When I was in Africa I always went to the places which were said by the
Negroes to be haunted
LECTURE VI 15June 1932
Today we have a rather crowded program.
There are certain questions to deal with, and here is a contribution from Mrs. Sigg, a picture of an old Greek vase with just the constellations we were speaking of, the great monster whale Cetus, and the two Fishes, and Perseus and Andromeda.
Pegasus is not there.
The picture shows that the antique feeling about such constellations was a peculiarly living idea.
To them, Andromeda, the victim, fastened to the rock and being rescued by Perseus from the sea monster, was depicted in the sky, it was happening.
We have not such vivid power of fantasy, to us it seems rather artificial to project such an image.
Of course, one should not say that the antique man was capable of projecting, he was rather the victim of the projection, it just happened to him.
The trees and the mountains were alive, the springs were filled with living beings, the stars were gods.
It sounds to us like a very faint and worn-out allegory to call that beautiful star Jupiter, but to them it was Jupiter, and in that form it worked in them, it influenced them.
All nature was teeming with life, and with a life which was darkly felt to be their own.
It was as if the nervous system had tentacles in objects, as if the nerves were not only under the skin but extended far into the outside world.
It was the life of the unconscious, since every Greek in those days was living in his unconscious all the time; nature was the unconscious, as it is still.
And they tried to interpret that life in nature, to find a suitable formula in their mythological images to express the strange impression they got from certain trees, mountains, rocks, or whatever it was.
So their world was populated with extraordinary beings; what we would call fantasy was experienced by them as reality.
The old Greek mind was very primitive, and it still happens with primitives that the trees have voices and speak to them.
We must now answer these questions.
They were suggested by that seminar two weeks ago where we had to swallow a particularly difficult bit.
The fantasy which contains the vision of the white city and the crucifixion obviously stirred up many problems.
Here is a question from Mrs. Crowley: “You spoke of the dissolution of the symbol when it no longer contained mana.
Did you mean that the symbol undergoes its natural transformation?
Is it not actually the same symbol reversed, or whose convex impression is visible?
Libido absorbing it from a new angle?
And therefore there is a constant spiral movement or growth that views its (the symbol’s) different aspects?”
A symbol is not its contents, they are not identical; the symbol is a man-made image, an honest attempt of man to express a certain influence or impression, a strange psychical experience; just as all the terrible Greek monsters, like the chimera, were attempts of man to characterize certain specific local impressions.
If one could go to the places where those monsters were supposed to have lived, we would probably see something that explained what the Greeks meant in characterizing them by such creatures.
When I was in Africa I always went to the places which were said by the Negroes to be haunted, in order to find out what made them say so.
There was one place of particularly ill repute, a cave far up in the mountains, almost eight thousand feet, which they said was inhabited by devils ( the term they used was explained to me as really meaning ghosts rather than devils); and if anyone entered it, he was instantly killed.
It was necessary to carry a grass torch, and those devils put out the light and strangled the man.
As the mountains were volcanic, we assumed that there might be pockets of carbon dioxide, so we took lanterns and long
ropes with us, in order to explore the ground before we descended.
We were afraid we would be suffocated if torches were put out by the atmosphere.
But when we got there we were rather disappointed; we came to a kraal, very high up, lost in the wilderness, where a Negro lived who said he would show us the cave.
We asked him whether there were or not.
You see, it was a place that only in the distance had that evil reputation; to faraway tribes and kraals it was a terrible place, but for people nearby it was just an ordinary cave. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars, Page 731-755
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