The hallmarks of spirit are, firstly, the principle of spontaneous movement and activity
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious CW 9i
The hallmarks of spirit are, firstly, the principle of spontaneous movement and activity; secondly, the spontaneous capacity to produce images independently of sense perception; and thirdly, the autonomous and sovereign manipulation of these images.
This spiritual entity approaches primitive man from outside; but with increasing development it gets lodged in man’s consciousness and becomes a subordinate function, thus apparently forfeiting its original character of autonomy.
That character is now retained only in the most conservative views, namely in the religions.
The descent of spirit into the sphere of human consciousness is expressed in the myth of the divine νοϋς caught in the embrace of φύσις.
This process, continuing over the ages, is probably an unavoidable necessity, and the religions would find themselves in a very forlorn situation if they believed in the attempt to hold up evolution.
Their task, if they are well advised, is not to impede the ineluctable march of events, but to guide it in such a way that it can proceed without fatal injury to the soul.
The religions should therefore constantly recall to us the origin and original character of the spirit, lest man should forget what he is drawing into himself and with what he is filling his consciousness.
He himself did not create the spirit, rather the spirit makes him creative, always spurring him on, giving him lucky ideas, staying power, “enthusiasm” and “inspiration.”
So much, indeed, does it permeate his whole being that he is in gravest danger of thinking that he actually created the spirit and that he “has” it.
In reality, however, the primordial phenomenon of the spirit takes possession of him, and, while appearing to be the willing object of human intentions, it binds his freedom, just as the physical world does, with a thousand chains and becomes an obsessive idee-force.
Spirit threatens the naive-minded man with inflation, of which our own times have given us the most horribly instructive examples.
The danger becomes all the greater the more our interest fastens upon external objects and the more we forget that the differentiation of our relation to nature should go hand in hand with a correspondingly differentiated relation to the spirit, so as to establish the necessary balance.
If the outer object is not offset by an inner, unbridled materialism results, coupled with maniacal arrogance or else the extinction of the autonomous personality, which is in any case the ideal of the totalitarian mass state. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 393
Instinct wants to be transformed into spirit
In his study entitled “The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype,” John Layard makes clear that the word “virgin” was not synonymous with “chaste” in either its Greek or Hebrew origins.
Referring to the Virgin Mary and to other mothers of divine heroes, he says, It would appear that to be a virgin in the mythological sense the woman must conceive outside or before the marriage bond. . .
What then do we mean by “virgin”? It may help us to examine those ways in which we use the word which are not directly concerned with sex.
We speak of a “virgin forest” as being one in which the powers of nature are untrammelled and untouched by man.
But we can think of this from two diametrically opposite points of view.
We can think of it either from the view of the agricultural pioneer, who would regard it as something to be destroyed and uprooted as soon as possible; or else we can think of it from the point of view of a nature lover who would regard the virgin forest with awe as a supreme manifestation of pregnant nature, and who would oppose all the most enlightened efforts of the agriculturalist or town-builder to destroy its primitive beauty,—who would, in fact, treat it as inviolably holy.
The one would represent “law and order” and the other ”nature”.
So that we have here two opposite principles, both valid, the law of man in apparently open conflict with the law of God.
Yet it is the law of God, the untrammelled law of pregnant though as yet chaotic nature that we dub “virgin”, and it is the reduction of that chaos which we call Law and Order.
Thus in this sense the word “virgin” does not mean chastity but the reverse, the pregnancy of nature, free and uncontrolled, corresponding on the human plane to unmarried love, in contrast to controlled nature corresponding to married love, despite the fact that from the legal point of view sexual intercourse within the marriage bond is the only kind which is regarded as “chaste”.
It will be seen that this argument has landed us in the midst of a paradox, a paradox only to be solved either
a) by regarding the whole biblical story of the Virgin Birth as purely allegorical, which the Church asserts it is not, it being, as she maintains, a unique historical event; or else
b) by reconciling the two through the realization that instinct wants to be transformed into spirit, and that the Virgin Birth is the supreme example of this having been achieved, that is to say that Our Lady’s womanhood was so complete and so closely united with God that it became self-reproductive. — Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin, Page 80.
