they are both projected.
You are then nothing but a sort of thin skin of consciousness, and so are liable to become possessed by someone who seems to contain those values.
You fall under the influence of the apparent proprietor of your treasures, and that is a sort of magic influence.
Now the more you fall under that fascination, the more you become immovable and the things around you become immovable too, because you are then not your own master.
Your treasures are outside and you are like a cockchafer on a string,-as when children fix a string to the leg of a cockchafer and let it fly, but it can only fly as far as the string goes.
You are in prison, you are utterly unfree.
That is why people are afraid of each other, they fear that somebody could put them into prison; people often have a tremendous fear of attaching themselves.
They fear the loss not only of their mental freedom, but of their moral and spiritual freedom, as if the very soul were threatened.
It seems to be a most horrible danger, so they often prefer to keep entirely aloof.
But if you can accept the fact of being caught, you are of course imprisoned, but on the other hand, you have a chance to come into possession of your treasure.
There is no other way; you will never come into possession of your treasure if you keep aloof, if you run about like a wild dog.
Yet innumerable people are so afraid of attachment that they prefer to remain unconscious and to live the life of wild dogs-the fear is sometimes just too much on account of that danger of growing into the earth.
You know there is an old saying that a treasure which is hidden in the ground rises to the surface on the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year, and if you are on the spot then it is yours.
But if you are not on the spot, the treasure descends with a noise like thunder into the earth, into unfathomable depths.
Then slowly it rises again.
That is the way of nature, and so it is with all treasures; they get into the unconscious where they are subject to the laws, the peculiar slow rhythm of the unconscious, which through certain periods of time bring things up to the surface, and later they disappear again. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1451-1365