1. Picture by a middle-aged man. In the center is a star.

Picture by a middle-aged man. In the center is a star.

Image 105, LN

In 1930, Jung anonymously reproduced this image in “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” as a mandala painted by a male patient during treatment.

He reproduced it again in 1952 in “Concerning Mandala Symbolism” and wrote:

Picture by a middle-aged man. In the center is a star. The blue sky contains golden clouds.

At the four cardinal points we see human figures: at the top, an old man in the attitude of contemplation; at the bottom, Loki or Hephaestus with red, flaming hair, holding in his hands a temple.

To the right and left are a light and dark female figure.

Together they indicate four aspects of the personality, or four archetypal figures belonging, as it were, to the periphery of the self.

The two female figures can be recognized without difficulty as the two aspects of the anima.

The old man corresponds to the archetype of meaning, or of the spirit, and the dark chthonic figure to the opposite of the Wise Old Man, namely the magical (and sometimes destructive) luciferian element.

In alchemy it is Hermes Trismegistus versus Mercurius, the evasive “trickster.”

The circle enclosing the sky contains structures or organisms that look like protozoa.

The sixteen globes painted in four colors just outside the circle derived originally from an eye motif and therefore stand for the observing and discriminating consciousness.

Similarly, the ornaments in the next circle, all opening inwards, are rather like vessels pouring out their content toward thecentre. [Fn: There is a similar conception in alchemy, in the Ripley Scrowle and its variants (Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 257). There it is the planetary Gods who are pouring their qualities into the bath of rebirth.]

On the other hand the ornaments along the rim open outward, as if to receive something from outside.

That is, in the individuation process what were originally projections stream back “inside” and are integrated into the personality again.

Here, in contrast to Figure 25, “Above” and “Below,” male and female, are integrated, as in the alchemical hermaphrodite (CW 9, pt. I, § 682).

The figure at the top is Philemon and the figure at the bottom is Ka. ~Editor, The Black Books, Vol. I, Page 134.

In the Center is a Star

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