Frances Baruch – Jung and the Stone

Originally delivered as a lecture at the Analytical Psychology Club in London. Summer 1990.

Note: Unless otherwise noted, quotes from C.G. Jung throughout this work are from Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, Pantheon, New York, 1962.

The invitation to do a talk for “Grass Roots” came at an interesting time for me. A whole group of astonishing coincidences had occurred just when I was feeling that there was no connection between the area of my work (which is doing sculpture) and the one of my involvement with analytical psychology. The ideas for this talk popped up quite suddenly and immediately on the day the invitation arrived and seemed to suggest a kind of answer to the feelings of disconnection. As a consequence, I delivered what follows as a lecture at the Analytical Psychology Club in London.

I had first thought of focusing on Jung as a sculptor and artist – but this narrowed things down too much, as his ‘flirtation’ with his artistic anima was short-lived, while his relationship to the stone was life-long. However, it was just this experience (hearing the comments of this artistic ‘lady’) who first spoke through the voice of an actual patient of Jung that first introduced Jung to his anima and, having resisted her tempting urges to look on his painted and written images from the unconscious as art, he was able to maintain a creative dialogue with ‘the lady’ for many years to come.

Jung first encountered the stone very early in his life – he was only seven or eight years old when he experienced the curious interaction between himself and the rock he used to sit on in the garden of his home in Klein Huningen. He called it “my stone” and said, “Often when I was alone I sat down on this stone and then began an imaginary game that went something like this: I am sitting on top of this stone and it is underneath.”

But the stone could also say “I” and think, “I am lying here on this slope and he is sitting on top of me.” The question then arose, “Am I the one who is sitting on the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” This puzzle gave Jung, as he says, a feeling of curious and fascinating darkness, but he adds: “There was no doubt whatsoever that this stone stood in some secret relationship to me…

” This experience, embedded in the eternal world of childhood, resonated with multi-toned echoes down the years in what seemed at times an alien place. Jung says, “The pull of that other world [the childhood one] was so strong that I had to tear myself violently from the spot [where he sat on the stone] in order not to lose hold of my future.”

About a year or so later (maybe two), Jung carved a little man out of the top of a ruler, formally dressed in top hat, frock coat and shining boots – he even gave him a little woolen top coat. This figure took up residence in a pencil case and was given as a sort of companion a smooth oblong pebble from the Rhine which Jung had painted, to divide it into an upper and lower half, and which he had carried about with him for a long time.

This stone then belonged to the carved figure and the two of them in their pencil box home were carefully hidden away in an attic, and kept as a great and important secret. The possession of this secret — the second in Jung’s life (the first was the amazing dream of the underground phallus) — was somehow a great comfort to the boy, and healed, for the moment, what he calls the tormenting sense of being at odds with himself. He also says, “This possession of a secret had a very powerful influence on my character. I consider it the essential factor of my boyhood.”

The carving of the mannequin was the first attempt to give shape to the secret, and its emergence gave rise to the awareness of a great mystery, the answer to which Jung began to sense and search for in the world of nature. “At that time my interest in plants, animals and stones grew, I was constantly on the lookout for something mysterious.” He also says, “It does seem to me, however, that I had a vague sense of relationship between the ‘soul-stone’ and the stone which was also myself.”

At this point, we might just look at some of the ways in which stones have always fascinated mankind, starting with the connection that Jung himself found, many years afterwards, of the stone belonging to the mannequin with the ‘soul stone’ or ‘churinga.’ The churingas were magic objects, either stone or wood, which were kept by Australian aborigines and handed on from one generation to the next and not only endowed with magic power put into them when they were made, but they also acquired some kind of virtue from every individual to whom they had belonged. They contain the spirit of the tribe and its continuity and represent the eternal and enduring.

Stones piled on graves by many different peoples symbolize what survives after death – stability, durability, immortality, imperishability — the eternal cohesion, the indestructibility of the Supreme Reality – these are all qualities of stone. The caches of stones kept by Stone-Age men in secret places were felt as repositories of their strength. Stones are the bones of the earth, the first solid form of creation. In primitive symbolism, stones can give birth to people and gods (like Mithra, who was born from a rock), and have a life-giving potency; conversely, people can be turned into sacred or other stones. Tall, upright rocks, columns or pillars are an axis-mundi and represent the supreme support of all things in the universe.

They are also an omphalos, navel or fixed point or center, where man can regain Paradise or find enlightenment. In the Bible, the stone on which Jacob slept when he dreamed his dream of the angels on the ladder, and which he later anointed and set up as a sacred altar called Beth El — House of God — was a meeting place of heaven and earth and of communication between them.

The foundation stone of the Temple was said to be the center of the earth, and supported the world. Moses brought the law from Sinai on tablets of stone. Stones are also connected with the cults of many Greek gods, especially Apollo – notably the omphalos or navel of the world at Delphi – regarded as the durable, reliable and indestructible center from which all the cosmos radiates and to which it refers back for stability and movement. The stone, as the goal of the alchemical process, the ‘lapis,’ is something we must return to later.

When Jung was about twelve, he started to have problems with school. One of the difficulties, which seems strange to me in view of the skillfulness of his later paintings, was with drawing classes, from which he was exempted on grounds of “utter incapacity!” Of course, he could only draw what stirred his imagination and not copies of prints of Greek gods or goat-heads! A spell of fainting fits made him able to avoid school for more than six months and he had a wonderful time drawing pictures of violent battles or besieged and burning castles, and exploring the woods and water. “Above all,” he says, “I was able to plunge into the world of the mysterious.

To that realm belonged trees, a pool, the swamp, stones and animals and my father’s library…. What had led me astray during the crisis [the six months away from school] was my passion for being alone, my delight in solitude. Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and inexplicably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.”

At this same time, however, Jung’s ego really began to appear consciously. “I had the overwhelming impression of having just emerged from a dense cloud.

I knew all at once: now I am myself…” Then came the fateful vision of Basel cathedral and the ensuing torment and at last the great and courageous leap to confronting the complete picture of the vast turd that smashed the roof of the Cathedral. After the initial immense relief, followed the beginning of the awful awareness that God could also be something terrible. The experience of such a profound paradox made the young boy deeply thoughtful and often, according to his mother, depressed, though Jung says he was really brooding on the secret (this was the third and perhaps greatest secret), and one which induced in him an almost unendurable loneliness.

“At such times,” he says, “it was strangely reassuring and calming to sit on my stone. Somehow it would free me of all my doubts. Whenever I thought that I was the stone, the conflict ceased…. The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out…. I was but the sum of my emotions, and the ‘other’ in me was the timeless, imperishable stone.”

The feeling Jung had of being and having always been two persons grew stronger. The number two personality, “The Other,” was remote from the world of men but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures and, above all, close to the night, to dreams and to whatever ‘God’ worked directly in him. Between twelve and sixteen, this feeling for nature contrasted with the unreliable world of people was again expressed.

“In fact, it seemed to me that the high mountains, the rivers, lakes, trees, flowers and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity and abhorrent egotism – all qualities with which I was only too familiar from myself, that is from personality number one, the schoolboy of 1890.”

Besides this world, there existed another realm, like a temple in which anyone who entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos, so that he could “only marvel and admire, forgetful of [himself].” And later, he writes, “Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings…. This impression was reinforced when I became acquainted with Gothic cathedrals. But there the infinity of the cosmos, the chaos of meaning and meaninglessness, of impersonal purpose and mechanical law, were wrapped in stone.

This contained and at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit. What I had dimly felt to be my kinship with the stone was the divine nature in both, in the dead and the living matter.”

As Jung grew up, his number one personality gradually took the upper hand, though there was always conflict. But an increasing interest in science led him further into the practical world and a meeting with a young chemist excited him very much. “… A chemist who had attained that pinnacle of glory – the doctorate.

This chemist was a fascinating novelty to me: here was a scientist, perhaps one of those who understood the secrets of stones…” In fact, the young man only taught Jung how to play croquet and imparted to him none of his “presumably vast learning…” Nevertheless, Jung says, “I revered him as the first person I had ever met in the flesh who was initiated into the secrets of nature, or some of them at least…”

During his later school years, and born out of the clash of opposites embodied in personalities one and two conflicting with each other, Jung had, as he says, his first systematic fantasy. He imagined the Rhine becoming a vast lake with boats and a large port in Basel. A kind of medieval city on a rock surrounded by canals and connected by a causeway to the mainland grew in his imagination and in the city was a fortified castle with a watch tower. This was Jung’s house.

There were many details of the town and castle and how it was governed, with Jung as chief adviser and arbitrator. The keep contained an immensely complicated machinery-cum-tree of copper – and there was a laboratory where he could make gold. These processes remained vague, but it is a fantastic image. The goings-on in this city and castle and on the ships on the lake provided Jung with wonderful fantasies as he walked to and from school and lasted several months.

But at last it paled, and he began instead to bring it down to earth by actually building the castle and fortifications and houses out of small stones and mud. Models were constructed of various types of fortifications, taken from real existing plans. For more than two years, this filled Jung’s leisure hours, while, as he says, “my leanings towards nature study and concrete things steadily increased, at the cost of Number Two [personality].”

Apart from the towers he used to build with toy bricks when he was a young child, this is the first emerging of the profound image that would later solidify still further and attain durable earthly existence in the building of his tower at Bollingen.

Many years later, after his break with Freud, when he was in a state of great inner confusion and, as he says, felt suspended in mid-air, Jung had a series of vivid dreams which left him feeling under constant inner pressure. Conscious looking back to the events and memories of his childhood did nothing to help to relieve it. So he said, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.” What occurred to him was the memory of a time when he was about ten or eleven and had spent a lot of time building little houses and castles with building blocks and stones and bits of whatever came to hand.

This memory had quite an emotional quality to it. Eventually, overcoming a lot of inner resistance to what seemed a terribly humiliating and childish activity for a grown-up psychiatrist, Jung began to collect stones from the lakeshore and the water and then to build houses or castles — a whole village. The church remained incomplete for lack of an altar until Jung found a red pyramid-shaped stone which he placed in the center of the church under the dome. At once, he recalled the childhood dream of the underground phallus, which pleased him very much.

He continued to play this building game whenever he had a spare moment, and, during these sessions, was able to clarify fantasies that, until then, had remained only a vague presence. These released fantasies were later written down in what Jung called the Black Book and afterwards, in good alchemical progression, in the Red Book, which he illustrated like medieval manuscripts with amazingly intricate, skillful and beautiful paintings.

The wealth of fantasy and the extraordinary ability to give it form in writing, shape and color, not surprisingly, stirred the unknown woman in Jung’s depths to voice her admiration and encouragement and to state firmly that these creations were indeed art. She tempted him to see himself as an artist, preferably a misunderstood one, and to devote himself entirely to his muse (herself?). But Jung was more concerned with where the images would lead him and what they meant, than with their existence as objects of purely aesthetic interest and pleasure.

He valued his anima for communicating these images to him, but managed to avoid her more dangerous seductions. From this time on, whenever Jung got stuck, he painted a picture or carved a stone. He says, “Each such experience proved to be a rite d’entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it…. Everything I have written this year, 1957, and last year: The Undiscovered Self; Flying Saucers:

A Modern Myth; A Psychological View of Conscience, has grown out of the stone sculptures I did after my wife’s death. The close of life, the end, and what it made me realize, wrenched me violently out of myself. It cost me a great deal to regain my footing, and contact with stone helped me.” According to von Franz, Jung once said, “Sometimes I know so little about what the unconscious demands that I simply leave it to my hands, so that afterwards I can think about what I have shaped.”

These years (between about 1914 and 1920) when, with immense courage, for it was dark and dangerous territory and he was absolutely alone in his descent, Jung pursued his inner images which were, as he says, the most important in his life, “in them everything essential was decided… It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work.”

With the building of the tower in Bollingen, which Jung began in 1923, two months after the death of his mother, he came to grips with stone in a new way; and yet, though on a vastly enlarged scale, it was not entirely new, only a fulfillment of an earlier blueprint in his imagination. As he says, “Words and paper did not seem real enough to me, something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone…”

Now the model castles and fortifications took on a human-sized reality as Jung began to build around himself, like some immensely inventive deep-sea creature, a shell of stone into which he would grow. It protected, as it also grew around him, the still vulnerable core of his personality (his Number Two personality), but also the emerging totality of himself being forged between the world outside and the larger landscape of the inner world.

He says, “From the beginning I felt the tower as in some way a place of maturation — a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be. It gave me a feeling as if I were being reborn in stone… I built the house in sections, always following the concrete needs of the moment. It might also be said that I built in a kind of dream. Only afterwards did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.”

Originally conceived as a sort of round African hut, representing, as Jung said, the maternal hearth, the first part of Bollingen grew into a circular tower instead. The place expanded with new parts being built at four-year intervals, until four sections had been constructed. But it was not quite completed until twenty years later, after the death of Emma Jung, when an upper story was added to the central section, which Jung saw as representing his ego personality, or an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. Jung did the initial construction himself, at least of the first tower, with the help of two Italian masons.

In a letter of 1934, he says, “I learned to split stones in the Bollingen quarries, and the masons also taught me a lot and I learned their art relatively quickly…” Later, in the same letter, he adds, “One of the motives [for the building work] was the workableness of matter to compensate for the airiness of psychology.” Many years later, von Franz tells how the son of a local stonemason from the Bollingen area said to her one day, “These days, masons don’t know how to work with natural stone any more. But old Jung, down there by the lake, he knew all right. He knew the right way to take a stone in your hand!”

At Bollingen, Jung lived consciously linked to the past. His own outer personal ancestors, as well as those of his wife, were honored in the stone plaques in which he carved their coats-of-arms. He also did this for his inner ancestors, and indeed those of the Bollingen ground itself. He says, “My ancestors’ souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can.

I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries were peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on.” The spirit of Philemon, the wise old man and essence of Jung’s Number Two personality, reigned over Bollingen, where Jung was most deeply himself, “there everything has its history and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world’s and the psyche’s hinterland.”

In 1944, Jung had a severe heart attack after breaking his foot. During his illness, he had a vision which began with the appearance of a huge monolithic meteorite or granite boulder floating in space. It contained a temple, hollowed out of the rock as Jung had seen stone temples in India. Inside sat a dark yogi, meditating and, Jung felt, waiting for him. All the elements of his earthly existence seemed to fall away from him and he seemed to be about to meet his eternal self.

But he was called back to life by a vision of his doctor (in the ennobled form of a prince of Kos): apparently it was too soon to learn the answers held in the rock temple. Shortly after his recovery, Jung had a dream in which the yogi, sitting in the lotus position, appeared again, this time meditating in a little country chapel by the wayside in the hills. Now Jung looked at him more closely and realized with great fear that the Yogi had his own (Jung’s) face. He awoke with the thought:

“Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream and I am it… I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.” This dream echoed strongly Jung’s childhood feelings as he sat on his stone and wondered who — he or the stone — was ‘I.’

With Jung’s research into the world of alchemy, the stone took on its final and complete dimension. Now, from its secret and primitive beginning as a companion to the pencil box figure, it revealed itself as what he truly was, always had been, always would be. All the threads were beginning to be brought together — the soul stone, the denizen of the world of nature, the raw material for construction and creation and the ‘lapis’, the once and future stone of alchemy – all of these achieved their final expression in the square stone which began its career as a mistake!

A triangular stone had been ordered as a cornerstone for a wall for Bollingen but a square one was sent instead, in spite of careful measurements having been given to the quarry owner. A perfect cube arrived, much larger than ordered, and caused fury in the mason who was about to send it straight back. It arrived by water on a barge with the rest of the stones for the wall, as if the lake itself were presenting Jung with a mysterious gift.

“When I saw the stone,” he says, “I said, ‘No, that is my Stone. I must have it!’ For I had seen at once that it suited me perfectly and that I wanted to do something with it. Only I did not yet know what.”

So the rejected cornerstone became the solid space in which Jung would draw the opposites together – could join spirit to matter – the word to the earth’s foundation. Although the Bollingen stone is neither really a work of art, nor a monument to a specific event or person (in fact, I see it almost as Jung’s totem, connecting him with his spiritual ancestors), in a way,

I still want to digress a bit about the actual business of chipping stone! Considering that he was already seventy-five years old when he started his carving, it is quite amazing that he had enough strength to do it, because, whatever else is needed to carve, brute force is high on the list! Although he was mainly carving letters, and the figures and ornamentation were done in low relief (as were his other carvings on the wall stones, the woman drinking from the mare and the bear with the ball), it is nevertheless hard work with mallet and chisel.

The Bollingen stone is made of blue-green sandstone, which is not one of the harder stones to cut, but the quality and design of the lettering is amazingly professional. It may be rather fanciful to bring Michelangelo into this — although he is the most archetypal of sculptors, but a few lines from one of his madrigals and sonnets seem to suggest a fleeting analogy.

The sonnet says:

These lines express the conviction that the form already lies dormant within the stone, waiting to be revealed by the removal of the excess material. I found a little technical description of how Michelangelo used wax models for his carvings very intriguing. Vasari (the Italian historian who wrote biographies of many artists of the Renaissance) relates that Michelangelo would take a finished wax model and immerse it in water.

The figure was then gradually raised so that one saw exactly which points were revealed first, and thus corresponded with the outside of the stone, and then the next highest parts where one worked down to next, and so on, until one could tell where the deepest cuts should be made.

It always surprises me to hear, when one talks about Michelangelo, how many people say that they prefer the unfinished figures – such as the three slaves or prisoners (in the Academia of Florence). These were actually abandoned in their present state and differ from the works in which an ‘unfinished’ or rough treatment of certain parts of a figure are used deliberately to heighten effect. Is there a parallel here with our greater involvement with the process of becoming, rather than the ideal and perhaps ultimately unattainable goal of achieved creation?

We are more concerned with the journey than the arrival. Possibly the journey is the arrival. My fantasy consisted in the analogy between Michelangelo chipping away to reveal the figure waiting in the stone and Jung seeking to reveal the ‘true’ personality in the analytic process, dissolving the hardened layers of neurotic petrification in the magic solution of the analytic relationship or indeed chipping away the ‘excess’ material to allow the ‘original’ form to emerge.

It is immensely satisfying when you are pounding away at a tirelessly resistant lump of stone to know that, in the end, what you manage to wrest from it or impose upon it will be there forever. In a letter to his daughter Marianne, Jung says, actually about the stone he carved in memory of his wife, “The stone I am working on… gives me stability with its hardness and its meaning governs my thoughts.”

In another letter, this time to the American ethnologist, Maud Oakes, Jung writes, “When I hewed the stone, I did not think, however, I just brought into shape what I saw on its face…” He managed to express in it not only everything that the tower itself meant to him, but, as he says in another letter to Maud Oakes, “All the volumes I have written are contained in it in nuce. The mandala itself is just a sort of hieroglyph, hinting at and trying to express a vast background in a most abbreviated form.”

In the center of this circle, the natural structure of the stone suggested another smaller circle, and inside this, Jung carved a little figure in a hooded cloak, carrying a lantern. This was a Kabir. These dwarf gods of antiquity can symbolize creative impulses and, in the form of Telesphoros, lead to a goal of some sort. The little pencil box mannequin, carved by Jung as a child, represented a first meeting with this member of the Pantheon. In one of Jung’s early fantasies during his inner voyage of discovery, a figure called ‘Ka’ came to the surface.

Jung says of him, “In ancient Egypt the ‘king ka’ was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy, the ka-soul came from below, out of the earth, as if out of a deep shaft. I did a painting of him, showing him in his earth-bound form, as a heron with base of stone and upper part of bronze… “

Frankly, De Vries’ Dictionary of Symbols says, “Some derive the name of the god Hermes from ‘herma’ which means stone or rock; and point out the stones as the origin of the Hermes cult. Ka represented a kind of earth demon or metal demon. Philemon was the spiritual aspect or ‘meaning.’ Ka, on the other hand was a spirit of Nature, like the Anthroparion of Greek Alchemy…” To this, Aniela Jaffé adds, “The Anthroparion is a tiny man, a kind of homunculus…

To the group-which includes the Anthroparion-belong the gnomes, the Dactyls of classical antiquity and the homunculi of the alchemists. As the spirit of quicksilver, the alchemical Mercurius was also an Anthroparion.” Kabirs are also connected with the dwarves of Northern mythologies, who mined the earth and were skilled metal workers and craftsmen. The Telesphoros of Asklepios (Telesphoros means ‘he who brings completeness.’), carved on the Bollingen stone, is such a Kabir, a phallic figure or earth spirit in a hooded cloak, who carries a lantern and points the way in the dark to “the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams…”

Von Franz mentions two other such figures. In the garden in Küsnacht, Jung erected a statue (done by a mason after two wooden carvings made by Jung many years earlier) “to the phallic God” in his first dream. It was another form of Kabir, which he names Atma victu (Breath of Life), and in Bollingen, he carved an ivy wreath around a phallic cornerstone which stands near the edge of the lake, with the inscription “Attei to Kallisto” (to the most beautiful Attis).

The stone stands alone among wild anemones, the flower of Attis, a god who symbolized the eternal springlike glory of life. The Telesphoros, however, was the second thing that Jung carved and thereupon, the first thing that occurred to him was a Latin verse by the 14th century alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova. In English, it reads:

This, then, is the lapis, the philosophers’ stone, both the beginning and the goal of the alchemical process. In its ‘mean and uncomely guise, it represents the prima materia, chaos, the base matter, the common earth beneath our feet seen, but ignored used, but unrecognized. The stone-like the Self – which it can symbolize -and which is also at the beginning and at the end of the process-has, in its primal and chaotic aspect, no boundaries and contains all things.

In her paper, “The Search in Alchemy,” Molly Tuby quotes from the Hermetic Museum, which says, “Our Matter has as many names as there are things in the world; that is why the foolish know it not.” But this base stone is both transformer and transformed. It is the “stone sent by God” which can turn any metal into gold and which, says von Franz, “according to some authors is hidden in the human body and can be extracted from it.”

It is God’s mystery in matter and is even described as “the stone that hath a spirit,” a spirit which must be extracted from it. One remembers Jung’s words describing his early experiences of stone, in which he said that the stone “contained and at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit.” His kinship with it he described as “the divine nature in both the dead and the living matter.”

In far Eastern alchemy, the diamond body corresponds to this stone. The alchemist creates this body through his meditative exercises, thereby attaining immortality in his lifetime. In the West, the stone later became identified with Christ who is taken as the rejected cornerstone and becomes the Redeemer, but, as Aniela Jaffé writes in her book, From the Life…and Work of C.G. Jung, the lapis was also a deus terrenus – an earth god, the begetter not only of light, but of darkness.