It is as if the stones held a living mystery that fascinates them
Perhaps crystals and st0nes are especially apt symbols of the Self because of the “just-so-ness” of their nature.
Many people cannot refrain from picking up st0nes of a slightly unusual color or shape and keeping them, without knowing why they do this.
It is as if the stones held a living mystery that fascinates them.
Men have collected stones since the beginning of time and have apparently assumed that certain ones were the containers of the life-force with all its mystery.
The ancient Germans, for instance, believed that the spirits of the dead continued to live in their tombst0nes.
The custom of placing st0nes on graves may spring partly from the symbolic idea that something eternal of the dead person remains, which can be most fittingly represented by a stone, for while the human being is as different as possible from a st0ne, yet man’s innermost center is in a strange and special way akin to it (perhaps because the stone symbolizes mere existence at the farthest remove from the emotions, feelings, fantasies, and discursive thinking of ego-consciousness.
In this sense the st0ne symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience —the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable. Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 206
The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation
Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.9 Part 2)
The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation, by which [we are] made one; we would say that the stone is a projection of the unified self.
This formulation is psychologically correct. It does not, however, take sufficient account of the fact that the stone is a transcendent unity.
We must therefore emphasize that though the self can become a symbolic content of consciousness, it is, as a supraordinate totality, necessarily transcendent as well.”
-Carl Jung, “The Alchemical Interpretation of the Fish,” in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
