Jung Four Archetypes M [625945]

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Jung Four Archetypes M [625945]

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Carl Gustav
Jung
Four Archetypes
Mother, Rebirth, Spirit. Trickster
Translated by R.F.C. Hull
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Also available as a printed book
see title verso for ISBN details

Four Archetypes
“Jung believed that the unconscious is not merely the
h i d i n g plac e of d e m o ns b ut th e pro v i n c e of an g els an dministers of grace, which he called the ‘archetypes’, . . .sy m b o ls of al l th e i n n er f orc es that work to ward u n ity ,health, fullness of life, and purposeful consciousdevelopment.”
Lewis Mumford, The New Yorker

Carl Gustav
Jung
Four Archetypes
Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster
Translated by R.F.C. Hull
London and New York

English edition ﬁrst published in the United Kingdom 1972
by Routledge & Kegan Paul
First published in Routledge Classics 2003
by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 1953, 1969 Bollingen Foundation
© 2001 Estate of Carl Gustav Jung
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafterinvented, including photocopying and recording, or inany information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0–415–30441–5 (pbk)This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
ISBN 0-203-42680-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-43990-2 (Adobe eReader Format)

CONTENTS
Editorial Note viii
Introduction 1
PART I Psychological Aspects of the Mother
Archetype
On the Concept of the Archetype 7 1
The Mother Archetype 14 2
The Mother-Complex 19 3
I The Mother-Complex of the Son 19
II The Mother-Complex of the Daughter 22
(a) Hypertrophy of the Maternal Element 22
(b) Overdevelopment of Eros 23
(c) Identity with the Mother 24
(d) Resistance to the Mother 26
Positive Aspects of the Mother-Complex 28 4
I The Mother 28
II The Overdeveloped Eros 31

III The “Nothing-But” Daughter 34
IV The Negative Mother-Complex 35
Conclusion 38 5
PART II Concerning Rebirth
Forms of Rebirth 53 1
The Psychology of Rebirth 57 2
I Experience of the Transcendence of Life 58
(a) Experiences induced by Ritual 58
(b) Immediate Experiences 60
II Subjective Transformation 60
(a) Diminution of Personality 61
(b) Enlargement of Personality 62
(c) Change of Internal Structure 65
(d) Identiﬁcation with a Group 68
(e) Identiﬁcation with a Cult-Hero 72
(f) Magical Procedures 73
(g) Technical Transformation 73
(h) Natural Transformation (Individuation) 75
A Typical Set of Symbols Illustrating the 3
Process of Transformation 81
PART III The Phenomenology of the Spirit in
Fairytales
The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales 101 1
I Concerning the Word “Spirit” 102
II Self-Representation of the Spirit in Dreams 110
III The Spirit in Fairytales 113
IV Theriomorphic Spirit Symbolism in Fairytales 128
V Supplement 143
VI Conclusion 154contents vi

PART IV On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure
On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure 159 1
Bibliography 180
Index 187contents vii

EDITORIAL NOTE
The concept of archetypes and its correlate, that of the collective
unconscious, are among the better known theories developed byProfessor Jung. Their origins may be traced to his earliest publi-cation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called OccultPhenomena” (1902), in which he described the fantasies of anhysterical medium. Intimations of the concepts can be found inmany of his subsequent writings, and gradually tentative state-ments crystallized and were reformulated until a stable core oftheory was established.
Volume 9 of the Collected Works consists of writings (from
1933 onward) describing and elaborating the two concepts. PartI, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious , is introduced by three
essays establishing the theoretical basis, followed by othersdescribing speci ﬁc archetypes, including the four that compose
this paperback selection. The relation of the archetypes to theprocess of individuation and in particular to mandala symbol-ism is de ﬁned in essays in the last section. Part II of Volume 9,
entitled Aion and published separately, is devoted to a long

monograph on the symbolism of the self as revealed in the
“Christian aeon.”
For this paperback edition, a brief theoretical introduction is
supplied by extracts from “Archetypes of the CollectiveUnconscious,” the ﬁrst essay in Volume 9, Part I. The paragraph
numbers of the Collected Works edition have been retained to
facilitate reference, and a new index has been prepared. Thebibliography includes only works relevant to this selection.editorial note ix

INTRODUCTION1
The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the1
class of ideas that people at ﬁrst ﬁnd strange but soon come to
possess and use as familiar conceptions. This has been the casewith the concept of the unconscious in general. After the philo-sophical idea of the unconscious, in the form presented chie ﬂy
by Carus and von Hartmann, had gone down under the over-whelming wave of materialism and empiricism, leaving hardly aripple behind it, it gradually reappeared in the scienti ﬁc domain
of medical psychology.
At ﬁrst the concept of the unconscious was limited to denot-
2
ing the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud,
who makes the unconscious—at least metaphorically—take thestage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering
1[From “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” ﬁrst published in the
Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934 , and later revised and published in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusst-
seins (Zurich, 1954), from which version the present translation is made. The
translation of the original version, by Stanley Dell, in The Integration of the Personal-
ity (New York, 1939; London, 1940), has been freely consulted.—E  .]

place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional
signi ﬁcance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the
unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature,2 although he
was aware of its archaic and mythological thought-forms.
A more or less super ﬁcial layer of the unconscious is 3
undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious . But this per-
sonal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does notderive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisi-tion but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious . I
have chosen the term “collective” because this part of theunconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to thepersonal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that aremore or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, inother words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a commonpsychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present inevery one of us.
Psychic existence can be recognized only by the presence of
4
contents that are capable of consciousness . We can therefore speak of
an unconscious only in so far as we are able to demonstrate itscontents. The contents of the personal unconscious are chie ﬂy
the feeling-toned complexes , as they are called; they constitute the
personal and private side of psychic life. The contents of thecollective unconscious, on the other hand, are known asarchetypes .
The term “archetype” occurs as early as Philo Judaeus,
3 with 5
reference to the Imago Dei (God-image) in man. It can also be
found in Irenaeus, who says: “The creator of the world did notfashion these things directly from himself but copied them from
2In his later works Freud di ﬀerentiated the basic view mentioned here. He
called the instinctual psyche the “id,” and his “super-ego” denotes the collect-ive consciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partlyunconscious (because it is repressed).
3De opi ﬁcio mundi , I, 69. Cf. Colson/Whitaker trans., I, p. 55.introduction 2

archetypes outside himself.”4 In the Corpus Hermeticum ,5 God is
called τὸ α᾿ ρΧέτυπον /phialtῶ/sigmaalt (archetypal light). The term occurs
several times in Dionysius the Areopagite, as for instance in De
caelesti hierarchia , II, 4: “immaterial Archetypes,”6 and in De divinis
nominibus , I, 6: “Archetypal stone.”7 The term “représentations
collectives,” used by Lévy-Bruhl to denote the symbolic ﬁgures
in the primitive view of the world, could easily be applied tounconscious contents as well, since it means practically the samething. Primitive tribal lore is concerned with archetypes thathave been modi ﬁed in a special way. They are no longer contents
of the unconscious, but have already been changed into con-scious formulae taught according to tradition, generally in theform of esoteric teaching. This last is a typical means of expres-sion for the transmission of collective contents originallyderived from the unconscious.
Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and
6
fairytale. But here too we are dealing with forms that havereceived a speci ﬁc stamp and have been handed down through
long periods of time. The term “archetype” thus applies onlyindirectly to the “représentations collectives,” since it designates
only those psychic contents which have not yet been submittedto conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datumof psychic experience. In this sense there is a considerable di ﬀer-
ence between the archetype and the historical formula that hasevolved. Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching thearchetypes appear in a form that reveals quite unmistakably thecritical and evaluating in ﬂuence of conscious elaboration. Their
immediate manifestation, as we encounter it in dreams andvisions, is much more individual, less understandable, and more
4Adversus haereses II, 7, 5: “Mundi fabricator non a semetipso fecit haec, sed de
alienis archetypis transtulit.” (Cf. Roberts/Rambaut trans., I, p. 139.)
5Scott, Hermetica , I. p. 140.
6In Migne, P. G., vol. 3, col. 144.
7Ibid., col. 595. Cf. The Divine Names (trans. by Rolt). pp. 62, 72.introduction 3

naïve than in myths, for example. The archetype is essentially an
unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious andby being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individualconsciousness in which it happens to appear.
8
As the archetypes, like all numinous contents, are relatively 85
autonomous, they cannot be integrated simply by rationalmeans, but require a dialectical procedure, a real coming toterms with them, often conducted by the patient in dialogueform, so that, without knowing it, he puts into e ﬀect the
alchemical de ﬁnition of the meditatio : “an inner colloquy with
one’s good angel.” Usually the process runs a dramatic course,with many ups and downs. It expresses itself in, or is accom-panied by, dream symbols that are related to the “représenta-tions collectives,” which in the form of mythological motifshave portrayed psychic processes of transformation since theearliest times.
8One must, for the sake of accuracy, distinguish between “archetype” and
“archetypal ideas.” The archetype as such is a hypothetical and irrepresentablemodel, something like the “pattern of behaviour” in biology. Cf. “On theNature of the Psyche,” sec. 7.introduction
4

Part I
Psychological Aspects of the
Mother Archetype
[First published as a lecture, “Die psychologischen Aspekte des
Mutterarchetypus,” in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1938 . Later revised and pub-
lished in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich: Rascher, 1954).
The present translation is of the latter, but it is also based partiallyon a translation of the 1938 version by Cary F. Baynes and Ximenade Angulo, privately issued in Spring (New York), 1943.—E ditors .]

1
ON THE CONCEPT OF
THE ARCHETYPE
The concept of the Great Mother belongs to the ﬁeld of com- 148
parative religion and embraces widely varying types of mother-
goddess. The concept itself is of no immediate concern topsychology, because the image of a Great Mother in this form israrely encountered in practice, and then only under very specialconditions. The symbol is obviously a derivative of the mother
archetype . If we venture to investigate the background of the Great
Mother image from the standpoint of psychology, then themother archetype, as the more inclusive of the two, must formthe basis of our discussion. Though lengthy discussion of theconcept of an archetype is hardly necessary at this stage, some
preliminary remarks of a general nature may not be out of place.
In former times, despite some dissenting opinion and the
149
inﬂuence of Aristotle, it was not too di ﬃcult to understand
Plato’s conception of the Idea as supraordinate and pre-existentto all phenomena. “Archetype,” far from being a modern term,was already in use before the time of St. Augustine, and was

synonymous with “Idea” in the Platonic usage. When the Corpus
Hermeticum , which probably dates from the third century,
describes God as τὸ α᾿ ρχέτυπον /phialtῶ/sigmaalt , the “archetypal light,” it
expresses the idea that he is the prototype of all light: that is tosay, pre-existent and supraordinate to the phenomenon “light.”Were I a philosopher, I should continue in this Platonic strainand say: somewhere, in “a place beyond the skies,” there is a
prototype or primordial image of the mother that is pre-existentand supraordinate to all phenomena in which the “maternal,” inthe broadest sense of the term, is manifest. But I am an empiri-cist, not a philosopher; I cannot let myself presuppose that mypeculiar temperament, my own attitude to intellectual problems,is universally valid. Apparently this is an assumption in whichonly the philosopher may indulge, who always takes it forgranted that his own disposition and attitude are universal, andwill not recognize the fact, if he can avoid it, that his “personalequation” conditions his philosophy. As an empiricist, I mustpoint out that there is a temperament which regards ideas as realentities and not merely as nomina . It so happens—by the merest
accident, one might say—that for the past two hundred years wehave been living in an age in which it has become unpopular oreven unintelligible to suppose that ideas could be anything butnomina . Anyone who continues to think as Plato did must pay for
his anachronism by seeing the “supracelestial,” i.e., meta-physical, essence of the Idea relegated to the unveri ﬁable realm
of faith and superstition, or charitably left to the poet. Onceagain, in the age-old controversy over universals, the nominal-istic standpoint has triumphed over the realistic, and the Ideahas evaporated into a mere ﬂatus vocis . This change was
accompanied—and, indeed, to a considerable degree caused—by the marked rise of empiricism, the advantages of which wereonly too obvious to the intellect. Since that time the Idea is nolonger something a priori , but is secondary and derived. Natur-
ally, the new nominalism promptly claimed universal validityaspects of the mother archetype 8

for itself in spite of the fact that it, too, is based on a de ﬁnite and
limited thesis coloured by temperament. This thesis runs as fol-lows: we accept as valid anything that comes from outside andcan be veri ﬁed. The ideal instance is veri ﬁcation by experiment.
The antithesis is: we accept as valid anything that comes frominside and cannot be veri ﬁed. The hopelessness of this position
is obvious. Greek natural philosophy with its interest in matter,together with Aristotelian reasoning, has achieved a belated butoverwhelming victory over Plato.
Yet every victory contains the germ of future defeat. In our
150
own day signs foreshadowing a change of attitude are rapidlyincreasing. Signi ﬁcantly enough, it is Kant’s doctrine of categor-
ies, more than anything else, that destroys in embryo everyattempt to revive metaphysics in the old sense of the word, but atthe same time paves the way for a rebirth of the Platonic spirit. Ifit be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending humanreason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical know-ledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori struc-
ture of cognition. During the century and a half that have elapsedsince the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason , the conviction
has gradually gained ground that thinking, understanding, andreasoning cannot be regarded as independent processes subjectonly to the eternal laws of logic, but that they are psychic functions
co-ordinated with the personality and subordinate to it. We nolonger ask, “Has this or that been seen, heard, handled, weighed,counted, thought, and found to be logical?” We ask instead,“Who saw, heard, or thought?” Beginning with “the personal
equation” in the observation and measurement of minimal pro-cesses, this critical attitude has gone on to the creation of anempirical psychology such as no time before ours has known.Today we are convinced that in all ﬁelds of knowledge psycho-
logical premises exist which exert a decisive in ﬂuence upon the
choice of material, the method of investigation, the nature of theconclusions, and the formulation of hypotheses and theories. Weon the concept of the archetype 9

have even come to believe that Kant’s personality was a decisive
conditioning factor of his Critique of Pure Reason . Not only our
philosophers, but our own predilections in philosophy, and evenwhat we are fond of calling our “best” truths are a ﬀected, if not
dangerously undermined, by this recognition of a personalpremise. All creative freedom, we cry out, is taken away from us!What? Can it be possible that a man only thinks or says or doeswhat he himself is?
Provided that we do not again exaggerate and so fall a victim
151
to unrestrained “psychologizing,” it seems to me that the criticalstandpoint here de ﬁned is inescapable. It constitutes the essence,
origin, and method of modern psychology. There is an a priori
factor in all human activities, namely the inborn, preconsciousand unconscious individual structure of the psyche. The pre-conscious psyche—for example, that of a new-born infant—isnot an empty vessel into which, under favourable conditions,practically anything can be poured. On the contrary, it is a tre-mendously complicated, sharply de ﬁned individual entity which
appears indeterminate to us only because we cannot see it dir-ectly. But the moment the ﬁrst visible manifestations of psychic
life begin to appear, one would have to be blind not to recognizetheir individual character, that is, the unique personality behindthem. It is hardly possible to suppose that all these details comeinto being only at the moment in which they appear. When it isa case of morbid predispositions already present in the parents,we infer hereditary transmission through the germ-plasm; itwould not occur to us to regard epilepsy in the child of anepileptic mother as an unaccountable mutation. Again, weexplain by heredity the gifts and talents which can be tracedback through whole generations. We explain in the same waythe reappearance of complicated instinctive actions in animalsthat have never set eyes on their parents and therefore could notpossibly have been “taught” by them.
Nowadays we have to start with the hypothesis that, so far as
152aspects of the mother archetype 10

predisposition is concerned, there is no essential di ﬀerence
between man and all other creatures. Like every animal, he pos-sesses a preformed psyche which breeds true to his species andwhich, on closer examination, reveals distinct features traceableto family antecedents. We have not the slightest reason to sup-pose that there are certain human activities or functions thatcould be exempted from this rule. We are unable to form anyidea of what those dispositions or aptitudes are which makeinstinctive actions in animals possible. And it is just as impos-sible for us to know the nature of the preconscious psychicdisposition that enables a child to react in a human manner. Wecan only suppose that his behaviour results from patterns offunctioning, which I have described as images . The term “image”
is intended to express not only the form of the activity takingplace, but the typical situation in which the activity is released.
1
These images are “primordial” images in so far as they are pecu-liar to whole species, and if they ever “originated” their originmust have coincided at least with the beginning of the species.They are the “human quality” of the human being, the speci ﬁc-
ally human form his activities take. This speci ﬁc form is heredi-
tary and is already present in the germ-plasm. The idea that it isnot inherited but comes into being in every child anew wouldbe just as preposterous as the primitive belief that the sun whichrises in the morning is a di ﬀerent sun from that which set the
evening before.
Since everything psychic is preformed, this must also be true
153
of the individual functions, especially those which derive dir-ectly from the unconscious predisposition. The most importantof these is creative fantasy. In the products of fantasy the prim-ordial images are made visible, and it is here that the concept ofthe archetype ﬁnds its speci ﬁc application. I do not claim to have
been the ﬁrst to point out this fact. The honour belongs to Plato.
1Cf. my “Instinct and the Unconscious,” par. 277.on the concept of the archetype 11

The ﬁrst investigator in the ﬁeld of ethnology to draw attention
to the widespread occurrence of certain “elementary ideas” wasAdolf Bastian. Two later investigators, Hubert and Mauss,
2 fol-
lowers of Dürkheim, speak of “categories” of the imagination.And it was no less an authority than Hermann Usener
3 who ﬁrst
recognized unconscious preformation under the guise of“unconscious thinking.” If I have any share in these discoveries,it consists in my having shown that archetypes are not dissemin-ated only by tradition, language, and migration, but that they canrearise spontaneously, at any time, at any place, and without anyoutside in ﬂuence.
The far-reaching implications of this statement must not be
154
overlooked. For it means that there are present in every psycheforms which are unconscious but nonetheless active—livingdispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that preform and con-tinually in ﬂuence our thoughts and feelings and actions.
Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an
155
archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other wordsthat it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression beadmissible). It is necessary to point out once more that arche-types are not determined as regards their content, but only asregards their form and then only to a very limited degree. Aprimordial image is determined as to its content only when ithas become conscious and is therefore ﬁlled out with the
material of conscious experience. Its form, however, as I haveexplained elsewhere, might perhaps be compared to the axialsystem of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystallinestructure in the mother liquid, although it has no material exist-ence of its own. This ﬁrst appears according to the speci ﬁc way
in which the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in
2[Cf. the previous paper, “Concerning the Archetypes,” par. 137, n. 25.—
E .]
3Usener, Das Weihnachtsfest , p. 3.aspects of the mother archetype 12

itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeform-
andi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori . The
representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms,and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts,which are also determined in form only. The existence of theinstincts can no more be proved than the existence of the arche-types, so long as they do not manifest themselves concretely.With regard to the de ﬁniteness of the form, our comparison
with the crystal is illuminating inasmuch as the axial systemdetermines only the stereometric structure but not the concreteform of the individual crystal. This may be either large or small,and it may vary endlessly by reason of the di ﬀerent size of its
planes or by the growing together of two crystals. The only thingthat remains constant is the axial system, or rather, the invariablegeometric proportions underlying it. The same is true of thearchetype. In principle, it can be named and has an invariablenucleus of meaning—but always only in principle, never asregards its concrete manifestation. In the same way, the speci ﬁc
appearance of the mother-image at any given time cannot bededuced from the mother archetype alone, but depends oninnumerable other factors.on the concept of the archetype 13

2
THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE
Like any other archetype, the mother archetype appears under 156
an almost in ﬁnite variety of aspects. I mention here only some of
the more characteristic. First in importance are the personalmother and grandmother, stepmother and mother-in-law; thenany woman with whom a relationship exists—for example, anurse or governess or perhaps a remote ancestress. Then thereare what might be termed mothers in a ﬁgurative sense. To this
category belongs the goddess, and especially the Mother of God,the Virgin, and Sophia. Mythology o ﬀers many variations of the
mother archetype, as for instance the mother who reappears asthe maiden in the myth of Demeter and Kore; or the motherwho is also the beloved, as in the Cybele-Attis myth. Other sym-bols of the mother in a ﬁgurative sense appear in things repre-
senting the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise,the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. Many thingsarousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church,university, city or country, heaven, earth, the woods, the sea orany still waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can

be mother-symbols. The archetype is often associated with
things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness: the cor-nucopia, a ploughed ﬁeld, a garden. It can be attached to a rock,
a cave, a tree, a spring, a deep well, or to various vessels such asthe baptismal font, or to vessel-shaped ﬂowers like the rose or
the lotus. Because of the protection it implies, the magic circle ormandala can be a form of mother archetype. Hollow objectssuch as ovens and cooking vessels are associated with the motherarchetype, and, of course, the uterus, yoni, and anything of a like
shape. Added to this list there are many animals, such as the cow,hare, and helpful animals in general.
All these symbols can have a positive, favourable meaning or a
157
negative, evil meaning. An ambivalent aspect is seen in the god-desses of fate (Moira, Graeae, Norns). Evil symbols are the witch,the dragon (or any devouring and entwining animal, such as alarge ﬁsh or a serpent), the grave, the sarcophagus, deep water,
death, nightmares and bogies (Empusa, Lilith, etc.). This list isnot, of course, complete; it presents only the most importantfeatures of the mother archetype.
The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and
158
sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom andspiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct orimpulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, thatfosters growth and fertility. The place of magic transformationand rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants,are presided over by the mother. On the negative side the motherarchetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss,the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poi-sons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate. All these attrib-utes of the mother archetype have been fully described anddocumented in my book Symbols of Transformation . There I formu-
lated the ambivalence of these attributes as “the loving and theterrible mother.” Perhaps the historical example of the dualnature of the mother most familiar to us is the Virgin Mary, whothe mother archetype 15

is not only the Lord’s mother, but also, according to the medieval
allegories, his cross. In India, “the loving and terrible mother” is
the paradoxical Kali. Sankhya philosophy has elaborated themother archetype into the concept of prakr˙ti (matter) and
assigned to it the three gunas or fundamental attributes: sattva, rajas,
tamas: goodness, passion, and darkness.
1 These are three essential
aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness,her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths. The specialfeature of the philosophical myth, which shows Prakr˙ti dancing
before Purusha in order to remind him of “discriminatingknowledge,” does not belong to the mother archetype but to thearchetype of the anima, which in a man’s psychology invariablyappears, at ﬁrst, mingled with the mother-image.
Although the ﬁgure of the mother as it appears in folklore is
159
more or less universal, this image changes markedly when it
appears in the individual psyche. In treating patients one is atﬁrst impressed, and indeed arrested, by the apparent signi ﬁcance
of the personal mother. This ﬁgure of the personal mother looms
so large in all personalistic psychologies that, as we know, theynever got beyond it, even in theory, to other importantaetiological factors. My own view di ﬀers from that of other
medico-psychological theories principally in that I attribute tothe personal mother only a limited aetiological signi ﬁcance. That
is to say, all those in ﬂuences which the literature describes as
being exerted on the children do not come from the motherherself, but rather from the archetype projected upon her, whichgives her a mythological background and invests her withauthority and numinosity.
2 The aetiological and traumatic
eﬀects produced by the mother must be divided into two
1This is the etymological meaning of the three gunas. See Weckerling,
Anandaraya-makhi: Das Glück des Lebens , pp. 21 ﬀ., and Garbe, Die Samkhya Philosophie ,
pp. 272 ﬀ. [Cf. also Zimmer, Philosophies of India , index, . .—E .]
2American psychology can supply us with any amount of examples. A blister-
ing but instructive lampoon on this subject is Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers .aspects of the mother archetype 16

groups: (1) those corresponding to traits of character or atti-
tudes actually present in the mother, and (2) those referring totraits which the mother only seems to possess, the reality beingcomposed of more or less fantastic (i.e., archetypal) projectionson the part of the child. Freud himself had already seen that thereal aetiology of neuroses does not lie in traumatic e ﬀects, as he
at ﬁrst suspected, but in a peculiar development of infantile fan-
tasy. This is not to deny that such a development can be tracedback to disturbing in ﬂuences emanating from the mother. I
myself make it a rule to look ﬁrst for the cause of infantile
neuroses in the mother, as I know from experience that a child ismuch more likely to develop normally than neurotically, andthat in the great majority of cases de ﬁnite causes of disturbances
can be found in the parents, especially in the mother. The con-tents of the child’s abnormal fantasies can be referred to thepersonal mother only in part, since they often contain clear andunmistakable allusions which could not possibly have referenceto human beings. This is especially true where de ﬁnitely mytho-
logical products are concerned, as is frequently the case ininfantile phobias where the mother may appear as a wild beast, awitch, a spectre, an ogre, a hermaphrodite, and so on. It must beborne in mind, however, that such fantasies are not always ofunmistakably mythological origin, and even if they are, they maynot always be rooted in the unconscious archetype but may havebeen occasioned by fairytales or accidental remarks. A thoroughinvestigation is therefore indicated in each case. For practicalreasons, such an investigation cannot be made so readily withchildren as with adults, who almost invariably transfer their fan-tasies to the physician during treatment—or, to be more precise,the fantasies are projected upon him automatically.
When that happens, nothing is gained by brushing them aside
160
as ridiculous, for archetypes are among the inalienable assets ofevery psyche. They form the “treasure in the realm of shadowythoughts” of which Kant spoke, and of which we have amplethe mother archetype 17

evidence in the countless treasure motifs of mythology. An
archetype is in no sense just an annoying prejudice; it becomesso only when it is in the wrong place. In themselves, archetypalimages are among the highest values of the human psyche; theyhave peopled the heavens of all races from time immemorial. Todiscard them as valueless would be a distinct loss. Our task is not,therefore, to deny the archetype, but to dissolve the projections,in order to restore their contents to the individual who hasinvoluntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself.aspects of the mother archetype 18

3
THE MOTHER-COMPLEX
The mother archetype forms the foundation of the so-called 161
mother-complex. It is an open question whether a mother-
complex can develop without the mother having taken part in itsformation as a demonstrable causal factor. My own experienceleads me to believe that the mother always plays an active part inthe origin of the disturbance, especially in infantile neuroses orin neuroses whose aetiology undoubtedly dates back to earlychildhood. In any event, the child’s instincts are disturbed, andthis constellates archetypes which, in their turn, produce fan-tasies that come between the child and its mother as alien andoften frightening elements. Thus, if the children of an over-anxious mother regularly dream that she is a terrifying animal ora witch, these experiences point to a split in the child’s psychethat predisposes it to a neurosis.
I THE MOTHER-COMPLEX OF THE SON
The e ﬀects of the mother-complex di ﬀer according to whether 162
it appears in a son or a daughter. Typical e ﬀects on the son are

homosexuality and Don Juanism, and sometimes also impo-
tence.1 In homosexuality, the son’s entire heterosexuality is tied
to the mother in an unconscious form; in Don Juanism, heunconsciously seeks his mother in every woman he meets. Theeﬀects of a mother-complex on the son may be seen in the
ideology of the Cybele and Attis type: self-castration, madness,and early death. Because of the di ﬀerence in sex, a son’s mother-
complex does not appear in pure form. This is the reason why inevery masculine mother-complex, side by side with the motherarchetype, a signi ﬁcant role is played by the image of the man’s
sexual counterpart, the anima. The mother is the ﬁrst feminine
being with whom the man-to-be comes in contact, andshe cannot help playing, overtly or covertly, consciously orunconsciously, upon the son’s masculinity, just as the son in histurn grows increasingly aware of his mother’s femininity, orunconsciously responds to it by instinct. In the case of the son,therefore, the simple relationships of identity or of resistanceand di ﬀerentiation are continually cut across by erotic attraction
or repulsion, which complicates matters very considerably. I donot mean to say that for this reason the mother-complex of a sonought to be regarded as more serious than that of a daughter.The investigation of these complex psychic phenomena is still inthe pioneer stage. Comparisons will not become feasible untilwe have some statistics at our disposal, and of these, so far, thereis no sign.
Only in the daughter is the mother-complex clear and
163
uncomplicated. Here we have to do either with an overdevelop-ment of feminine instincts indirectly caused by the mother, orwith a weakening of them to the point of complete extinction. Inthe ﬁrst case, the preponderance of instinct makes the daughter
unconscious of her own personality; in the latter, the instinctsare projected upon the mother. For the present we must content
1But the father-complex also plays a considerable part here.aspects of the mother archetype 20

ourselves with the statement that in the daughter a mother-
complex either unduly stimulates or else inhibits the feminineinstinct, and that in the son it injures the masculine instinctthrough an unnatural sexualization.
Since a “mother-complex” is a concept borrowed from psy-
164
chopathology, it is always associated with the idea of injury andillness. But if we take the concept out of its narrow psychopatho-logical setting and give it a wider connotation, we can see that ithas positive e ﬀects as well. Thus a man with a mother-complex
may have a ﬁnely di ﬀerentiated Eros
2 instead of, or in addition
to, homosexuality. (Something of this sort is suggested by Platoin his Symposium .) This gives him a great capacity for friendship,
which often creates ties of astonishing tenderness between menand may even rescue friendship between the sexes from thelimbo of the impossible. He may have good taste and an aestheticsense which are fostered by the presence of a feminine streak.Then he may be supremely gifted as a teacher because of hisalmost feminine insight and tact. He is likely to have a feeling forhistory, and to be conservative in the best sense and cherish thevalues of the past. Often he is endowed with a wealth of religiousfeelings, which help to bring the ecclesia spiritualis into reality; and
a spiritual receptivity which makes him responsive to revelation.
In the same way, what in its negative aspect is Don Juanism
165
can appear positively as bold and resolute manliness; ambitiousstriving after the highest goals; opposition to all stupidity,narrow-mindedness, injustice, and laziness; willingness to makesacriﬁces for what is regarded as right, sometimes bordering on
heroism; perseverance, in ﬂexibility and toughness of will; a
curiosity that does not shrink even from the riddles of the uni-verse; and ﬁnally, a revolutionary spirit which strives to put a
new face upon the world.
All these possibilities are re ﬂected in the mythological motifs
166
2[Cf. T wo Essays on Analytical Psychology , pars. 16 ﬀ.—E .]the mother-complex 21

enumerated earlier as di ﬀerent aspects of the mother archetype.
As I have already dealt with the mother-complex of the son,including the anima complication, elsewhere, and my presenttheme is the archetype of the mother, in the following discus-sion I shall relegate masculine psychology to the background.
II THE MOTHER-COMPLEX OF THE DAUGHTER3
(a) Hypertrophy of the maternal element
We have noted that in the daughter the mother-complex leads 167
either to a hypertrophy of the feminine side or to its atrophy.
The exaggeration of the feminine side means an intensi ﬁcation
of all female instincts, above all the maternal instinct. The nega-tive aspect is seen in the woman whose only goal is childbirth.To her the husband is obviously of secondary importance; he isﬁrst and foremost the instrument of procreation, and she regards
him merely as an object to be looked after, along with children,poor relations, cats, dogs, and household furniture. Even herown personality is of secondary importance; she often remainsentirely unconscious of it, for her life is lived in and throughothers, in more or less complete identi ﬁcation with all the
objects of her care. First she gives birth to the children, and fromthen on she clings to them, for without them she has no exist-ence whatsoever. Like Demeter, she compels the gods by herstubborn persistence to grant her the right of possession over
3In the present section I propose to present a series of di ﬀerent “types” of
mother-complex; in formulating them, I am drawing on my own therapeuticexperiences. “Types” are not individual cases, neither are they freely inventedschemata into which all individual cases have to be ﬁtted. “Types” are ideal
instances, or pictures of the average run of experience, with which no singleindividual can be identi ﬁed. People whose experience is con ﬁned to books or
psychological laboratories can form no proper idea of the cumulative experi-ence of a practising psychologist.aspects of the mother archetype
22

her daughter. Her Eros develops exclusively as a maternal rela-
tionship while remaining unconscious as a personal one. Anunconscious Eros always expresses itself as will to power.
4
Women of this type, though continually “living for others,” are,as a matter of fact, unable to make any real sacri ﬁce. Driven by
ruthless will to power and a fanatical insistence on their ownmaternal rights, they often succeed in annihilating not only theirown personality but also the personal lives of their children. Theless conscious such a mother is of her own personality, thegreater and the more violent is her unconscious will to power.For many such women Baubo rather than Demeter would be theappropriate symbol. The mind is not cultivated for its own sakebut usually remains in its original condition, altogether primi-tive, unrelated, and ruthless, but also as true, and sometimes asprofound, as Nature herself.
5 She herself does not know this and
is therefore unable to appreciate the wittiness of her mind or tomarvel philosophically at its profundity; like as not she willimmediately forget what she has said.
(b) Overdevelopment of Eros
It by no means follows that the complex induced in a daugh-
168
ter by such a mother must necessarily result in hypertrophy of
the maternal instinct. Quite the contrary, this instinct may bewiped out altogether. As a substitute, an overdeveloped Erosresults, and this almost invariably leads to an unconsciousincestuous relationship with the father.
6 The intensi ﬁed Eros
4This statement is based on the repeated experience that, where love is lacking,
power ﬁlls the vacuum.
5In my English seminars [privately distributed] I have called this the “natural
mind.”
6Here the initiative comes from the daughter. In other cases the father’s psych-
ology is responsible; his projection of the anima arouses an incestuous ﬁxation
in the daughter.the mother-complex 23

places an abnormal emphasis on the personality of others. Jeal-
ousy of the mother and the desire to outdo her become theleitmotifs of subsequent undertakings, which are often disas-trous. A woman of this type loves romantic and sensational epi-sodes for their own sake, and is interested in married men, lessfor themselves than for the fact that they are married and so giveher an opportunity to wreck a marriage, that being the wholepoint of her manoeuvre. Once the goal is attained, her interestevaporates for lack of any maternal instinct, and then it will besomeone else’s turn.
7 This type is noted for its remarkable
unconsciousness. Such women really seem to be utterly blind towhat they are doing,
8 which is anything but advantageous either
for themselves or for their victims. I need hardly point out thatfor men with a passive Eros this type o ﬀers an excellent hook for
anima projections.
(c) Identity with the mother
If a mother-complex in a woman does not produce an over-
169
developed Eros, it leads to identi ﬁcation with the mother and to
paralysis of the daughter’s feminine initiative. A complete pro-jection of her personality on to the mother then takes place,owing to the fact that she is unconscious both of her maternalinstinct and of her Eros. Everything which reminds her ofmotherhood, responsibility, personal relationships, and eroticdemands arouses feelings of inferiority and compels her to runaway—to her mother, naturally, who lives to perfection every-thing that seems unattainable to her daughter. As a sort ofsuperwoman (admired involuntarily by the daughter), the
7Herein lies the di ﬀerence between this type of complex and the feminine
father-complex related to it, where the “father” is mothered and coddled.
8This does not mean that they are unconscious of the facts. It is only their
meaning that escapes them.aspects of the mother archetype 24

mother lives out for her beforehand all that the girl might have
lived for herself. She is content to cling to her mother in sel ﬂess
devotion, while at the same time unconsciously striving, almostagainst her will, to tyrannize over her, naturally under the maskof complete loyalty and devotion. The daughter leads a shadow-existence, often visibly sucked dry by her mother, and sheprolongs her mother’s life by a sort of continuous blood transfu-sion. These bloodless maidens are by no means immune to mar-riage. On the contrary, despite their shadowiness and passivity,they command a high price on the marriage market. First, theyare so empty that a man is free to impute to them anythinghe fancies. In addition, they are so unconscious that theunconscious puts out countless invisible feelers, veritableoctopus-tentacles, that suck up all masculine projections; andthis pleases men enormously. All that feminine inde ﬁniteness is
the longed-for counterpart of male decisiveness and single-mindedness, which can be satisfactorily achieved only if a mancan get rid of everything doubtful, ambiguous, vague, and mud-dled by projecting it upon some charming example of feminineinnocence.
9 Because of the woman’s characteristic passivity, and
the feelings of inferiority which make her continually play theinjured innocent, the man ﬁnds himself cast in an attractive role:
he has the privilege of putting up with the familiar femininefoibles with real superiority, and yet with forbearance, like atrue knight. (Fortunately, he remains ignorant of the fact thatthese de ﬁciencies consist largely of his own projections.) The
girl’s notorious helplessness is a special attraction. She is somuch an appendage of her mother that she can only ﬂutter
confusedly when a man approaches. She just doesn’t know athing. She is so inexperienced, so terribly in need of help, that
9This type of woman has an oddly disarming e ﬀect on her husband, but only
until he discovers that the person he has married and who shares his nuptialbed is his mother-in-law.the mother-complex
25

even the gentlest swain becomes a daring abductor who brutally
robs a loving mother of her daughter. Such a marvellousopportunity to pass himself o ﬀ as a gay Lothario does not occur
every day and therefore acts as a strong incentive. This was howPluto abducted Persephone from the inconsolable Demeter. But,by a decree of the gods, he had to surrender his wife every yearto his mother-in-law for the summer season. (The attentivereader will note that such legends do not come about bychance!)
(d) Resistance to the mother
These three extreme types are linked together by many inter-
170
mediate stages, of which I shall mention only one important
example. In the particular intermediate type I have in mind, theproblem is less an over-development or an inhibition of thefeminine instincts than an overwhelming resistance to maternalsupremacy, often to the exclusion of all else. It is the supremeexample of the negative mother-complex. The motto of this typeis: anything, so long as it is not like Mother! On one hand wehave a fascination which never reaches the point of identi ﬁca-
tion; on the other, an intensi ﬁcation of Eros which exhausts itself
in jealous resistance. This kind of daughter knows what she doesnot want, but is usually completely at sea as to what she would
choose as her own fate. All her instincts are concentrated on themother in the negative form of resistance and are therefore of nouse to her in building her own life. Should she get as far asmarrying, either the marriage will be used for the sole purposeof escaping from her mother, or else a diabolical fate will presenther with a husband who shares all the essential traits of hermother’s character. All instinctive processes meet withunexpected di ﬃculties; either sexuality does not function prop-
erly, or the children are unwanted, or maternal duties seemunbearable, or the demands of marital life are responded to withaspects of the mother archetype 26

impatience and irritation. This is quite natural, since none of it
has anything to do with the realities of life when stubborn resist-ance to the power of the mother in every form has come to belife’s dominating aim. In such cases one can often see the attrib-utes of the mother archetype demonstrated in every detail. Forexample, the mother as representative of the family (or clan)causes either violent resistances or complete indi ﬀerence to any-
thing that comes under the head of family, community, society,convention, and the like. Resistance to the mother as uterus often
manifests itself in menstrual disturbances, failure of conception,abhorrence of pregnancy, hemorrhages and excessive vomitingduring pregnancy, miscarriages, and so on. The mother as mate-
ria, ‘matter,’ may be at the back of these women’s impatience
with objects, their clumsy handling of tools and crockery andbad taste in clothes.
Again, resistance to the mother can sometimes result in a
171
spontaneous development of intellect for the purpose of creatinga sphere of interest in which the mother has no place. Thisdevelopment springs from the daughter’s own needs and not atall for the sake of a man whom she would like to impress ordazzle by a semblance of intellectual comradeship. Its real pur-pose is to break the mother’s power by intellectual criticism andsuperior knowledge, so as to enumerate to her all her stupidities,mistakes in logic, and educational shortcomings. Intellectualdevelopment is often accompanied by the emergence ofmasculine traits in general.the mother-complex 27

4
POSITIVE ASPECTS OF THE
MOTHER-COMPLEX
I THE MOTHER
The positive aspect of the ﬁrst type of complex, namely the 172
overdevelopment of the maternal instinct, is identical with that
well-known image of the mother which has been glori ﬁed in all
ages and all tongues. This is the mother-love which is one of themost moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mys-terious root of all growth and change; the love that meanshomecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which every-thing begins and in which everything ends. Intimately knownand yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel likefate, joyous and untiring giver of life— mater dolorosa and mute
implacable portal that closes upon the dead. Mother is mother-love, my experience and my secret. Why risk saying too much, too
much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, aboutthat human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier ofthat great experience which includes herself and myself and all

mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experi-
ence of life whose children we are? The attempt to say thesethings has always been made, and probably always will be; buta sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormousburden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on tothe shoulders of one frail and fallible human being—so deserv-ing of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness—whowas our mother. He knows that the mother carries for us thatinborn image of the mater natura and mater spiritualis , of the total-
ity of life of which we are a small and helpless part. Norshould we hesitate for one moment to relieve the humanmother of this appalling burden, for our own sakes as well ashers. It is just this massive weight of meaning that ties us to themother and chains her to her child, to the physical and mentaldetriment of both. A mother-complex is not got rid of byblindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besidesthat we run the risk of dissolving the experience “Mother” intoatoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable andthrowing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in ourcradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added thepre-existent divine pair to the personal parents—the “god”-father and “god”-mother of the newborn child—so that, fromsheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he shouldnever forget himself so far as to invest his own parents withdivinity.
The archetype is really far less a scienti ﬁc problem than an
173
urgent question of psychic hygiene. Even if all proofs of the
existence of archetypes were lacking, and all the clever people inthe world succeeded in convincing us that such a thing could notpossibly exist, we would have to invent them forthwith in orderto keep our highest and most important values from disappear-ing into the unconscious. For when these fall into theunconscious the whole elemental force of the original experi-ence is lost. What then appears in its place is ﬁxation on thepositive aspects of the mother-complex 29

mother-imago; and when this has been su ﬃciently rationalized
and “corrected,” we are tied fast to human reason and con-demned from then on to believe exclusively in what is rational.That is a virtue and an advantage on the one hand, but on theother a limitation and impoverishment, for it brings us nearer tothe bleakness of doctrinairism and “enlightenment.” ThisDéesse Raison emits a deceptive light which illuminates onlywhat we know already, but spreads a darkness over all thosethings which it would be most needful for us to know andbecome conscious of. The more independent “reason” pretendsto be, the more it turns into sheer intellectuality which putsdoctrine in the place of reality and shows us man not as he is buthow it wants him to be.
Whether he understands them or not, man must remain con-
174
scious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still apart of Nature and is connected with his own roots. A view ofthe world or a social order that cuts him o ﬀ from the primordial
images of life not only is no culture at all but, in increasingdegree, is a prison or a stable. If the primordial images remainconscious in some form or other, the energy that belongs tothem can ﬂow freely into man. But when it is no longer possible
to maintain contact with them, then the tremendous sum ofenergy stored up in these images, which is also the source of thefascination underlying the infantile parental complex, falls backinto the unconscious. The unconscious then becomes chargedwith a force that acts as an irresistible vis a tergo to whatever view
or idea or tendency our intellect may choose to dangleenticingly before our desiring eyes. In this way man is deliveredover to his conscious side, and reason becomes the arbiter ofright and wrong, of good and evil. I am far from wishing tobelittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty. But in therole of absolute tyrant it has no meaning—no more than lightwould have in a world where its counterpart, darkness, wasabsent. Man would do well to heed the wise counsel of theaspects of the mother archetype 30

mother and obey the inexorable law of nature which sets limits
to every being. He ought never to forget that the world existsonly because opposing forces are held in equilibrium. So, too,the rational is counterbalanced by the irrational, and what isplanned and purposed by what is.
This excursion into the realm of generalities was unavoidable,
175
because the mother is the ﬁrst world of the child and the last
world of the adult. We are all wrapped as her children in themantle of this great Isis. But let us now return to the di ﬀerent
types of feminine mother-complex. It may seem strange that Iam devoting so much more time to the mother-complex inwoman than to its counterpart in man. The reason for this hasalready been mentioned: in a man, the mother-complex is never“pure,” it is always mixed with the anima archetype, and theconsequence is that a man’s statements about the mother arealways emotionally prejudiced in the sense of showing “animos-ity.” Only in women is it possible to examine the e ﬀects of the
mother archetype without admixture of animosity, and even thishas prospects of success only when no compensating animus hasdeveloped.
II THE OVERDEVELOPED EROS
I drew a very unfavourable picture of this type as we 176
encounter it in the ﬁeld of psychopathology. But this type,
uninviting as it appears, also has positive aspects which societycould ill a ﬀord to do without. Indeed, behind what is possibly
the worst e ﬀect of this attitude, the unscrupulous wrecking of
marriages, we can see an extremely signi ﬁcant and purposeful
arrangement of nature. This type often develops in reaction to amother who is wholly a thrall of nature, purely instinctive andtherefore all-devouring. Such a mother is an anachronism, athrow-back to a primitive state of matriarchy where the manleads an insipid existence as a mere procreator and serf of thepositive aspects of the mother-complex 31

soil. The reactive intensi ﬁcation of the daughter’s Eros is aimed
at some man who ought to be rescued from the preponderanceof the female-maternal element in his life. A woman of this typeinstinctively intervenes when provoked by the unconsciousnessof the marriage partner. She will disturb that comfortable ease sodangerous to the personality of a man but frequently regardedby him as marital faithfulness. This complacency leads to blankunconsciousness of his own personality and to those supposedlyideal marriages where he is nothing but Dad and she is nothingbut Mom, and they even call each other that. This is a slipperypath that can easily degrade marriage to the level of a merebreeding pen.
A woman of this type directs the burning ray of her Eros
177
upon a man whose life is sti ﬂed by maternal solicitude, and by
doing so she arouses a moral con ﬂict. Yet without this there
can be no consciousness of personality. “But why on earth,”you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, byhook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?” This istruly the crucial question, and I do not ﬁnd the answer easy.
Instead of a real answer I can only make a confession of faith: Ibelieve that, after thousands and millions of years, someonehad to realize that this wonderful world of mountains andoceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and ani-mals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I
once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in sound-less stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touchedonly by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I werethe ﬁrst man, the ﬁrst creature, to know that all this is. The
entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did notknow that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I
came to know, the world sprang into being; without thatmoment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goaland ﬁnds it ful ﬁlled in man, but only in the most highly
developed and most fully conscious man. Every advance, evenaspects of the mother archetype 32

the smallest, along this path of conscious realization adds that
much to the world.
There is no consciousness without discrimination of oppos- 178
ites. This is the paternal principle, the Logos, which eternallystruggles to extricate itself from the primal warmth and primaldarkness of the maternal womb; in a word, from unconscious-ness. Divine curiosity yearns to be born and does not shrinkfrom con ﬂict, su ﬀering, or sin. Unconsciousness is the primal
sin, evil itself, for the Logos. Therefore its ﬁrst creative act of
liberation is matricide, and the spirit that dared all heights andall depths must, as Synesius says, su ﬀer the divine punishment,
enchainment on the rocks of the Caucasus. Nothing can existwithout its opposite; the two were one in the beginning and willbe one again in the end. Consciousness can only exist throughcontinual recognition of the unconscious, just as everything thatlives must pass through many deaths.
The stirring up of con ﬂict is a Luciferian virtue in the true
179
sense of the word. Con ﬂict engenders ﬁre, the ﬁre of a ﬀects and
emotions, and like every other ﬁre it has two aspects, that of
combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotionis the alchemical ﬁre whose warmth brings everything into
existence and whose heat burns all super ﬂuities to ashes ( omnes
superﬂuitates comburit ). But on the other hand, emotion is the
moment when steel meets ﬂint and a spark is struck forth, for
emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no changefrom darkness to light or from inertia to movement withoutemotion.
The woman whose fate it is to be a disturbing element is not
180
solely destructive, except in pathological cases. Normally thedisturber is herself caught in the disturbance; the worker ofchange is herself changed, and the glare of the ﬁre she ignites
both illuminates and enlightens all the victims of the entangle-ment. What seemed a senseless upheaval becomes a process ofpuriﬁcation:positive aspects of the mother-complex 33

So that all that is vain
Might dwindle and wane.1
If a woman of this type remains unconscious of the meaning 181
of her function, if she does not know that she is
Part of that power which wouldEver work evil but engenders good,
2
she will herself perish by the sword she brings. But conscious-
ness transforms her into a deliverer and redeemer.
III THE “NOTHING-BUT” DAUGHTER
The woman of the third type, who is so identi ﬁed with the 182
mother that her own instincts are paralysed through projection,
need not on that account remain a hopeless nonentity forever.On the contrary, if she is at all normal, there is a good chance ofthe empty vessel being ﬁlled by a potent anima projection.
Indeed, the fate of such a woman depends on this eventuality;she can never ﬁnd herself at all, not even approximately, without
a man’s help; she has to be literally abducted or stolen from hermother. Moreover, she must play the role mapped out for her fora long time and with great e ﬀort, until she actually comes to
loathe it. In this way she may perhaps discover who she really is.Such women may become devoted and self-sacri ﬁcing wives of
husbands whose whole existence turns on their identi ﬁcation
with a profession or a great talent, but who, for the rest, areunconscious and remain so. Since they are nothing but masksthemselves, the wife, too, must be able to play the accompanyingpart with a semblance of naturalness. But these women
1Faust, Part II, Act 5.
2Ibid., Part I. Act 1.aspects of the mother archetype 34

sometimes have valuable gifts which remained undeveloped
only because they were entirely unconscious of their own per-sonality. They may project the gift or talent upon a husband wholacks it himself, and then we have the spectacle of a totallyinsigni ﬁcant man who seemed to have no chance whatsoever
suddenly soaring as if on a magic carpet to the highest summitsof achievement. Cherchez la femme , and you have the secret of his
success. These women remind me—if I may be forgiven theimpolite comparison—of hefty great bitches who turn tailbefore the smallest cur simply because he is a terrible male and itnever occurs to them to bite him.
Finally, it should be remarked that emptiness is a great feminine
183
secret. It is something absolutely alien to man; the chasm, the
unplumbed depths, the yin. The pitifulness of this vacuous non-
entity goes to his heart (I speak here as a man), and one istempted to say that this constitutes the whole “mystery” ofwoman. Such a female is fate itself. A man may say what he likesabout it; be for it or against it, or both at once; in the end he falls,absurdly happy, into this pit, or, if he doesn’t, he has missed andbungled his only chance of making a man of himself. In the ﬁrst
case one cannot disprove his foolish good luck to him, and in thesecond one cannot make his misfortune seem plausible. “TheMothers, the Mothers, how eerily it sounds!”
3 With this sigh,
which seals the capitulation of the male as he approaches therealm of the Mothers, we will turn to the fourth type.
IV THE NEGATIVE MOTHER-COMPLEX
As a pathological phenomenon this type is an unpleasant, 184
exacting, and anything but satisfactory partner for her husband,since she rebels in every ﬁbre of her being against everything
that springs from natural soil. However, there is no reason why
3Ibid., Part II, Act 1.positive aspects of the mother-complex 35

increasing experience of life should not teach her a thing or two,
so that for a start she gives up ﬁghting the mother in the personal
and restricted sense. But even at her best she will remain hostileto all that is dark, unclear, and ambiguous, and will cultivate andemphasize everything certain and clear and reasonable. Excellingher more feminine sister in her objectivity and coolness ofjudgment, she may become the friend, sister, and competentadviser of her husband. Her own masculine aspirations make itpossible for her to have a human understanding of the individu-ality of her husband quite transcending the realm of the erotic.The woman with this type of mother-complex probably has thebest chance of all to make her marriage an outstanding successduring the second half of life. But this is true only if she succeedsin overcoming the hell of “nothing but femininity,” the chaos ofthe maternal womb, which is her greatest danger because of hernegative complex. As we know, a complex can be really over-come only if it is lived out to the full. In other words, if we are todevelop further we have to draw to us and drink down to thevery dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at adistance.
This type started out in the world with averted face, like Lot’s
185
wife looking back on Sodom and Gomorrha. And all the whilethe world and life pass by her like a dream—an annoyingsource of illusions, disappointments, and irritations, all ofwhich are due solely to the fact that she cannot bring herself tolook straight ahead for once. Because of her merelyunconscious, reactive attitude toward reality, her life actuallybecomes dominated by what she fought hardest against—theexclusively maternal feminine aspect. But if she should laterturn her face, she will see the world for the ﬁrst time, so to
speak, in the light of maturity, and see it embellished with all thecolours and enchanting wonders of youth, and sometimes evenof childhood. It is a vision that brings knowledge and discoveryof truth, the indispensable prerequisite for consciousness. Aaspects of the mother archetype 36

part of life was lost, but the meaning of life has been salvaged for
her.
The woman who ﬁghts against her father still has the possibil- 186
ity of leading an instinctive, feminine existence, because she
rejects only what is alien to her. But when she ﬁghts against the
mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain togreater consciousness, because in repudiating the mother sherepudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, andunconscious in her own nature. Thanks to her lucidity, objectiv-ity, and masculinity, a woman of this type is frequently found inimportant positions in which her tardily discovered maternalquality, guided by a cool intelligence, exerts a most bene ﬁcial
inﬂuence. This rare combination of womanliness and masculine
understanding proves valuable in the realm of intimate relation-ships as well as in practical matters. As the spiritual guide andadviser of a man, such a woman, unknown to the world, mayplay a highly in ﬂuential part. Owing to her qualities, the mascu-
line mind ﬁnds this type easier to understand than women with
other forms of mother-complex, and for this reason men oftenfavour her with the projection of positive mother-complexes.The excessively feminine woman terri ﬁes men who have a
mother-complex characterized by great sensitivity. But thiswoman is not frightening to a man, because she builds bridgesfor the masculine mind over which he can safely guide his feel-ings to the opposite shore. Her clarity of understanding inspireshim with con ﬁdence, a factor not to be underrated and one that
is absent from the relationship between a man and a womanmuch more often than one might think. The man’s Eros does notlead upward only but downward into that uncanny dark worldof Hecate and Kali, which is a horror to any intellectual man. Theunderstanding possessed by this type of woman will be a guid-ing star to him in the darkness and seemingly unending mazesof life.positive aspects of the mother-complex 37

5
CONCLUSION
From what has been said it should be clear that in the last 187
analysis all the statements of mythology on this subject as well as
the observed e ﬀects of the mother-complex, when stripped of
their confusing detail, point to the unconscious as their place oforigin. How else could it have occurred to man to divide thecosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter,into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled withfabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a div-ision in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and theinvisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man’s percep-tion of objects is conditioned only partly by the objectivebehaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater partis often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to theexternal objects except by way of projection.
1 This is due to the
simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that asceticdiscipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To
1[Cf. above, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” par. 7.—E  .]

him the world is a more or less ﬂuid phenomenon within the
stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undif-ferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration. “All that isoutside, also is inside,” we could say with Goethe. But this“inside,” which modern rationalism is so eager to derive from“outside,” has an a priori structure of its own that antedates all
conscious experience. It is quite impossible to conceive how“experience” in the widest sense, or, for that matter, anythingpsychic, could originate exclusively in the outside world. Thepsyche is part of the inmost mystery of life, and it has its ownpeculiar structure and form like every other organism. Whetherthis psychic structure and its elements, the archetypes, ever“originated” at all is a metaphysical question and thereforeunanswerable. The structure is something given, the precondi-tion that is found to be present in every case. And this is themother , the matrix—the form into which all experience is
poured. The father, on the other hand, represents the dynamism of
the archetype, for the archetype consists of both—form andenergy.
The carrier of the archetype is in the ﬁrst place the personal
188
mother, because the child lives at ﬁrst in complete participation
with her, in a state of unconscious identity. She is the psychic aswell as the physical precondition of the child. With the awaken-ing of ego-consciousness the participation gradually weakens,and consciousness begins to enter into opposition to theunconscious, its own precondition. This leads to di ﬀerentiation
of the ego from the mother, whose personal peculiarities grad-ually become more distinct. All the fabulous and mysteriousqualities attaching to her image begin to fall away and are trans-ferred to the person closest to her, for instance the grandmother.As the mother of the mother, she is “greater” than the latter; sheis in truth the “grand” or “Great Mother.” Not infrequently she
assumes the attributes of wisdom as well as those of a witch. Forthe further the archetype recedes from consciousness and theconclusion 39

clearer the latter becomes, the more distinctly does the archetype
assume mythological features. The transition from mother tograndmother means that the archetype is elevated to a higherrank. This is clearly demonstrated in a notion held by the Bataks.The funeral sacri ﬁce in honour of a dead father is modest,
consisting of ordinary food. But if the son has a son of hisown, then the father has become a grandfather and has con-sequently attained a more digni ﬁed status in the Beyond, and
very important o ﬀerings are made to him.
2
As the distance between conscious and unconscious increases, 189
the grandmother’s more exalted rank transforms her into a
“Great Mother,” and it frequently happens that the oppositescontained in this image split apart. We then get a good fairy anda wicked fairy, or a benevolent goddess and one who is malevo-lent and dangerous! In Western antiquity and especially inEastern cultures the opposites often remain united in the sameﬁgure, though this paradox does not disturb the primitive mind
in the least. The legends about the gods are as full of contradic-tions as are their moral characters. In the West, the paradoxicalbehaviour and moral ambivalence of the gods scandalizedpeople even in antiquity and gave rise to criticism that led ﬁnally
to a devaluation of the Olympians on the one hand and to theirphilosophical interpretation on the other. The clearest expres-sion of this is the Christian reformation of the Jewish concept ofthe Deity: the morally ambiguous Yahweh became an exclusivelygood God, while everything evil was united in the devil. It seemsas if the development of the feeling function in Western manforced a choice on him which led to the moral splitting of thedivinity into two halves. In the East the predominantly intuitiveintellectual attitude left no room for feeling values, and thegods—Kali is a case in point—could retain their original para-doxical morality undisturbed. Thus Kali is representative of the
2Warnecke, Die Religion der Batak .aspects of the mother archetype 40

East and the Madonna of the West. The latter has entirely lost the
shadow that still distantly followed her in the allegories of theMiddle Ages. It was relegated to the hell of popular imagination,where it now leads an insigni ﬁcant existence as the devil’s
grandmother.
3 Thanks to the development of feeling-values, the
splendour of the “light” god has been enhanced beyond meas-ure, but the darkness supposedly represented by the devil haslocalized itself in man. This strange development was precipi-tated chie ﬂy by the fact that Christianity, terri ﬁed of Manichaean
dualism, strove to preserve its monotheism by main force. Butsince the reality of darkness and evil could not be denied, therewas no alternative but to make man responsible for it. Even thedevil was largely, if not entirely, abolished, with the result thatthis metaphysical ﬁgure, who at one time was an integral part of
the Deity, was introjected into man, who thereupon became thereal carrier of the mysterium iniquitatis: “omne bonum a Deo, omne
malum ab homine.” In recent times this development has suf-fered a diabolical reverse, and the wolf in sheep’s clothing nowgoes about whispering in our ear that evil is really nothing but amisunderstanding of good and an e ﬀective instrument of pro-
gress. We think that the world of darkness has thus been abol-ished for good and all, and nobody realizes what a poisoningthis is of man’s soul. In this way he turns himself into the devil,for the devil is half of the archetype whose irresistible powermakes even unbelievers ejaculate “Oh God!” on every suitable
and unsuitable occasion. If one can possibly avoid it, one oughtnever to identify with an archetype, for, as psychopathology andcertain contemporary events show, the consequences areterrifying.
Western man has sunk to such a low level spiritually that he
190
even has to deny the apotheosis of untamed and untameablepsychic power—the divinity itself—so that, after swallowing
3[A familiar ﬁgure of speech in German.—E  .]conclusion 41

evil, he may possess himself of the good as well. If you read
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with attention and psychological under-
standing, you will see that he has described with rare con-sistency and with the passion of a truly religious person thepsychology of the “Superman” for whom God is dead, and whois himself burst asunder because he tried to imprison the divineparadox within the narrow framework of the mortal man.Goethe has wisely said: “What terror then shall seize theSuperman!”—and was rewarded with a supercilious smile fromthe Philistines. His glori ﬁcation of the Mother who is great
enough to include in herself both the Queen of Heaven andMaria Aegyptiaca is supreme wisdom and profoundly signi ﬁcant
for anyone willing to re ﬂect upon it. But what can one expect in
an age when the o ﬃcial spokesmen of Christianity publicly
announce their inability to understand the foundations ofreligious experience! I extract the following sentence from anarticle by a Protestant theologian: “We understand ourselves—whether naturalistically or idealistically—to be homogeneous crea-
tures who are not so peculiarly divided that alien forces can intervene in our innerlife, as the New Testament supposes.”
4 (Italics mine.) The author
is evidently unacquainted with the fact that science demon-strated the lability and dissociability of consciousness more thanhalf a century ago and proved it by experiment. Our consciousintentions are continually disturbed and thwarted, to a greater orlesser degree, by unconscious intrusions whose causes are at ﬁrst
strange to us. The psyche is far from being a homogeneousunit—on the contrary, it is a boiling cauldron of contradictoryimpulses, inhibitions, and a ﬀects, and for many people the con-
ﬂict between them is so insupportable that they even wish for
the deliverance preached by theologians. Deliverance fromwhat? Obviously, from a highly questionable psychic state. The
4Buri, “Theologie und Philosophie,” p. 117. [Quoting Rudolf Bultmann.—
E .]aspects of the mother archetype 42

unity of consciousness or of the so-called personality is not a
reality at all but a desideratum. I still have a vivid memory of acertain philosopher who also raved about this unity and used toconsult me about his neurosis: he was obsessed by the idea thathe was su ﬀering from cancer. I do not know how many special-
ists he had consulted already, and how many X-ray pictures hehad had made. They all assured him that he had no cancer. Hehimself told me: “I know I have no cancer, but I still could haveone.” Who is responsible for this “imaginary” idea? He certainlydid not make it himself; it was forced on him by an “alien”power. There is little to choose between this state and that of theman possessed in the New Testament. Now whether you believein a demon of the air or in a factor in the unconscious that playsdiabolical tricks on you is all one to me. The fact that man’simagined unity is menaced by alien powers remains the same ineither case. Theologians would do better to take account foronce of these psychological facts than to go on “demythologiz-ing” them with rationalistic explanations that are a hundredyears behind the times.
I have tried in the foregoing to give a survey of the psychic
191
phenomena that may be attributed to the predominance of the
mother-image. Although I have not always drawn attention tothem, my reader will presumably have had no di ﬃculty in rec-
ognizing those features which characterize the Great Mothermythologically, even when they appear under the guise of per-sonalistic psychology. When we ask patients who are particu-larly in ﬂuenced by the mother-image to express in words or
pictures what “Mother” means to them—be it positive or
negative—we invariably get symbolical ﬁgures which must be
regarded as direct analogies of the mythological mother-image.These analogies take us into a ﬁeld that still requires a great deal
more work of elucidation. At any rate, I personally do not feelable to say anything de ﬁnitive about it. If, nevertheless, I ventureconclusion 43

to oﬀer a few suggestions, they should be regarded as altogether
provisional and tentative.
Above all, I should like to point out that the mother-image in 192
a man’s psychology is entirely di ﬀerent in character from a
woman’s. For a woman, the mother typi ﬁes her own conscious
life as conditioned by her sex. But for a man the mother typi ﬁes
something alien, which he has yet to experience and which isﬁlled with the imagery latent in the unconscious. For this reason,
if for no other, the mother-image of a man is essentially di ﬀerent
from a woman’s. The mother has from the outset a decidedlysymbolical signi ﬁcance for a man, which probably accounts for
his strong tendency to idealize her. Idealization is a hidden apo-tropaism; one idealizes whenever there is a secret fear to beexorcized. What is feared is the unconscious and its magicalinﬂuence.
5
Whereas for a man the mother is ipso facto symbolical, for a 193
woman she becomes a symbol only in the course of her psycho-
logical development. Experience reveals the striking fact that theUrania type of mother-image predominates in masculine psych-ology, whereas in a woman the chthonic type, or Earth Mother,is the most frequent. During the manifest phase of the archetypean almost complete identi ﬁcation takes place. A woman can
identify directly with the Earth Mother, but a man cannot(except in psychotic cases). As mythology shows, one of thepeculiarities of the Great Mother is that she frequently appearspaired with her male counterpart. Accordingly the man identi-ﬁes with the son-lover on whom the grace of Sophia has des-
cended, with a puer aeternus or a ﬁlius sapientiae . But the companion
of the chthonic mother is the exact opposite: an ithyphallicHermes (the Egyptian Bes) or a lingam. In India this symbol is ofthe highest spiritual signi ﬁcance, and in the West Hermes is one
5Obviously a daughter can idealize her mother too, but for this special circum-
stances are needed, whereas in a man idealization is almost the normal thing.aspects of the mother archetype 44

of the most contradictory ﬁgures of Hellenistic syncretism,
which was the source of extremely important spiritual develop-ments in Western civilization. He is also the god of revelation,and in the uno ﬃcial nature philosophy of the early Middle Ages
he is nothing less than the world-creating Nous itself. This mys-tery has perhaps found its ﬁnest expression in the words of the
T abula smaragdina: “omne superius sicut inferius” (as it is above, so
it is below).
It is a psychological fact that as soon as we touch on these
194
identi ﬁcations we enter the realm of the syzygies, the paired
opposites, where the One is never separated from the Other, itsantithesis. It is a ﬁeld of personal experience which leads directly
to the experience of individuation, the attainment of the self. Avast number of symbols for this process could be mustered fromthe medieval literature of the West and even more from thestorehouses of Oriental wisdom, but in this matter words andideas count for little. Indeed, they may become dangerousbypaths and false trails. In this still very obscure ﬁeld of psycho-
logical experience, where we are in direct contact, so to speak,with the archetype, its psychic power is felt in full force. Thisrealm is so entirely one of immediate experience that it cannotbe captured by any formula, but can only be hinted at to onewho already knows. He will need no explanations to understandwhat was the tension of opposites expressed by Apuleius in hismagni ﬁcent prayer to the Queen of Heaven, when he associates
“heavenly Venus” with “Proserpina, who strikest terror withmidnight ululations”:
6 it was the terrifying paradox of the
primordial mother-image.
When, in 1938, I originally wrote this paper, I naturally did 195
not know that twelve years later the Christian version of the
mother archetype would be elevated to the rank of a dogmatic
6“Nocturnis ululatibus horrenda Proserpina.” Cf. Symbols of Transformation , p. 99.conclusion 45

truth. The Christian “Queen of Heaven” has, obviously, shed all
her Olympian qualities except for her brightness, goodness, andeternality; and even her human body, the thing most prone togross material corruption, has put on an ethereal incorrupt-ibility. The richly varied allegories of the Mother of God havenevertheless retained some connection with her pagan pre ﬁgura-
tions in Isis (Io) and Semele. Not only are Isis and the Horus-child iconological exemplars, but the ascension of Semele, theoriginally mortal mother of Dionysus, likewise anticipates theAssumption of the Blessed Virgin. Further, this son of Semele is adying and resurgent god and the youngest of the Olympians.Semele herself seems to have been an earth-goddess, just as theVirgin Mary is the earth from which Christ was born. This beingso, the question naturally arises for the psychologist: what hasbecome of the characteristic relation of the mother-image to theearth, darkness, the abysmal side of the bodily man with hisanimal passions and instinctual nature, and to “matter” in gen-eral? The declaration of the dogma comes at a time when theachievements of science and technology, combined with arationalistic and materialistic view of the world, threaten thespiritual and psychic heritage of man with instant annihilation.Humanity is arming itself, in dread and fascinated horror, for astupendous crime. Circumstances might easily arise when thehydrogen bomb would have to be used and the unthinkablyfrightful deed became unavoidable in legitimate self-defence. Instriking contrast to this disastrous turn of events, the Mother ofGod is now enthroned in heaven; indeed, her Assumption hasactually been interpreted as a deliberate counterstroke to thematerialistic doctrinairism that provoked the chthonic powersinto revolt. Just as Christ’s appearance in his own day created areal devil and adversary of God out of what was originally a sonof God dwelling in heaven, so now, conversely, a heavenly ﬁgure
has split o ﬀ from her original chthonic realm and taken up a
counter-position to the titanic forces of the earth and theaspects of the mother archetype 46

underworld that have been unleashed. In the same way that the
Mother of God was divested of all the essential qualities ofmateriality, matter became completely de-souled, and this at atime when physics is pushing forward to insights which, if theydo not exactly “de-materialize” matter, at least endue it withproperties of its own and make its relation to the psyche a prob-lem that can no longer be shelved. For just as the tremendousadvancement of science led at ﬁrst to a premature dethronement
of mind and to an equally ill-considered dei ﬁcation of matter, so
it is this same urge for scienti ﬁc knowledge that is now attempt-
ing to bridge the huge gulf that has opened out between the twoWeltanschauungen . The psychologist inclines to see in the dogma of
the Assumption a symbol which, in a sense, anticipates thiswhole development. For him the relationship to the earth and tomatter is one of the inalienable qualities of the mother arche-type. So that when a ﬁgure that is conditioned by this archetype
is represented as having been taken up into heaven, the realm ofthe spirit, this indicates a union of earth and heaven, or of matterand spirit. The approach of natural science will almost certainlybe from the other direction: it will see in matter itself the equiva-lent of spirit, but this “spirit” will appear divested of all, or atany rate most, of its known qualities, just as earthly matter wasstripped of its speci ﬁc characteristics when it staged its entry
into heaven. Nevertheless, the way will gradually be cleared for aunion of the two principles.
Understood concretely, the Assumption is the absolute oppos-
196
ite of materialism. Taken in this sense, it is a counterstroke thatdoes nothing to diminish the tension between the opposites, butdrives it to extremes.
Understood symbolically, however, the Assumption of the
197
body is a recognition and acknowledgment of matter, which inthe last resort was identi ﬁed with evil only because of an over-
whelmingly “pneumatic” tendency in man. In themselves, spiritand matter are neutral, or rather, “utriusque capax”—that is,conclusion 47

capable of what man calls good or evil. Although as names they
are exceedingly relative, underlying them are very real oppositesthat are part of the energic structure of the physical and of thepsychic world, and without them no existence of any kind couldbe established. There is no position without its negation. In spiteor just because of their extreme opposition, neither can existwithout the other. It is exactly as formulated in classical Chinesephilosophy: yang (the light, warm, dry, masculine principle)
contains within it the seed of yin (the dark, cold, moist, feminine
principle), and vice versa. Matter therefore would contain theseed of spirit and spirit the seed of matter. The long-known“synchronistic” phenomena that have now been statisticallyconﬁrmed by Rhine’s experiments
7 point, to all appearances, in
this direction. The “psychization” of matter puts the absoluteimmateriality of spirit in question, since this would then have tobe accorded a kind of substantiality. The dogma of the Assump-tion, proclaimed in an age su ﬀering from the greatest political
schism history has ever known, is a compensating symptom thatreﬂects the strivings of science for a uniform world-picture. In a
certain sense, both developments were anticipated by alchemy inthe hieros gamos of opposites, but only in symbolic form. Never-
theless, the symbol has the great advantage of being able to uniteheterogeneous or even incommensurable factors in a single
image. With the decline of alchemy the symbolical unity ofspirit and matter fell apart, with the result that modern manﬁnds himself uprooted and alienated in a de-souled world.
The alchemist saw the union of opposites under the symbol of
198
the tree, and it is therefore not surprising that the unconscious ofpresent-day man, who no longer feels at home in his world andcan base his existence neither on the past that is no more nor onthe future that is yet to be, should hark back to the symbol of thecosmic tree rooted in this world and growing up to heaven—the
7Cf. my “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.”aspects of the mother archetype 48

tree that is also man. In the history of symbols this tree is
described as the way of life itself, a growing into that whicheternally is and does not change; which springs from the unionof opposites and, by its eternal presence, also makes that unionpossible. It seems as if it were only through an experience ofsymbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own “existence”and making a philosophy out of it, can ﬁnd his way back to a
world in which he is no longer a stranger.conclusion 49

Part II
Concerning Rebirth
This paper represents the substance of a lecture which I delivered
on the spur of the moment at the Eranos meeting in 1939. Inputting it into written form I have made use of the stenographicnotes which were taken at the meeting. Certain portions had tobe omitted, chie ﬂy because the requirements of a printed text
are di ﬀerent from those of the spoken word. However, so far as
possible, I have carried out my original intention of summing upthe content of my lecture on the theme of rebirth, and have alsoendeavoured to reproduce my analysis of the Eighteenth Sura ofthe Koran as an example of a rebirth mystery. I have added somereferences to source material, which the reader may welcome.My summary does not purport to be more than a survey of aﬁeld of knowledge which can only be treated very super ﬁcially
in the framework of a lecture.—C. G. J.
[First published as a lecture, “Die verschiedenen Aspekte der

Wiedergeburt,” in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1939 (Zurich, 1940). Revised
and expanded as “Über Wiedergeburt,” Gestaltungen des Unbe-
wussten (Zurich: Rascher, 1950), from which the present translation
is made.—E ditors .]concerning rebirth 52

1
FORMS OF REBIRTH
The concept of rebirth is not always used in the same sense. 199
Since this concept has various aspects, it may be useful to review
its di ﬀerent meanings. The ﬁve di ﬀerent forms which I am
going to enumerate could probably be added to if one were togo into greater detail, but I venture to think that my de ﬁnitions
cover at least the cardinal meanings. In the ﬁrst part of my
exposition, I give a brief summary of the di ﬀerent forms of
rebirth, while the second part presents its various psychologicalaspects. In the third part, I give an example of a rebirth mysteryfrom the Koran.
1. Metempsychosis . The ﬁrst of the ﬁve aspects of rebirth to which
200
I should like to draw attention is that of metempsychosis, or
transmigration of souls. According to this view, one’s life is pro-longed in time by passing through di ﬀerent bodily existences;
or, from another point of view, it is a life-sequence interruptedby di ﬀerent reincarnations. Even in Buddhism, where this doc-
trine is of particular importance—the Buddha himself experi-enced a very long sequence of such rebirths—it is by no means

certain whether continuity of personality is guaranteed or not:
there may be only a continuity of karma . The Buddha’s disciples
put this question to him during his lifetime, but he nevermade any de ﬁnite statement as to whether there is or is not a
continuity of personality.
1
2. Reincarnation . This concept of rebirth necessarily implies the 201
continuity of personality. Here the human personality is
regarded as continuous and accessible to memory, so that, whenone is incarnated or born, one is able, at least potentially, toremember that one has lived through previous existences andthat these existences were one’s own, i.e., that they had the sameego-form as the present life. As a rule, reincarnation meansrebirth in a human body.
3. Resurrection . This means a re-establishment of human exist-
202
ence after death. A new element enters here: that of the change,
transmutation, or transformation of one’s being. The changemay be either essential, in the sense that the resurrected being isa diﬀerent one; or nonessential, in the sense that only the gen-
eral conditions of existence have changed, as when one ﬁnds
oneself in a di ﬀerent place or in a body which is di ﬀerently
constituted. It may be a carnal body, as in the Christian assump-tion that this body will be resurrected. On a higher level, theprocess is no longer understood in a gross material sense; it isassumed that the resurrection of the dead is the raising upof the corpus glori ﬁcationis , the “subtle body,” in the state of
incorruptibility.
4. Rebirth (renovatio ). The fourth form concerns rebirth in the
203
strict sense; that is to say, rebirth within the span of individual
life. The English word rebirth is the exact equivalent of the
German Wiedergeburt , but the French language seems to lack a
term having the peculiar meaning of “rebirth.” This word has
1Cf. the Samyutta-Nikaya (Book of the Kindred Sayings) , Part II: The Nidana Book, pp.
150f.concerning rebirth 54

a special ﬂavour; its whole atmosphere suggests the idea of
renovatio , renewal, or even of improvement brought about by
magical means. Rebirth may be a renewal without any change ofbeing, inasmuch as the personality which is renewed is notchanged in its essential nature, but only its functions, or partsof the personality, are subjected to healing, strengthening, orimprovement. Thus even bodily ills may be healed throughrebirth ceremonies.
Another aspect of this fourth form is essential transform-
204
ation, i.e., total rebirth of the individual. Here the renewalimplies a change of his essential nature, and may be called atransmutation. As examples we may mention the transform-ation of a mortal into an immortal being, of a corporeal into aspiritual being, and of a human into a divine being. Well-known prototypes of this change are the trans ﬁguration and
ascension of Christ, and the assumption of the Mother of Godinto heaven after her death, together with her body. Similarconceptions are to be found in Part II of Goethe’s Faust; for
instance, the transformation of Faust into the boy and then intoDoctor Marianus.
5. Participation in the process of transformation . The ﬁfth and last
205
form is indirect rebirth. Here the transformation is brought
about not directly, by passing through death and rebirthoneself, but indirectly, by participating in a process oftransformation which is conceived of as taking place outsidethe individual. In other words, one has to witness, or take partin, some rite of transformation. This rite may be a ceremonysuch as the Mass, where there is a transformation of sub-stances. Through his presence at the rite the individual par-ticipates in divine grace. Similar transformations of the Deityare to be found in the pagan mysteries; there too the initiatesharing the experience is vouchsafed the gift of grace, as weknow from the Eleusinian mysteries. A case in point is theconfession of the initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries, whoforms of rebirth 55

praises the grace conferred through the certainty of
immortality.2
2Cf. the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, verses 480–82: “Blessed is he among men
who has seen these mysteries; but he who is uninitiate and has no part in them,never has lot of like good things once he is dead, down in the darkness andgloom.” (Trans. by Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica , p. 323.)
And in an Eleusinian epitaph we read:
“Truly the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret:
Death comes not as a curse, but as a blessing to men.”concerning rebirth 56

2
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
REBIRTH
Rebirth is not a process that we can in any way observe. We 206
can neither measure nor weigh nor photograph it. It is entirely
beyond sense perception. We have to do here with a purelypsychic reality, which is transmitted to us only indirectly through
personal statements. One speaks of rebirth; one professes rebirth;one is ﬁlled with rebirth. This we accept as su ﬃciently real. We
are not concerned here with the question: is rebirth a tangibleprocess of some sort? We have to be content with its psychicreality. I hasten to add that I am not alluding to the vulgar notionthat anything “psychic” is either nothing at all or at best evenmore tenuous than a gas. Quite the contrary; I am of the opinionthat the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life.Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts; of civilization and ofits destroyer, war. All this is at ﬁrst psychic and invisible. So long
as it is “merely” psychic it cannot be experienced by the senses,but is nonetheless indisputably real. The mere fact that peopletalk about rebirth, and that there is such a concept at all, means

that a store of psychic experiences designated by that term must
actually exist. What these experiences are like we can only inferfrom the statements that have been made about them. So, if wewant to ﬁnd out what rebirth really is, we must turn to history in
order to ascertain what “rebirth” has been understood to mean.
Rebirth is an a ﬃrmation that must be counted among the
207
primordial a ﬃrmations of mankind. These primordial a ﬃrm-
ations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact thatall aﬃrmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in
the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is notsurprising that a concurrence of a ﬃrmations concerning rebirth
can be found among the most widely di ﬀering peoples. There
must be psychic events underlying these a ﬃrmations which it is
the business of psychology to discuss—without entering into allthe metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding theirsigni ﬁcance. In order to obtain a general view of their phenom-
enology, it is necessary to sketch the whole ﬁeld of transform-
ation experiences in sharper outline. Two main groups ofexperience may be distinguished: that of the transcendence oflife, and that of one’s own transformation.
I EXPERIENCE OF THE TRANSCENDENCE OF LIFE
(a) Experiences induced by ritual
By the “transcendence of life” I mean those aforementioned 208
experiences of the initiate who takes part in a sacred rite
which reveals to him the perpetual continuation of life throughtransformation and renewal. In these mystery-dramas the tran-scendence of life, as distinct from its momentary concrete mani-festations, is usually represented by the fateful transformations—death and rebirth—of a god or a godlike hero. The initiate mayeither be a mere witness of the divine drama or take part in it orbe moved by it, or he may see himself identi ﬁed through theconcerning rebirth 58

ritual action with the god. In this case, what really matters is that
an objective substance or form of life is ritually transformedthrough some process going on independently, while the initi-ate is in ﬂuenced, impressed, “consecrated,” or granted “divine
grace” on the mere ground of his presence or participation. Thetransformation process takes place not within him but outsidehim, although he may become involved in it. The initiate whoritually enacts the slaying, dismemberment, and scattering ofOsiris, and afterwards his resurrection in the green wheat,experiences in this way the permanence and continuity of life,which outlasts all changes of form and, phoenix-like, continu-ally rises anew from its own ashes. This participation in the ritualevent gives rise, among other e ﬀects, to that hope of immortality
which is characteristic of the Eleusinian mysteries.
1
A living example of the mystery drama representing the per- 209
manence as well as the transformation of life is the Mass. If weobserve the congregation during this sacred rite we note alldegrees of participation, from mere indi ﬀerent attendance to the
profoundest emotion. The groups of men standing about nearthe exit, who are obviously engaged in every sort of worldlyconversation, crossing themselves and genu ﬂecting in a purely
mechanical way—even they, despite their inattention, partici-pate in the sacral action by their mere presence in this placewhere grace abounds. The Mass is an extramundane andextratemporal act in which Christ is sacri ﬁced and then resur-
rected in the transformed substances; and this rite of his sacri-ﬁcial death is not a repetition of the historical event but the
original, unique, and eternal act. The experience of the Mass istherefore a participation in the transcendence of life, whichovercomes all bounds of space and time. It is a moment ofeternity in time.
2
1[Cf. infra, “The Psychology of the Kore,” and Kerényi’s companion essays in
Essays on a Science of Mythology . —E .]
2Cf. my “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass.”the psychology of rebirth 59

(b) Immediate experiences
All that the mystery drama represents and brings about in the 210
spectator may also occur in the form of a spontaneous, ecstatic,
or visionary experience, without any ritual. Nietzsche’s Noon-tide Vision is a classic example of this kind.
3 Nietzsche, as we
know, substitutes for the Christian mystery the myth ofDionysus-Zagreus, who was dismembered and came to lifeagain. His experience has the character of a Dionysian naturemyth: the Deity appears in the garb of Nature, as classicalantiquity saw it,
4 and the moment of eternity is the noonday
hour, sacred to Pan: “Hath time ﬂown away? Do I not fall? Have I
not fallen—hark!—into the well of eternity?” Even the “goldenring,” the “ring of return,” appears to him as a promise of
resurrection and life.
5 It is just as if Nietzsche had been present at
a performance of the mysteries.
Many mystic experiences have a similar character: they repre- 211
sent an action in which the spectator becomes involved thoughhis nature is not necessarily changed. In the same way, the mostbeautiful and impressive dreams often have no lasting or trans-formative e ﬀect on the dreamer. He may be impressed by them,
but he does not necessarily see any problem in them. The eventthen naturally remains “outside,” like a ritual action performedby others. These more aesthetic forms of experience must becarefully distinguished from those which indubitably involve achange of one’s nature.
II SUBJECTIVE TRANSFORMATION
Transformations of personality are by no means rare occur- 212
rences. Indeed, they play a considerable role in psychopathology,
3Thus Spake Zarathustra , trans. by Common, pp. 315 ﬀ.
4Ibid.: “An old, bent and gnarled tree, hung with grapes.”
5Horne ﬀer, Nietzsches Lehre von der ewigen Wiederkehr .concerning rebirth 60

although they are rather di ﬀerent from the mystical experiences
just discussed, which are not easily accessible to psychologicalinvestigation. However, the phenomena we are now about toexamine belong to a sphere quite familiar to psychology.
(a) Diminution of personality
An example of the alteration of personality in the sense of
213
diminution is furnished by what is known in primitive psych-
ology as “loss of soul.” The peculiar condition covered by thisterm is accounted for in the mind of the primitive by the sup-position that a soul has gone o ﬀ, just like a dog that runs away
from his master overnight. It is then the task of the medicine-man to fetch the fugitive back. Often the loss occurs suddenlyand manifests itself in a general malaise. The phenomenon isclosely connected with the nature of primitive consciousness,which lacks the ﬁrm coherence of our own. We have control of
our will power, but the primitive has not. Complicated exercisesare needed if he is to pull himself together for any activity that isconscious and intentional and not just emotional and instinctive.Our consciousness is safer and more dependable in this respect;but occasionally something similar can happen to civilized man,only he does not describe it as “loss of soul” but as an “abaisse-ment du niveau mental,” Janet’s apt term for this phenomenon.
6
It is a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might becompared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather.The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listless-ness, moroseness, and depression. One no longer has any wishor courage to face the tasks of the day. One feels like lead,because no part of one’s body seems willing to move, and this isdue to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy.
7
6Les Névroses , p. 358.
7The gana phenomena described by Count Keyserling ( South-American Meditations ,
pp. 161 ﬀ.) come into this category.the psychology of rebirth 61

This well-known phenomenon corresponds to the primitive’s
loss of soul. The listlessness and paralysis of will can go so farthat the whole personality falls apart, so to speak, and con-sciousness loses its unity; the individual parts of the personalitymake themselves independent and thus escape from the controlof the conscious mind, as in the case of anaesthetic areas orsystematic amnesias. The latter are well known as hysterical “lossof function” phenomena. This medical term is analogous to theprimitive loss of soul.
Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and
214
mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of
which the last has a particularly deleterious e ﬀect on one’s self-
assurance. The abaissement always has a restrictive in ﬂuence on
the personality as a whole. It reduces one’s self-con ﬁdence and
the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing ego-centricity, narrows the mental horizon. In the end it may leadto the development of an essentially negative personality, whichmeans that a falsi ﬁcation of the original personality has
supervened.
(b) Enlargement of personality
The personality is seldom, in the beginning, what it will be
215
later on. For this reason the possibility of enlarging it exists, at
least during the ﬁrst half of life. The enlargement may be
eﬀected through an accretion from without, by new vital con-
tents ﬁnding their way into the personality from outside and
being assimilated. In this way a considerable increase of per-sonality may be experienced. We therefore tend to assume thatthis increase comes only from without, thus justifying the
prejudice that one becomes a personality by stu ﬃng into one-
self as much as possible from outside. But the more assidu-ously we follow this recipe, and the more stubbornly webelieve that all increase has to come from without, the greaterconcerning rebirth 62

becomes our inner poverty. Therefore, if some great idea takes
hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takeshold of us only because something in us responds to it andgoes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mentalreceptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. Whatcomes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything thatrises up from within, can only be made our own if we arecapable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incomingcontent. Real increase of personality means consciousness ofan enlargement that ﬂows from inner sources. Without psychic
depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude ofour object. It has therefore been said quite truly that a mangrows with the greatness of his task. But he must have withinhimself the capacity to grow; otherwise even the most di ﬃcult
task is of no bene ﬁt to him. More likely he will be shattered
by it.
A classic example of enlargement is Nietzsche’s encounter
216
with Zarathustra, which made of the critic and aphorist a tragicpoet and prophet. Another example is St. Paul, who, on his wayto Damascus, was suddenly confronted by Christ. True though itmay be that this Christ of St. Paul’s would hardly have beenpossible without the historical Jesus, the apparition of Christcame to St. Paul not from the historical Jesus but from the depthsof his own unconscious.
When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and
217
from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says,“One becomes Two,” and the greater ﬁgure, which one always
was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personal-ity with the force of a revelation. He who is truly and hopelesslylittle will always drag the revelation of the greater down to thelevel of his littleness, and will never understand that the day ofjudgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who isinwardly great will know that the long expected friend of hissoul, the immortal one, has now really come, “to lead captivitythe psychology of rebirth 63

captive”;8 that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal
had always been con ﬁned and held prisoner, and to make his life
ﬂow into that greater life—a moment of deadliest peril!
Nietzsche’s prophetic vision of the Tightrope Walker9 reveals the
awful danger that lies in having a “tightrope-walking” attitudetowards an event to which St. Paul gave the most exalted namehe could ﬁnd.
Christ himself is the perfect symbol of the hidden immortal
218
within the mortal man.10 Ordinarily this problem is symbolized
by a dual motif such as the Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal andthe other immortal. An Indian parallel is the parable of the twofriends:
Behold, upon the selfsame tree,
Two birds, fast-bound companions, sit.This one enjoys the ripened fruit,The other looks, but does not eat.
On such a tree my spirit crouched,
Deluded by its powerlessness,Till seeing with joy how great its Lord,It found from sorrow swift release . . .
11
Another notable parallel is the Islamic legend of the meeting 219
of Moses and Khidr,12 to which I shall return later on. Naturally
the transformation of personality in this enlarging sense doesnot occur only in the form of such highly signi ﬁcant
experiences. There is no lack of more trivial instances, a list of
8Ephesians 4:8.
9“Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body.” Thus Spake Zarathustra , p. 74.
10Cf. “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” pars. 226 ﬀ.
11Shvetashvatara Upanishad 4, 6 ﬀ. (Trans. based on Hume, The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads , pp. 403 ﬀ.).
12Koran, 18th Sura.concerning rebirth 64

which could easily be compiled from the clinical history of
neurotic patients. Indeed, any case where the recognition of agreater personality seems to burst an iron ring round the heartmust be included in this category.
13
(c) Change of internal structure
We now come to changes of personality which imply neither 220
enlargement nor diminution but a structural alteration. One of
the most important forms is the phenomenon of possession:some content, an idea or a part of the personality, obtains mas-tery of the individual for one reason or another. The contentswhich thus take possession appear as peculiar convictions, idio-syncrasies, stubborn plans, and so forth. As a rule, they are notopen to correction. One has to be an especially good friend ofthe possessed person and willing to put up with almost anythingif one is to attempt to deal with such a condition. I am notprepared to lay down any hard and fast line of demarcationbetween possession and paranoia. Possession can be formulatedas identity of the egopersonality with a complex.
14
A common instance of this is identity with the persona, 221
which is the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the mannerhe assumes in dealing with, the world. Every calling or profes-sion, for example, has its own characteristic persona. It is easy tostudy these things nowadays, when the photographs of publicpersonalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind ofbehaviour is forced on them by the world, and professionalpeople endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the
13I have discussed one such case of a widening of the personality in my
inaugural dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called OccultPhenomena.”
14For the Church’s view of possession see de Tonquédec, Les Maladies nerveuses ou
mentales et les manifestations diaboliques ; also “A Psychological Approach to the
Dogma of the Trinity,” p. 163, n. 15.the psychology of rebirth 65

danger is that they become identical with their personas—the
professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then thedamage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against thebackground of his own biography. For by that time it is written:“. . . then he went to such and such a place and said this or that,”etc. The garment of Deianeira has grown fast to his skin, and adesperate decision like that of Heracles is needed if he is to tearthis Nessus shirt from his body and step into the consuming ﬁre
of the ﬂame of immortality, in order to transform himself into
what he really is. One could say, with a little exaggeration, thatthe persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneselfas well as others think one is.
15 In any case the temptation to be
what one seems to be is great, because the persona is usuallyrewarded in cash.
There are still other factors which may take possession of the
222
individual, one of the most important being the so-called“inferior function.” This is not the place to enter into a detaileddiscussion of this problem;
16 I should only like to point out that
the inferior function is practically identical with the dark side ofthe human personality. The darkness which clings to every per-sonality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway ofdreams, from which those two twilight ﬁgures, the shadow and
the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible,take possession of our ego-consciousness. A man who is pos-sessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light andfalling into his own traps. Whenever possible, he prefers tomake an unfavourable impression on others. In the long run luckis always against him, because he is living below his own leveland at best only attains what does not suit him. And if there isno doorstep for him to stumble over, he manufactures one
15In this connection, Schopenhauer’s “The Wisdom of Life: Aphorisms” ( Essays
from the Parerga and Paralipomena ) could be read with pro ﬁt.
16This important problem is discussed in detail in Ch. II of Psychological T ypes .concerning rebirth 66

for himself and then fondly believes he has done something
useful.
Possession caused by the anima or animus presents a di ﬀerent 223
picture. Above all, this transformation of personality gives prom-
inence to those traits which are characteristic of the oppositesex; in man the feminine traits, and in woman the masculine. Inthe state of possession both ﬁgures lose their charm and their
values; they retain them only when they are turned away fromthe world, in the introverted state, when they serve as bridges tothe unconscious. Turned towards the world, the anima is ﬁckle,
capricious, moody, uncontrolled and emotional, sometimesgifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful,bitchy, double-faced, and mystical.
17 The animus is obstinate,
harping on principles, laying down the law, dogmatic, world-reforming, theoretic, word-mongering, argumentative, anddomineering.
18 Both alike have bad taste: the anima surrounds
herself with inferior people, and the animus lets himself betaken in by second-rate thinking.
Another form of structural change concerns certain unusual
224
observations about which I speak only with the utmost reserve. Irefer to states of possession in which the possession is caused bysomething that could perhaps most ﬁtly be described as an
“ancestral soul,” by which I mean the soul of some de ﬁnite
forebear. For all practical purposes, such cases may be regardedas striking instances of identi ﬁcation with deceased persons.
(Naturally, the phenomena of identity only occur after the
17Cf. the apt description of the anima in Aldrovandus, Dendrologiae libri duo
(1668, p. 211): “She appeared both very soft and very hard at the same time,and while for some two thousand years she had made a show of inconstantlooks like a Proteus, she bedevilled the love of Lucius Agatho Priscus, then acitizen of Bologna, with anxious cares and sorrows, which assuredly wereconjured up from chaos, or from what Plato calls Agathonian confusion.”There is a similar description in Fierz-David, The Dream of Poliphilo , pp. 189 ﬀ.
18Cf. Emma Jung “On the Nature of the Animus.”the psychology of rebirth 67

“ancestor’s” death.) My attention was ﬁrst drawn to such possi-
bilities by Léon Daudet’s confused but ingenious book L’Hérédo .
Daudet supposes that, in the structure of the personality, thereare ancestral elements which under certain conditions may sud-denly come to the fore. The individual is then precipitatelythrust into an ancestral role. Now we know that ancestral rolesplay a very important part in primitive psychology. Not only areancestral spirits supposed to be reincarnated in children, but anattempt is made to implant them into the child by naming himafter an ancestor. So, too, primitives try to change themselvesback into their ancestors by means of certain rites. I would men-tion especially the Australian conception of the alcheringamijina ,
19
ancestral souls, half man and half animal, whose reactivation
through religious rites is of the greatest functional signi ﬁcance
for the life of the tribe. Ideas of this sort, dating back to the StoneAge, were widely di ﬀused, as may be seen from numerous other
traces that can be found elsewhere. It is therefore not improbablethat these primordial forms of experience may recur even todayas cases of identi ﬁcation with ancestral souls, and I believe I have
seen such cases.
(d) Identiﬁcation with a group
We shall now discuss another form of transformation experi-
225
ence which I would call identi ﬁcation with a group. More accur-
ately speaking, it is the identi ﬁcation of an individual with a
number of people who, as a group, have a collective experienceof transformation. This special psychological situation must notbe confused with participation in a transformation rite, which,though performed before an audience, does not in any waydepend upon group identity or necessarily give rise to it. Toexperience transformation in a group and to experience it in
19Cf. Lévy-Bruhl, La Mythologie primitive .concerning rebirth 68

oneself are two totally di ﬀerent things. If any considerable group
of persons are united and identi ﬁed with one another by a
particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation experi-ence bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience ofindividual transformation. A group experience takes place on alower level of consciousness than the experience of an indi-vidual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gathertogether to share one common emotion, the total psyche emer-ging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche.If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more likethe psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethicalattitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psych-ology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mobpsychology.
20 If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experi-
ence as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level ofconsciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone. Thatis why this group experience is very much more frequent than anindividual experience of transformation. It is also much easier toachieve, because the presence of so many people together exertsgreat suggestive force. The individual in a crowd easily becomesthe victim of his own suggestibility. It is only necessary for some-thing to happen, for instance a proposal backed by the wholecrowd, and we too are all for it, even if the proposal is immoral.In the crowd one feels no responsibility, but also no fear.
Thus identi ﬁcation with the group is a simple and easy path to
226
follow, but the group experience goes no deeper than the level of
one’s own mind in that state. It does work a change in you, butthe change does not last. On the contrary, you must have con-tinual recourse to mass intoxication in order to consolidate theexperience and your belief in it. But as soon as you are removedfrom the crowd, you are a di ﬀerent person again and unable to
reproduce the previous state of mind. The mass is swayed by
20Le Bon, The Crowd .the psychology of rebirth 69

participation mystique , which is nothing other than an unconscious
identity. Supposing, for example, you go to the theatre: glancemeets glance, everybody observes everybody else, so that allthose who are present are caught up in an invisible web ofmutual unconscious relationship. If this condition increases, oneliterally feels borne along by the universal wave of identity withothers. It may be a pleasant feeling—one sheep among ten thou-sand! Again, if I feel that this crowd is a great and wonderfulunity, I am a hero, exalted along with the group. When I ammyself again, I discover that I am Mr. So-and-So, and that I live insuch and such a street, on the third ﬂoor. I also ﬁnd that the
whole a ﬀair was really most delightful, and I hope it will take
place again tomorrow so that I may once more feel myself to be awhole nation, which is much better than being just plain Mr. X.Since this is such an easy and convenient way of raising one’spersonality to a more exalted rank, mankind has always formedgroups which made collective experiences of transformation—often of an ecstatic nature—possible. The regressive identi ﬁca-
tion with lower and more primitive states of consciousness isinvariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life; hence thequickening e ﬀect of regressive identi ﬁcations with half-animal
ancestors
21 in the Stone Age.
The inevitable psychological regression within the group is 227
partially counteracted by ritual, that is to say through a cultceremony which makes the solemn performance of sacredevents the centre of group activity and prevents the crowd fromrelapsing into unconscious instinctuality. By engaging the indi-vidual’s interest and attention, the ritual makes it possible forhim to have a comparatively individual experience even withinthe group and so to remain more or less conscious. But if there isno relation to a centre which expresses the unconscious through
21The alcheringamijina . Cf. the rites of Australian tribes, in Spencer and Gillen, The
Northern Tribes of Central Australia ; also Lévy-Bruhl, La Mythologie primitive .concerning rebirth 70

its symbolism, the mass psyche inevitably becomes the hypnotic
focus of fascination, drawing everyone under its spell. That iswhy masses are always breeding-grounds of psychic epidem-ics,
22 the events in Germany being a classic example of this.
It will be objected to this essentially negative evaluation of 228
mass psychology that there are also positive experiences, forinstance a positive enthusiasm which spurs the individual tonoble deeds, or an equally positive feeling of human solidarity.Facts of this kind should not be denied. The group can give theindividual a courage, a bearing, and a dignity which may easilyget lost in isolation. It can awaken within him the memory ofbeing a man among men. But that does not prevent somethingelse from being added which he would not possess as an indi-vidual. Such unearned gifts may seem a special favour of themoment, but in the long run there is a danger of the gift becom-ing a loss, since human nature has a weak habit of taking gifts forgranted; in times of necessity we demand them as a right insteadof making the e ﬀort to obtain them ourselves. One sees this,
unfortunately, only too plainly in the tendency to demand every-thing from the State, without re ﬂecting that the State consists of
those very individuals who make the demands. The logicaldevelopment of this tendency leads to Communism, where eachindividual enslaves the community and the latter is representedby a dictator, the slave-owner. All primitive tribes characterizedby a communistic order of society also have a chieftain overthem with unlimited powers. The Communist State is nothingother than an absolute monarchy in which there are no subjects,but only serfs.
22I would remind the reader of the catastrophic panic which broke out in New
York on the occasion [1938] of a broadcast dramatization of H. G. Wells’ War of
the Worlds shortly before the second World War [see Cantril, The Invasion from Mars
(1940)], and which was later [1949] repeated in Quito.the psychology of rebirth 71

(e) Identiﬁcation with a cult-hero
Another important identi ﬁcation underlying the transform- 229
ation experience is that with the god or hero who is transformed
in the sacred ritual. Many cult ceremonies are expressly intendedto bring this identity about, an obvious example being the Meta-
morphosis of Apuleius. The initiate, an ordinary human being, is
elected to be Helios; he is crowned with a crown of palms andclad in the mystic mantle, whereupon the assembled crowd payshomage to him. The suggestion of the crowd brings about hisidentity with the god. The participation of the community canalso take place in the following way: there is no apotheosis of theinitiate, but the sacred action is recited, and then, in the courseof long periods of time, psychic changes gradually occur in theindividual participants. The Osiris cult o ﬀers an excellent
example of this. At ﬁrst only Pharaoh participated in the trans-
formation of the god, since he alone “had an Osiris”; but laterthe nobles of the Empire acquired an Osiris too, and ﬁnally this
development culminated in the Christian idea that everyone hasan immortal soul and shares directly in the Godhead. In Christi-anity the development was carried still further when the outerGod or Christ gradually became the inner Christ of the indi-vidual believer, remaining one and the same though dwelling inmany. This truth had already been anticipated by the psychologyof totemism: many exemplars of the totem animal are killed andconsumed during the totem meals, and yet it is only the Onewho is being eaten, just as there is only one Christ-child and oneSanta Claus.
In the mysteries, the individual undergoes an indirect trans-
230
formation through his participation in the fate of the god. Thetransformation experience is also an indirect one in the ChristianChurch, inasmuch as it is brought about by participation insomething acted or recited. Here the ﬁrst form, the dromenon , is
characteristic of the richly developed ritual of the Catholicconcerning rebirth 72

Church; the second form, the recitation, the “Word” or “gos-
pel,” is practised in the “preaching of the Word” inProtestantism.
(f ) Magical procedures
A further form of transformation is achieved through a rite
231
used directly for this purpose. Instead of the transformation
experience coming to one through participation in the rite, therite is used for the express purpose of e ﬀecting the transform-
ation. It thus becomes a sort of technique to which one submitsoneself. For instance, a man is ill and consequently needs to be“renewed.” The renewal must “happen” to him from outside,and to bring this about, he is pulled through a hole in the wall atthe head of his sick-bed, and now he is reborn; or he is givenanother name and thereby another soul, and then the demons nolonger recognize him; or he has to pass through a symbolicaldeath; or, grotesquely enough, he is pulled through a leatherncow, which devours him, so to speak, in front and then expelshim behind; or he undergoes an ablution or baptismal bath andmiraculously changes into a semi-divine being with a new char-acter and an altered metaphysical destiny.
(g) Technical transformation
Besides the use of the rite in the magical sense, there are still
232
other special techniques in which, in addition to the grace
inherent in the rite, the personal endeavour of the initiate isneeded in order to achieve the intended purpose. It is a trans-formation experience induced by technical means. The exercisesknown in the East as yoga and in the West as exercitia spiritualia
come into this category. These exercises represent special tech-niques prescribed in advance and intended to achieve a de ﬁnite
psychic e ﬀect, or at least to promote it. This is true both ofthe psychology of rebirth 73

Eastern yoga and of the methods practised in the West.23 They
are, therefore, technical procedures in the fullest sense of theword; elaborations of the originally natural processes of trans-formation. The natural or spontaneous transformations thatoccurred earlier, before there were any historical examples tofollow, were thus replaced by techniques designed to induce thetransformation by imitating this same sequence of events. I willtry to give an idea of the way such techniques may have origin-ated by relating a fairy story:
There was once a queer old man who lived in a cave, where he
233
had sought refuge from the noise of the villages. He was reputedto be a sorcerer, and therefore he had disciples who hoped tolearn the art of sorcery from him. But he himself was not think-ing of any such thing. He was only seeking to know what it wasthat he did not know, but which, he felt certain, was alwayshappening. After meditating for a very long time on that whichis beyond meditation, he saw no other way of escape from hispredicament than to take a piece of red chalk and draw all kindsof diagrams on the walls of his cave, in order to ﬁnd out what
that which he did not know might look like. After many attemptshe hit on the circle. “That’s right,” he felt, “and now for a
quadrangle inside it!”—which made it better still. His discipleswere curious; but all they could make out was that the old manwas up to something, and they would have given anything toknow what he was doing. But when they asked him: “What areyou doing there?” he made no reply. Then they discovered thediagrams on the wall and said: “That’s it!”—and they all imi-tated the diagrams. But in so doing they turned the whole pro-cess upside down, without noticing it: they anticipated the resultin the hope of making the process repeat itself which had led tothat result. This is how it happened then and how it still happenstoday.
23Cf. “The Psychology of Eastern Meditation.”concerning rebirth 74

(h) Natural transformation (individuation)
As I have pointed out, in addition to the technical processes of 234
transformation there are also natural transformations. All ideas
of rebirth are founded on this fact. Nature herself demands adeath and a rebirth. As the alchemist Democritus says: “Naturerejoices in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules overnature.” There are natural transformation processes which sim-ply happen to us, whether we like it or not, and whether weknow it or not. These processes develop considerable psychiceﬀects, which would be su ﬃcient in themselves to make any
thoughtful person ask himself what really happened to him. Likethe old man in our fairytale, he, too, will draw mandalas andseek shelter in their protective circle; in the perplexity andanguish of his self-chosen prison, which he had deemed a ref-uge, he is transformed into a being akin to the gods. Mandalasare birth-places, vessels of birth in the most literal sense, lotus-ﬂowers in which a Buddha comes to life. Sitting in the lotus-seat,
the yogi sees himself trans ﬁgured into an immortal.
Natural transformation processes announce themselves
235
mainly in dreams. Elsewhere24 I have presented a series of
dream-symbols of the process of individuation. They weredreams which without exception exhibited rebirth symbolism.In this particular case there was a long-drawn-out process ofinner transformation and rebirth into another being. This“other being” is the other person in ourselves—that larger andgreater personality maturing within us, whom we have alreadymet as the inner friend of the soul. That is why we takecomfort whenever we ﬁnd the friend and companion depicted
in a ritual, an example being the friendship between Mithrasand the sungod. This relationship is a mystery to the scienti ﬁc
intellect, because the intellect is accustomed to regard these
24Cf. Psychology and Alchemy , Part II.the psychology of rebirth 75

things unsympathetically. But if it made allowance for feeling,
we would discover that it is the friend whom the sun-god takeswith him on his chariot, as shown in the monuments. It is therepresentation of a friendship between two men which is simplythe outer re ﬂection of an inner fact: it reveals our relationship to
that inner friend of the soul into whom Nature herself wouldlike to change us—that other person who we also are and yet cannever attain to completely. We are that pair of Dioscuri, one ofwhom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, thoughalways together, can never be made completely one. The trans-formation processes strive to approximate them to one another,but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the otherperson seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot getaccustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in ourown house. We should prefer to be always “I” and nothing else.But we are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whetherhe is our friend or our foe depends on ourselves.
You need not be insane to hear his voice. On the contrary, it is
236
the simplest and most natural thing imaginable. For instance,you can ask yourself a question to which “he” gives answer. Thediscussion is then carried on as in any other conversation. Youcan describe it as mere “associating” or “talking to oneself,” or
as a “meditation” in the sense used by the old alchemists, whoreferred to their interlocutor as aliquem alium internum , “a certain
other one, within.”
25 This form of colloquy with the friend of
the soul was even admitted by Ignatius Loyola into the techniqueof his Exercitia spiritualia ,
26 but with the limiting condition that
only the person meditating is allowed to speak, whereas theinner responses are passed over as being merely human and
25Cf. Ruland, Lexicon (1893 edn.), p. 226.
26Izquierdo, Pratica di alcuni Esercitij spirituali di S. Ignatio (Rome, 1686, p. 7): “A
colloquy . . . is nothing else than to talk and communicate familiarly withChrist.”concerning rebirth
76

therefore to be repudiated. This state of things has continued
down to the present day. It is no longer a moral or metaphysicalprejudice, but—what is much worse—an intellectual one. The“voice” is explained as nothing but “associating,” pursued in awitless way and running on and on without sense or purpose,like the works of a clock that has no dial. Or we say “It is only myown thoughts!” even if, on closer inspection, it should turn outthat they are thoughts which we either reject or had never con-sciously thought at all—as if everything psychic that is glimpsedby the ego had always formed part of it! Naturally this hybrisserves the useful purpose of maintaining the supremacy of ego-consciousness, which must be safeguarded against dissolutioninto the unconscious. But it breaks down ignominiously if everthe unconscious should choose to let some nonsensical ideabecome an obsession or to produce other psychogenic symp-toms, for which we would not like to accept responsibility onany account.
Our attitude towards this inner voice alternates between two
237
extremes: it is regarded either as undiluted nonsense or as thevoice of God. It does not seem to occur to any one that theremight be something valuable in between. The “other” may bejust as one-sided in one way as the ego is in another. And yet theconﬂict between them may give rise to truth and meaning—but
only if the ego is willing to grant the other its rightful personal-ity. It has, of course, a personality anyway, just as have the voicesof insane people; but a real colloquy becomes possible onlywhen the ego acknowledges the existence of a partner to thediscussion. This cannot be expected of everyone, because, afterall, not everyone is a ﬁt subject for exercitia spiritualia . Nor can it be
called a colloquy if one speaks only to oneself or only addressesthe other, as is the case with George Sand in her conversationswith a “spiritual friend”:
26a for thirty pages she talks exclusively
26a[“Daily Conversations with Dr. Pi ﬀoel,” in her Intimate Journal .—E .]the psychology of rebirth 77

to herself while one waits in vain for the other to reply. The
colloquy of the exercitia may be followed by that silent grace in
which the modern doubter no longer believes. But what if itwere the supplicated Christ himself who gave immediate answerin the words of the sinful human heart? What fearful abysses ofdoubt would then be opened? What madness should we notthen have to fear? From this one can understand that images ofthe gods are better mute, and that ego-consciousness had betterbelieve in its own supremacy rather than go on “associating.”One can also understand why that inner friend so often seems tobe our enemy, and why he is so far o ﬀ and his voice so low. For
he who is near to him “is near to the ﬁre.”
Something of this sort may have been in the mind of the
238
alchemist who wrote: “Choose for your Stone him throughwhom kings are honoured in their crowns, and through whomphysicians heal their sick, for he is near to the ﬁre.”
27 The
alchemists projected the inner event into an outer ﬁgure, so for
them the inner friend appeared in the form of the “Stone,” ofwhich the Tractatus aureus says: “Understand, ye sons of the wise,
what this exceeding precious Stone crieth out to you: Protect meand I will protect thee. Give me what is mine that I may helpthee.”
28 To this a scholiast adds: “The seeker after truth hears
both the Stone and the Philosopher speaking as if out of onemouth.”
29 The Philosopher is Hermes, and the Stone is identical
27A Pseudo-Aristotle quotation in Rosarium philosophorum (1550), fol. Q.
28“Largiri vis mihi meum” is the usual reading, as in the ﬁrst edition (1556) of
Ars chemica , under the title “Septem tractatus seu capitula Hermetis Trismegisti
aurei,” and also in Theatrum chemicum , IV (1613), and Manget, Bibliotheca chemica , I
(1702), pp. 400 ﬀ. In the Rosarium philosophorum (1550), fol. E /halflengthmark, there is a di ﬀer-
ent reading: “Largire mihi ius meum ut te adiuvem” (Give me my due that Imay help thee). This is one of the interpretative readings for which theanonymous author of the Rosarium is responsible. Despite their arbitrariness
they have an important bearing on the interpretation of alchemy. [Cf. Psychology
and Alchemy , par. 139, n. 17.]
29Biblio. chem. , I, p. 430b.concerning rebirth 78

with Mercurius, the Latin Hermes.30 From the earliest times,
Hermes was the mystagogue and psychopomp of the alchemists,their friend and counsellor, who leads them to the goal of theirwork. He is “like a teacher mediating between the stone and thedisciple.”
31 To others the friend appears in the shape of Christ or
Khidr or a visible or invisible guru, or some other personal guideor leader ﬁgure. In this case the colloquy is distinctly one-sided:
there is no inner dialogue, but instead the response appears asthe action of the other, i.e., as an outward event. The alchemistssaw it in the transformation of the chemical substance. So if oneof them sought transformation, he discovered it outside in mat-ter, whose transformation cried out to him, as it were, “I am thetransformation!” But some were clever enough to know, “It ismy own transformation—not a personal transformation, but thetransformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal. Itshakes o ﬀ the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its
own; it mounts the sun-barge and may take me with it.”
32
30Detailed documentation in Psychology and Alchemy , par. 84, and “The Spirit
Mercurius,” pars. 278 ﬀ., 287 ﬀ.
31“Tanquam praeceptor intermedius inter lapidem et discipulum.” ( Biblio.
chem., I. p. 430b.) Cf. the beautiful prayer of Astrampsychos, beginning “Come
to me, Lord Hermes,” and ending “I am thou and thou art I.” (Reitzenstein,Poimandres , p. 21.)
32The stone and its transformation are represented:
(1) as the resurrection of the homo philosophicus , the Second Adam (“Aurea
hora,” Artis auriferae , 1593, I, p. 195);
(2) as the human soul (“Book of Krates,” Berthelot, La Chimie au moyen âge , III,
p. 50);
(3) as a being below and above man: “This stone is under thee, as to obedi-
ence; above thee, as to dominion; therefore from thee, as to knowledge;about thee, as to equals” (“Rosinus ad Sarratantam,” Art. aurif. , I, p. 310);
(4) as life: “blood is soul and soul is life and life is our Stone” (“Tractatulus
Aristotelis,” ibid., p. 364).
(5) as the resurrection of the dead (“Calidis liber secretorum,” ibid., p. 347;
also “Rachaidibi fragmentum,” ibid., p. 398);
(6) as the Virgin Mary (“De arte chymica,” ibid., p. 582); andthe psychology of rebirth
79

This is a very ancient idea. In Upper Egypt, near Aswan, I once 239
saw an ancient Egyptian tomb that had just been opened. Just
behind the entrance-door was a little basket made of reeds, con-taining the withered body of a new-born infant, wrapped inrags. Evidently the wife of one of the workmen had hastily laidthe body of her dead child in the nobleman’s tomb at the lastmoment, hoping that, when he entered the sun-barge in orderto rise anew, it might share in his salvation, because it had beenburied in the holy precinct within reach of divine grace.
(7) as man himself: “thou art its ore . . . and it is extracted from thee . . . and
it remains inseparably with thee” (“Rosinus ad Sarratantam,” ibid., p.311).concerning rebirth
80

3
A TYPICAL SET OF SYMBOLS
ILLUSTRATING THE PROCESS
OF TRANSFORMATION
I have chosen as an example a ﬁgure which plays a great role 240
in Islamic mysticism, namely Khidr, “the Verdant One.” He
appears in the Eighteenth Sura of the Koran, entitled “The Cave.”1
This entire Sura is taken up with a rebirth mystery. The cave isthe place of rebirth, that secret cavity in which one is shut up inorder to be incubated and renewed. The Koran says of it: “Youmight have seen the rising sun decline to the right of theircavern, and as it set, go past them on the left, while they [theSeven Sleepers] stayed in the middle.” The “middle” isthe centre where the jewel reposes, where the incubation or thesacriﬁcial rite or the transformation takes place. The most beauti-
ful development of this symbolism is to be found on Mithraic
1[The Dawood trans. of the Koran is quoted, sometimes with modi ﬁcations.
The 18th Sura is at pp. 89–98.—E  .]

altarpieces2 and in alchemical pictures of the transformative sub-
stance,3 which is always shown between sun and moon. Repre-
sentations of the cruci ﬁxion frequently follow the same type,
and a similar symbolical arrangement is also found in the trans-formation or healing ceremonies of the Navahos.
4 Just such a
place of the centre or of transformation is the cave in whichthose seven had gone to sleep, little thinking that they wouldexperience there a prolongation of life verging on immortality.When they awoke, they had slept 309 years.
The legend has the following meaning: Anyone who gets into
241
that cave, that is to say into the cave which everyone has inhimself, or into the darkness that lies behind consciousness, willﬁnd himself involved in an—at ﬁrst—unconscious process of
transformation. By penetrating into the unconscious he makes aconnection with his unconscious contents. This may result in amomentous change of personality in the positive or negativesense. The transformation is often interpreted as a prolongationof the natural span of life or as an earnest of immortality. Theformer is the case with many alchemists, notably Paracelsus(in his treatise De vita longa
5), and the latter is exempli ﬁed in the
Eleusinian mysteries.
Those seven sleepers indicate by their sacred number6 that they 242
2Cumont, T extes et monuments ﬁgurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra , II.
3Cf. especially the crowning vision in the dream of Zosimos: “And another
[came] behind him, bringing one adorned round with signs, clad in white andcomely to see, who was named the Meridian of the Sun.” Cf. “The Visions ofZosimos,” par. 87 (III, v bis).
4Matthews, The Mountain Chant , and Stevenson, Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailijis .
5An account of the secret doctrine hinted at in this treatise may be found in my
“Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” pars. 169 ﬀ.
6The di ﬀerent versions of the legend speak sometimes of seven and sometimes
of eight disciples. According to the account given in the Koran, the eighth is adog. The 18th Sura mentions still other versions: “Some will say: ‘The sleepers
were three: their dog was the fourth.’ Others, guessing at the unknown, willsay: ‘They were ﬁve: their dog was the sixth.’ And yet others: ‘Seven: their dogconcerning rebirth
82

are gods,7 who are transformed during sleep and thereby enjoy
eternal youth. This helps us to understand at the outset that weare dealing with a mystery legend. The fate of the numinousﬁgures recorded in it grips the hearer, because the story gives
expression to parallel processes in his own unconscious whichin that way are integrated with consciousness again. The repris-tination of the original state is tantamount to attaining oncemore the freshness of youth.
The story of the sleepers is followed by some moral observa-
243
tions which appear to have no connection with it. But thisapparent irrelevance is deceptive. In reality, these edifying com-ments are just what are needed by those who cannot be rebornthemselves and have to be content with moral conduct, that is tosay with adherence to the law. Very often behaviour prescribed byrule is a substitute for spiritual transformation.
8 These edifying
was the eighth.’” It is evident, therefore, that the dog is to be taken into
account. This would seem to be an instance of that characteristic waveringbetween seven and eight (or three and four, as the case may be), which I havepointed out in Psychology and Alchemy , pars. 200 ﬀ. There the wavering between
seven and eight is connected with the appearance of Mephistopheles, who, aswe know, materialized out of the black poodle. In the case of three and four, thefourth is the devil or the female principle, and on a higher level the Mater Dei.(Cf. “Psychology and Religion,” pars. 124 ﬀ.) We may be dealing with the same
kind of ambiguity as in the numbering of the Egyptian nonad ( paut = ‘com-
pany of gods’; cf. Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians , I, p. 88). The Khidr legend
relates to the persecution of the Christians under Decius ( c. .. 250). The
scene is Ephesus, where St. John lay “sleeping,” but not dead. The sevensleepers woke up again during the reign of Theodosius II (408–450); thus theyhad slept not quite 200 years.
7The seven are the planetary gods of the ancients. Cf. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der
Gnosis , pp. 23 ﬀ.
8Obedience under the law on the one hand, and the freedom of the “children
of God,” the reborn, on the other, is discussed at length in the Epistles of St.Paul. He distinguishes not only between two di ﬀerent classes of men, who are
separated by a greater or lesser development of consciousness, but alsobetween the higher and lower man in one and the same individual. The sarkikossymbols illustrating the process of transformation
83

observations are then followed by the story of Moses and his
servant Joshua ben Nun:
And Moses said to his servant: “I will not cease from my wan-
derings until I have reached the place where the two seas meet,even though I journey for eighty years.”
But when they had reached the place where the two seas
meet, they forgot their ﬁsh, and it took its way through a streamto the sea.
And when they had journeyed past this place, Moses said to
his servant: “Bring us our breakfast, for we are weary from thisjourney.”
But the other replied: “See what has befallen me! When we
were resting there by the rock, I forgot the ﬁsh. Only Satan canhave put it out of my mind, and in wondrous fashion it took itsway to the sea.”
Then Moses said: “That is the place we seek.” And they went
back the way they had come. And they found one of Our ser-vants, whom We had endowed with Our grace and Our wis-dom. Moses said to him: “Shall I follow you, that you may teachme for my guidance some of the wisdom you have learnt?”
But he answered: “You will not bear with me, for how should
you bear patiently with things you cannot comprehend?”
Moses said: “If Allah wills, you shall ﬁnd me patient; I shall
not in anything disobey you.”
He said: “If you are bent on following me, you must ask no
question about anything till I myself speak to you concerning it.”
(carnal man) remains eternally under the law; the pneumatikos (spiritual man)
alone is capable of being reborn into freedom. This is quite in keeping withwhat seems such an insoluble paradox: the Church demanding absolute obedi-ence and at the same time proclaiming freedom from the law. So, too, in theKoran text, the legend appeals to the pneumatikos and promises rebirth to him
that has ears to hear. But he who, like the sarkikos , has no inner ear will ﬁnd
satisfaction and safe guidance in blind submission to Allah’s will.concerning rebirth
84

The two set forth, but as soon as they embarked, Moses’
companion bored a hole in the bottom of the ship.
“A strange thing you have done!” exclaimed Moses. “Is it to
drown her passengers that you have bored a hole in her?”
“Did I not tell you,” he replied, “that you would not bear with
me?”
“Pardon my forgetfulness,” said Moses. “Do not be angry
with me on this account.”
They journeyed on until they fell in with a certain youth.
Moses’ companion slew him, and Moses said: “You have killedan innocent man who has done no harm. Surely you havecommitted a wicked crime.”
“Did I not tell you,” he replied, “that you would not bear with
me?”
Moses said: “If ever I question you again, abandon me; for
then I should deserve it.”
They travelled on until they came to a certain city. They asked
the people for some food, but the people declined to receivethem as their guests. There they found a wall on the point offalling down. The other raised it up, and Moses said: “Had youwished, you could have demanded payment for your labours.”
“Now the time has arrived when we must part,” said the
other. “But ﬁrst I will explain to you those acts of mine whichyou could not bear with in patience.
“Know that the ship belonged to some poor ﬁshermen. I
damaged it because in their rear was a king who was takingevery ship by force.
“As for the youth, his parents both are true believers, and we
feared lest he should plague them with his wickedness andunbelief. It was our wish that their Lord should grant themanother in his place, a son more righteous and more ﬁlial.
“As for the wall, it belonged to two orphan boys in the city
whose father was an honest man. Beneath it their treasure isburied. Your Lord decreed in His mercy that they should dig outsymbols illustrating the process of transformation 85

their treasure when they grew to manhood. What I did was not
done by caprice. That is the meaning of the things you couldnot bear with in patience.”
This story is an ampli ﬁcation and elucidation of the legend of 244
the seven sleepers and the problem of rebirth. Moses is the man
who seeks, the man on the “quest.” On this pilgrimage he isaccompanied by his “shadow,” the “servant” or “lower” man
(pneumatikos and sarkikos in two individuals). Joshua is the son of
Nun, which is a name for “ ﬁsh,”
9 suggesting that Joshua had his
origin in the depths of the waters, in the darkness of theshadow-world. The critical place is reached “where the two seasmeet,” which is interpreted as the isthmus of Suez, where theWestern and the Eastern seas come close together. In otherwords, it is that “place of the middle” which we have already
met in the symbolic preamble, but whose signi ﬁcance was not
recognized at ﬁrst by the man and his shadow. They had “forgot-
ten their ﬁsh,” the humble source of nourishment. The ﬁsh
refers to Nun, the father of the shadow, of the carnal man, whocomes from the dark world of the Creator. For the ﬁsh came alive
again and leapt out of the basket in order to ﬁnd its way back to
its homeland, the sea. In other words, the animal ancestor andcreator of life separates himself from the conscious man, anevent which amounts to loss of the instinctive psyche. Thisprocess is a symptom of dissociation well known in the psycho-pathology of the neuroses; it is always connected with one-sidedness of the conscious attitude. In view of the fact, however,that neurotic phenomena are nothing but exaggerations of nor-mal processes, it is not to be wondered at that very similar phe-nomena can also be found within the scope of the normal. It is aquestion of that well-known “loss of soul” among primitives, as
9Vollers, “Chidher,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft , XII, p. 241. All quotations from
the commentaries are extracted from this article.concerning rebirth 86

described above in the section on diminution of the personality;
in scienti ﬁc language, an abaissement du niveau mental .
Moses and his servant soon notice what has happened. Moses 245
had sat down, “worn out” and hungry. Evidently he had a feel-ing of insu ﬃciency, for which a physiological explanation is
given. Fatigue is one of the most regular symptoms of loss ofenergy or libido. The entire process represents something verytypical, namely the failure to recognize a moment of crucial importance , a
motif which we encounter in a great variety of mythical forms.Moses realizes that he has unconsciously found the source of lifeand then lost it again, which we might well regard as a remark-able intuition. The ﬁsh they had intended to eat is a content of
the unconscious, by which the connection with the origin is re-established. He is the reborn one, who has awakened to new life.This came to pass, as the commentaries say, through the contactwith the water of life: by slipping back into the sea, the ﬁsh
once more becomes a content of the unconscious, and its o ﬀ-
spring are distinguished by having only one eye and half ahead.
10
The alchemists, too, speak of a strange ﬁsh in the sea, the 246
“round ﬁsh lacking bones and skin,”11 which symbolizes the
“round element,” the germ of the “animate stone,” of the ﬁlius
philosophorum . The water of life has its parallel in the aqua permanens
of alchemy. This water is extolled as “vivifying,” besides which
it has the property of dissolving all solids and coagulating allliquids. The Koran commentaries state that, on the spot wherethe ﬁsh disappeared, the sea was turned to solid ground,
whereon the tracks of the ﬁsh could still be seen.
12 On the island
thus formed Khidr was sitting, in the place of the middle. Amystical interpretation says that he was sitting “on a throne
10Ibid., p. 253.
11Cf. Aion, pars. 195 ﬀ.
12Vollers, p. 244.symbols illustrating the process of transformation 87

consisting of light, between the upper and the lower sea,”13 again
in the middle position. The appearance of Khidr seems to bemysteriously connected with the disappearance of the ﬁsh. It
looks almost as if he himself had been the ﬁsh. This conjecture is
supported by the fact that the commentaries relegate the sourceof life to the “place of darkness.”
14 The depths of the sea are dark
(mare tenebrositatis ). The darkness has its parallel in the alchemical
nigredo , which occurs after the coniunctio , when the female takes
the male into herself.15 From the nigredo issues the Stone, the sym-
bol of the immortal self; moreover, its ﬁrst appearance is likened
to “ﬁsh eyes.”16
Khidr may well be a symbol of the self. His qualities signalize 247
him as such: he is said to have been born in a cave, i.e., in
darkness. He is the “Long-lived One,” who continually renewshimself, like Elijah. Like Osiris, he is dismembered at the end of
13Ibid., p. 260.
14Ibid., p. 258.
15Cf. the myth in the “Visio Arislei,” especially the version in the Rosarium
philosophorum (Art. aurif. , II, p. 246), likewise the drowning of the sun in the
Mercurial Fountain and the green lion who devours the sun ( Art. aurif. , II, pp.
315, 366). Cf. “The Psychology of the Transference,” pars. 467 ﬀ.
16The white stone appears on the edge of the vessel, “like Oriental gems, like
ﬁsh’s eyes.” Cf. Joannes Isaacus Hollandus, Opera mineralia (1600), p. 370. Also
Lagneus, “Harmonica chemica.” Theatrum chemicum , IV (1613), p. 870. The eyes
appear at the end of the nigredo and with the beginning of the albedo. Another
simile of the same sort is the scintillae that appear in the dark substance. This idea
is traced back to Zacharias 4:10 (DV): “And they shall rejoice and see the tinplummet in the hand of Zorobabel. These are the seven eyes of the Lord thatrun to and fro through the whole earth.” (Cf. Eirenaeus Orandus, in the intro-duction to Nicholas Flamel’s Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures , 1624, fol. A5.)
They are the seven eyes of God on the corner-stone of the new temple (Zach.3:9). The number seven suggests the seven stars, the planetary gods, who weredepicted by the alchemists in a cave under the earth (Mylius, Philosophia reformata ,
1622, p. 167). They are the “sleepers enchained in Hades” (Berthelot, Collection
des anciens alchimistes grecs , IV , xx, 8). This is an allusion to the legend of the seven
sleepers.concerning rebirth
88

time, by Antichrist, but is able to restore himself to life. He is
analogous to the Second Adam, with whom the reanimated ﬁsh
is identi ﬁed;17 he is a counsellor, a Paraclete, “Brother Khidr.”
Anyway Moses accepts him as a higher consciousness and looksup to him for instruction. Then follow those incomprehensibledeeds which show how ego-consciousness reacts to the superiorguidance of the self through the twists and turns of fate. To theinitiate who is capable of transformation it is a comforting tale;to the obedient believer, an exhortation not to murmur againstAllah’s incomprehensible omnipotence. Khidr symbolizes notonly the higher wisdom but also a way of acting which is inaccord with this wisdom and transcends reason.
Anyone hearing such a mystery tale will recognize himself in
248
the questing Moses and the forgetful Joshua, and the tale showshim how the immortality-bringing rebirth comes about. Charac-teristically, it is neither Moses nor Joshua who is transformed,but the forgotten ﬁsh. Where the ﬁsh disappears, there is the
birthplace of Khidr. The immortal being issues from somethinghumble and forgotten, indeed, from a wholly improbablesource. This is the familiar motif of the hero’s birth and need notbe documented here.
18 Anyone who knows the Bible will think
of Isaiah 53:2 ﬀ., where the “servant of God” is described, and of
the gospel stories of the Nativity. The nourishing character ofthe transformative substance or deity is borne out by numerous
17Vollers, p. 254. This may possibly be due to Christian in ﬂuence: one thinks of
the ﬁsh meals of the early Christians and of ﬁsh symbolism in general. Vollers
himself stresses the analogy between Christ and Khidr. Concerning the ﬁsh
symbolism, see Aion.
18Further examples in Symbols of Transformation , Part II. I could give many more
from alchemy, but shall content myself with the old verse:
“This is the stone, poor and of little price.
Spurned by the fool, but honoured by the wise.”
(Ros. phil. , in Art. aurif. , II, p. 210) The “lapis exilis” may be a connecting-link
with the “lapsit exillis,” the grail of Wolfram von Eschenbach.symbols illustrating the process of transformation 89

cult-legends: Christ is the bread, Osiris the wheat, Mondamin
the maize,19 etc. These symbols coincide with a psychic fact which
obviously, from the point of view of consciousness, has thesigni ﬁcance merely of something to be assimilated, but whose
real nature is overlooked. The ﬁsh symbol shows immediately
what this is: it is the “nourishing” in ﬂuence of unconscious
contents, which maintain the vitality of consciousness by a con-tinual in ﬂux of energy; for consciousness does not produce its
energy by itself. What is capable of transformation is just thisroot of consciousness, which—inconspicuous and almost invis-ible (i.e., unconscious) though it is—provides consciousnesswith all its energy. Since the unconscious gives us the feelingthat it is something alien, a non-ego, it is quite natural that itshould be symbolized by an alien ﬁgure. Thus, on the one hand,
it is the most insigni ﬁcant of things, while on the other, so far as
it potentially contains that “round” wholeness which con-sciousness lacks, it is the most signi ﬁcant of all. This “round”
thing is the great treasure that lies hidden in the cave of theunconscious, and its personi ﬁcation is this personal being who
represents the higher unity of conscious and unconscious. It is aﬁgure comparable to Hiranyagarbha, Purusha, Atman, and the
mystic Buddha. For this reason I have elected to call it the “self,”by which I understand a psychic totality and at the same time acentre, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it,just as a larger circle encloses a smaller one.
The intuition of immortality which makes itself felt during
249
the transformation is connected with the peculiar nature of theunconscious. It is, in a sense, non-spatial and non-temporal. Theempirical proof of this is the occurrence of so-called telepathicphenomena, which are still denied by hypersceptical critics,
19[The Ojibway legend of Mondamin was recorded by H. R. Schoolcraft and
became a source for Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha . Cf. M. L. Williams, Schoolcraft’s
Indian Legends , pp. 58 ﬀ.—E .]concerning rebirth 90

although in reality they are much more common than is gener-
ally supposed.20 The feeling of immortality, it seems to me, has its
origin in a peculiar feeling of extension in space and time, and Iam inclined to regard the dei ﬁcation rites in the mysteries as a
projection of this same psychic phenomenon.
The character of the self as a personality comes out very
250
plainly in the Khidr legend. This feature is most strikinglyexpressed in the non-Koranic stories about Khidr, of whichVollers gives some telling examples. During my trip throughKenya, the headman of our safari was a Somali who had beenbrought up in the Su ﬁ faith. To him Khidr was in every way a
living person, and he assured me that I might at any time meetKhidr, because I was, as he put it, a M’tu-ya-kitabu ,
21 a “man of the
Book,” meaning the Koran. He had gathered from our talks that Iknew the Koran better than he did himself (which was, by theway, not saying a great deal). For this reason he regarded me as“islamu.” He told me I might meet Khidr in the street in theshape of a man, or he might appear to me during the night as apure white light, or—he smilingly picked a blade of grass—theVerdant One might even look like that. He said he himself hadonce been comforted and helped by Khidr, when he could notﬁnd a job after the war and was su ﬀering want. One night, while
he slept, he dreamt he saw a bright white light near the door andhe knew it was Khidr. Quickly leaping to his feet (in the dream),he reverentially saluted him with the words salem aleikum , “peace
be with you,” and then he knew that his wish would be ful ﬁlled.
He added that a few days later he was o ﬀered the post as head-
man of a safari by a ﬁrm of out ﬁtters in Nairobi.
This shows that, even in our own day, Khidr still lives on in
251
20Rhine, New Frontiers of the Mind . [Cf. also “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connect-
ing Principle.”—E  .]
21He spoke in Kiswahili, the lingua franca of East Africa. It contains many
words borrowed from Arabic, as shown by the above example: kitab = book.symbols illustrating the process of transformation 91

the religion of the people, as friend, adviser, comforter, and
teacher of revealed wisdom. The position assigned to him bydogma was, according to my Somali, that of maleika kwanza-ya-
mungu , “First Angel of God”—a sort of “Angel of the Face,” an
angelos in the true sense of the word, a messenger.
Khidr’s character as a friend explains the subsequent part of
252
the Eighteenth Sura, which reads as follows:
They will ask you about Dhulqarnein. Say: “I will give you an
account of him.
“We made him mighty in the land and gave him means to
achieve all things. He journeyed on a certain road until hereached the West and saw the sun setting in a pool of blackmud. Hard by he found a certain people.
“ ‘Dhulqarnein,’ we said, ‘you must either punish them or
show them kindness.’“He replied: ‘The wicked We shall surely punish. Then theyshall return to their Lord and be sternly punished by Him. Asfor those that have faith and do good works, we shall bestow onthem a rich reward and deal indulgently with them.’
“He then journeyed along another road until he reached the
East and saw the sun rising upon a people whom We hadutterly exposed to its ﬂaming rays. So he did; and We had fullknowledge of all the forces at his command.
“Then he followed yet another route until he came between
the Two Mountains and found a people who could barelyunderstand a word. ‘Dhulqarnein,’ they said, ‘Gog and Magogare ravaging this land. Build us a rampart against them and wewill pay you tribute.’
“He replied: ‘The power which my Lord has given me is
better than any tribute. Lend me a force of labourers, and I willraise a rampart between you and them. Come, bring me blocksof iron.’
“He dammed up the valley between the Two Mountains, andconcerning rebirth 92

said: ‘Ply your bellows.’ And when the iron blocks were red with
heat, he said: ‘Bring me molten brass to pour on them.’
“Gog and Magog could not scale it, nor could they dig their
way through it. He said: ‘This is a blessing from my Lord. Butwhen my Lord’s promise is fulﬁlled, He will level it to dust. Thepromise of my Lord is true.” ’
On that day We will let them come in tumultuous throngs.
The Trumpet shall be sounded and We will gather them alltogether.
On that day Hell shall be laid bare before the unbelievers,
who have turned a blind eye to My admonition and a deaf ear toMy warning.
We see here another instance of that lack of coherence which 253
is not uncommon in the Koran. How are we to account for this
apparently abrupt transition to Dhulqarnein, the Two-hornedOne, that is to say, Alexander the Great? Apart from the unheard-of anachronism (Mohammed’s chronology in general leavesmuch to be desired), one does not quite understand why Alex-ander is brought in here at all. But it has to be borne in mind thatKhidr and Dhulqarnein are the great pair of friends, altogether
comparable to the Dioscuri, as Vollers rightly emphasizes. Thepsychological connection may therefore be presumed to be asfollows: Moses has had a profoundly moving experience of theself, which brought unconscious processes before his eyes withoverwhelming clarity. Afterwards, when he comes to his people,the Jews, who are counted among the in ﬁdels, and wants to tell
them about his experience, he prefers to use the form of a mys-tery legend. Instead of speaking about himself, he speaks aboutthe Two-horned One. Since Moses himself is also “horned,” thesubstitution of Dhulqarnein appears plausible. Then he has torelate the history of this friendship and describe how Khidrhelped his friend. Dhulqarnein makes his way to the setting ofthe sun and then to its rising. That is, he describes the way of thesymbols illustrating the process of transformation 93

renewal of the sun, through death and darkness to a new resur-
rection. All this again indicates that it is Khidr who not onlystands by man in his bodily needs but also helps him to attainrebirth.
22 The Koran, it is true, makes no distinction in this narra-
tive between Allah, who is speaking in the ﬁrst person plural,
and Khidr. But it is clear that this section is simply a continuationof the helpful actions described previously, from which it isevident that Khidr is a symbolization or “incarnation” of Allah.The friendship between Khidr and Alexander plays an especiallyprominent part in the commentaries, as does also the connectionwith the prophet Elijah. Vollers does not hesitate to extend thecomparison to that other pair of friends, Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
23
To sum up, then: Moses has to recount the deeds of the two 254
friends to his people in the manner of an impersonal mysterylegend. Psychologically this means that the transformation has tobe described or felt as happening to the “other.” Although it isMoses himself who, in his experience with Khidr, stands inDhulqarnein’s place, he has to name the latter instead of himselfin telling the story. This can hardly be accidental, for the greatpsychic danger which is always connected with individuation,or the development of the self, lies in the identi ﬁcation of ego-
consciousness with the self. This produces an in ﬂation which
threatens consciousness with dissolution. All the more primitiveor older cultures show a ﬁne sense for the “perils of the soul”
and for the dangerousness and general unreliability of the gods.That is, they have not yet lost their psychic instinct for the barelyperceptible and yet vital processes going on in the background,which can hardly be said of our modern culture. To be sure, wehave before our eyes as a warning just such a pair of friends
22There are similar indications in the Jewish tales about Alexander. Cf. Bin
Gorion, Der Born Judas , III, p. 133, for the legend of the “water of life,” which is
related to the 18th Sura.
23[For a fuller discussion of these relationships, see Symbols of Transformation , pars.
282ﬀ.—E .]concerning rebirth 94

distorted by in ﬂation—Nietzsche and Zarathustra—but the
warning has not been heeded. And what are we to make of Faustand Mephistopheles? The Faustian hybris is already the ﬁrst step
towards madness. The fact that the unimpressive beginning ofthe transformation in Faust is a dog and not an edible ﬁsh, and
that the transformed ﬁgure is the devil and not a wise friend,
“endowed with Our grace and Our wisdom,” might, I aminclined to think, o ﬀer a key to our understanding of the highly
enigmatic Germanic soul.
Without entering into other details of the text, I would like to
255
draw attention to one more point: the building of the rampartagainst Gog and Magog (also known as Yajuj and Majuj). Thismotif is a repetition of Khidr’s last deed in the previous episode,the rebuilding of the town wall. But this time the wall is to be astrong defence against Gog and Magog. The passage may possiblyrefer to Revelation 20:7f. (AV):
And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed
out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations whichare in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gatherthem together for battle: the number of whom is as the sand ofthe sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, andcompassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city.
Here Dhulqarnein takes over the role of Khidr and builds an 256
unscalable rampart for the people living “between Two Moun-
tains.” This is obviously the same place in the middle which is tobe protected against Gog and Magog, the featureless, hostilemasses. Psychologically, it is again a question of the self,enthroned in the place of the middle, and referred to in Revela-tion as the beloved city (Jerusalem, the centre of the earth). Theself is the hero, threatened already at birth by envious collectiveforces; the jewel that is coveted by all and arouses jealous strife;and ﬁnally the god who is dismembered by the old, evil powersymbols illustrating the process of transformation 95

of darkness. In its psychological meaning, individuation is an
opus contra naturam , which creates a horror vacui in the collective layer
and is only too likely to collapse under the impact of the collect-ive forces of the psyche. The mystery legend of the two helpfulfriends promises protection
24 to him who has found the jewel on
his quest. But there will come a time when, in accordance withAllah’s providence, even the iron rampart will fall to pieces,namely, on the day when the world comes to an end, or psycho-logically speaking, when individual consciousness is extin-guished in the waters of darkness, that is to say when a subjective
end of the world is experienced. By this is meant the momentwhen consciousness sinks back into the darkness from which itoriginally emerged, like Khidr’s island: the moment of death.
The legend then continues along eschatological lines: on that
257
day (the day of the Last Judgment) the light returns to eternallight and the darkness to eternal darkness. The opposites areseparated and a timeless state of permanence sets in, which,because of the absolute separation of opposites, is neverthelessone of supreme tension and therefore corresponds to theimprobable initial state. This is in contrast to the view which seesthe end as a complexio oppositorum .
With this prospect of eternity, Paradise, and Hell the Eight-
258
eenth Sura comes to an end. In spite of its apparently discon-nected and allusive character, it gives an almost perfect picture ofa psychic transformation or rebirth which today, with ourgreater psychological insight, we would recognize as an indi-viduation process. Because of the great age of the legend and theIslamic prophet’s primitive cast of mind, the process takes placeentirely outside the sphere of consciousness and is projected inthe form of a mystery legend of a friend or a pair of friends andthe deeds they perform. That is why it is all so allusive andlacking in logical sequence. Nevertheless, the legend expresses
24Just as the Dioscuri come to the aid of those who are in danger at sea.concerning rebirth 96

the obscure archetype of transformation so admirably that the
passionate religious eros of the Arab ﬁnds it completely satisfying.
It is for this reason that the ﬁgure of Khidr plays such an import-
ant part in Islamic mysticism.symbols illustrating the process of transformation 97

Part III
The Phenomenology of the Spirit
in Fairytales

1
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF
THE SPIRIT IN FAIRYTALES1
One of the unbreakable rules in scienti ﬁc research is to take an 384
object as known only so far as the inquirer is in a position to
make scienti ﬁcally valid statements about it. “Valid” in this sense
simply means what can be veri ﬁed by facts. The object of inquiry
is the natural phenomenon. Now in psychology, one of the mostimportant phenomena is the statement , and in particular its form
and content, the latter aspect being perhaps the more signi ﬁcant
with regard to the nature of the psyche. The ﬁrst task that ordin-
arily presents itself is the description and arrangement of events,then comes the closer examination into the laws of their living
1[First published as a lecture, “Zur Psychologie des Geistes,” in the Eranos-
Jahrbuch 1945 . Revised and published as “Zur Phänomenologie des Geistes im
Märchen,” in Symbolik des Geistes (Zurich, 1948), from which the present transla-
tion was made. This translation was published in a slightly di ﬀerent form in
Spirit and Nature (Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 1; New York, 1953; London,
1954).—E  .]

behaviour. To inquire into the substance of what has been observed
is possible in natural science only where there is an Archime-dean point outside. For the psyche, no such outside standpointexists—only the psyche can observe the psyche. Consequently,knowledge of the psychic substance is impossible for us, at leastwith the means at present available. This does not rule out thepossibility that the atomic physics of the future may supply uswith the said Archimedean point. For the time being, however,our subtlest lucubrations can establish no more than is expressedin the statement: this is how the psyche behaves. The honestinvestigator will piously refrain from meddling with questionsof substance. I do not think it super ﬂuous to acquaint my reader
with the necessary limitations that psychology voluntarilyimposes on itself, for he will then be in a position to appreciatethe phenomenological standpoint of modern psychology,which is not always understood. This standpoint does notexclude the existence of faith, conviction, and experienced cer-tainties of whatever description, nor does it contest their pos-sible validity. Great as is their importance for the individual andfor collective life, psychology completely lacks the means toprove their validity in the scienti ﬁc sense. One may lament this
incapacity on the part of science, but that does not enable it tojump over its own shadow.
I CONCERNING THE WORD “SPIRIT”
The word “spirit” possesses such a wide range of application 385
that it requires considerable e ﬀort to make clear to oneself all the
things it can mean. Spirit, we say, is the principle that stands inopposition to matter. By this we understand an immaterial sub-stance or form of existence which on the highest and mostuniversal level is called “God.” We imagine this immaterial sub-stance also as the vehicle of psychic phenomena or even of lifeitself. In contradiction to this view there stands the antithesis:phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 102

spirit and nature. Here the concept of spirit is restricted to the
supernatural or anti-natural, and has lost its substantial connec-tion with psyche and life. A similar restriction is implied inSpinoza’s view that spirit is an attribute of the One Substance.Hylozoism goes even further, taking spirit to be a quality ofmatter.
A very widespread view conceives spirit as a higher and psy-
386
che as a lower principle of activity, and conversely the alchemiststhought of spirit as the ligamentum animae et corporis , obviously
regarding it as a spiritus vegetativus (the later life-spirit or nerve-
spirit). Equally common is the view that spirit and psyche areessentially the same and can be separated only arbitrarily. Wundttakes spirit as “the inner being, regardless of any connectionwith an outer being.” Others restrict spirit to certain psychiccapacities or functions or qualities, such as the capacity to thinkand reason in contradistinction to the more “soulful” senti-ments. Here spirit means the sum-total of all the phenomena ofrational thought, or of the intellect, including the will, memory,imagination, creative power, and aspirations motivated by ideals.Spirit has the further connotation of sprightliness , as when we say
that a person is “spirited,” meaning that he is versatile and fullof ideas, with a brilliant, witty, and surprising turn of mind.Again, spirit denotes a certain attitude or the principle under-lying it, for instance, one is “educated in the spirit of Pestalozzi,”or one says that the “spirit of Weimar is the immortal Germanheritage.” A special instance is the time-spirit, or spirit of theage, which stands for the principle and motive force behindcertain views, judgments, and actions of a collective nature. Thenthere is the “objective spirit,”
2 by which is meant the whole
stock of man’s cultural possessions with particular regard to hisintellectual and religious achievements.
As linguistic usage shows, spirit in the sense of an attitude has
387
2[An Hegelian term, roughly equivalent to our “spirit of man.”—T . ]phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 103

unmistakable leanings towards personi ﬁcation: the spirit of
Pestalozzi can also be taken concretistically as his ghost or imago,just as the spirits of Weimar are the personal spectres of Goetheand Schiller; for spirit still has the spookish meaning of the soulof one departed. The “cold breath of the spirits” points on theone hand to the ancient a ﬃnity of
ψυχή with ψυχρό/sigmaalt and
ψῦχο/sigmaalt , which both mean “cold,” and on the other hand to the
original meaning of πνεῦµα , which simply denoted “air in
motion”; and in the same way animus and anima were con-nected with
α῎ νεµο/sigmaalt , “wind.” The German word Geist probably
has more to do with something frothing, e ﬀervescing, or fer-
menting; hence a ﬃnities with Gischt (foam), Gäscht (yeast), ghost,
and also with the emotional ghastly and aghast, are not to be
rejected. From time immemorial emotion has been regarded aspossession, which is why we still say today, of a hot-temperedperson, that he is possessed of a devil or that an evil spirit hasentered into him.
3 Just as, according to the old view, the spirits
or souls of the dead are of a subtle disposition like a vapour or asmoke, so to the alchemist spiritus was a subtle, volatile, active,
and vivifying essence, such as alcohol was understood to be, andall the arcane substances. On this level, spirit includes spirits ofsalts, spirits of ammonia, formic spirit, etc.
This score or so of meanings and shades of meaning attribut-
388
able to the word “spirit” make it di ﬃcult for the psychologist to
delimit his subject conceptually, but on the other hand theylighten the task of describing it, since the many di ﬀerent aspects
go to form a vivid and concrete picture of the phenomenon inquestion. We are concerned with a functional complex whichoriginally, on the primitive level, was felt as an invisible, breath-like “presence.” William James has given us a lively account ofthis primordial phenomenon in his Varieties of Religious Experience .
Another well-known example is the wind of the Pentecostal
3See my “Spirit and Life.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 104

miracle. The primitive mentality ﬁnds it quite natural to person-
ify the invisible presence as a ghost or demon. The souls orspirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of theliving; they merely continue it. The view that the psyche is aspirit is implicit in this. When therefore something psychic hap-pens in the individual which he feels as belonging to himself,that something is his own spirit. But if anything psychic happenswhich seems to him strange, then it is somebody else’s spirit,and it may be causing a possession. The spirit in the ﬁrst case
corresponds to the subjective attitude, in the latter case to publicopinion, to the time-spirit, or to the original, not yet human,anthropoid disposition which we also call the unconscious .
In keeping with its original wind-nature, spirit is always an
389
active, winged, swift-moving being as well as that which vivi ﬁes,
stimulates, incites, ﬁres, and inspires. To put it in modern lan-
guage, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that veryreason the classical antithesis of matter—the antithesis, that is, ofits stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life anddeath. The subsequent di ﬀerentiation of this contrast leads to the
actually very remarkable opposition of spirit and nature. Eventhough spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, onecannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead. We must there-fore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spiritwhose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that incomparison with it the latter is no better than death.
This special development in man’s idea of spirit rests on the
390
recognition that its invisible presence is a psychic phenomenon,i.e., one’s own spirit, and that this consists not only of uprushesof life but of formal products too. Among the ﬁrst, the most
prominent are the images and shadowy presentations thatoccupy our inner ﬁeld of vision; among the second, thinking
and reason, which organize the world of images. In this way atranscendent spirit superimposed itself upon the original, nat-ural life-spirit and even swung over to the opposite position, asphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 105

though the latter were merely naturalistic. The transcendent
spirit became the supranatural and transmundane cosmic prin-ciple of order and as such was given the name of “God,” or atleast it became an attribute of the One Substance (as in Spinoza)or one Person of the Godhead (as in Christianity).
The corresponding development of spirit in the reverse, hylo-
391
zoistic direction— a maiori ad minus —took place under anti-
Christian auspices in materialism. The premise underlying thisreaction is the exclusive certainty of the spirit’s identity withpsychic functions, whose dependence upon brain and metabol-ism became increasingly clear. One had only to give the OneSubstance another name and call it “matter” to produce the ideaof a spirit which was entirely dependent on nutrition andenvironment, and whose highest form was the intellect or rea-son. This meant that the original pneumatic presence had takenup its abode in man’s physiology, and a writer like Klages couldarraign the spirit as the “adversary of the soul.”
4 For it was into
this latter concept that the original spontaneity of the spiritwithdrew after it had been degraded to a servile attribute ofmatter. Somewhere or other the deus ex machina quality of spirit
had to be preserved—if not in the spirit itself, then in its syno-nym the soul, that glancing, Aeolian
5 thing, elusive as a butter ﬂy
(anima, ψυχή ).
Even though the materialistic conception of the spirit did not 392
prevail everywhere, it still persisted, outside the sphere ofreligion, in the realm of conscious phenomena. Spirit as “sub-jective spirit” came to mean a purely endopsychic phenomenon,while “objective spirit” did not mean the universal spirit, orGod, but merely the sum total of intellectual and cultural posses-
4Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele .
5Soul, from Old German saiwalô , may be cognate with αἰόλο/sigmaalt , “quick-moving,
changeful of hue, shifting.” It also has the meaning of “wily” or “shifty”;hence an air of probability attaches to the alchemical de ﬁnition of anima as
Mercurius.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
106

sions which make up our human institutions and the content of
our libraries. Spirit had forfeited its original nature, its autonomyand spontaneity over a very wide area, with the solitary excep-tion of the religious ﬁeld, where, at least in principle, its pristine
character remained unimpaired.
In this résumé we have described an entity which presents
itself to us as an immediate psychic phenomenon distinguishedfrom other psychisms whose existence is naïvely believed to becausally dependent upon physical in ﬂuences. A connection
between spirit and physical conditions is not immediatelyapparent, and for this reason it was credited with immaterialityto a much higher degree than was the case with psychic phe-nomena in the narrower sense. Not only is a certain physicaldependence attributed to the latter, but they are themselvesthought of as possessing a kind of materiality, as the idea of thesubtle body and the Chinese kuei-soul clearly show. In view of the
intimate connection that exists between certain psychic pro-cesses and their physical parallels we cannot very well accept thetotal immateriality of the psyche. As against this, the consensus
omnium insists on the immateriality of spirit, though not every-
one would agree that it also has a reality of its own. It is, how-ever, not easy to see why our hypothetical “matter,” which looksquite di ﬀerent from what it did even thirty years ago, alone
should be real, and spirit not. Although the idea of immaterialitydoes not in itself exclude that of reality, popular opinion invari-ably associates reality with materiality. Spirit and matter maywell be forms of one and the same transcendental being. Forinstance the Tantrists, with as much right, say that matter isnothing other than the concreteness of God’s thoughts. The soleimmediate reality is the psychic reality of conscious contents,which are as it were labelled with a spiritual or material origin asthe case may be.
The hallmarks of spirit are, ﬁrstly, the principle of spon-
393
taneous movement and activity; secondly, the spontaneousphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 107

capacity to produce images independently of sense perception;
and thirdly, the autonomous and sovereign manipulation ofthese images. This spiritual entity approaches primitive manfrom outside; but with increasing development it gets lodged inman’s consciousness and becomes a subordinate function, thusapparently forfeiting its original character of autonomy. Thatcharacter is now retained only in the most conservative views,namely in the religions. The descent of spirit into the sphere ofhuman consciousness is expressed in the myth of the divine
νοῦ/sigmaalt
caught in the embrace of /phialtύσι/sigmaalt . This process, continuing over
the ages, is probably an unavoidable necessity, and the religionswould ﬁnd themselves in a very forlorn situation if they believed
in the attempt to hold up evolution. Their task, if they are welladvised, is not to impede the ineluctable march of events, but toguide it in such a way that it can proceed without fatal injury tothe soul. The religions should therefore constantly recall to usthe origin and original character of the spirit, lest man shouldforget what he is drawing into himself and with what he isﬁlling 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 wholebeing that he is in gravest danger of thinking that he actuallycreated the spirit and that he “has” it. In reality, however, theprimordial phenomenon of the spirit takes possession of him,
and, while appearing to be the willing object of human inten-tions, it binds his freedom, just as the physical world does, witha thousand chains and becomes an obsessive idée-force . Spirit
threatens the naïve-minded man with in ﬂation, of which our
own times have given us the most horribly instructive examples.The danger becomes all the greater the more our interest fastensupon external objects and the more we forget that the di ﬀeren-
tiation of our relation to nature should go hand in hand with acorrespondingly di ﬀerentiated relation to the spirit, so as tophenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 108

establish the necessary balance. If the outer object is not o ﬀset
by an inner, unbridled materialism results, coupled withmaniacal arrogance or else the extinction of the autonomouspersonality, which is in any case the ideal of the totalitarianmass state.
As can readily be seen, the common modern idea of spirit ill
394
accords with the Christian view, which regards it as the summum
bonum , as God himself. To be sure, there is also the idea of an evil
spirit. But the modern idea cannot be equated with that either,since for us spirit is not necessarily evil; we would have to call itmorally indi ﬀerent or neutral. When the Bible says “God is
spirit,” it sounds more like the de ﬁnition of a substance, or like a
quali ﬁcation. But the devil too, it seems, is endowed with the
same peculiar spiritual substance, albeit an evil and corrupt one.The original identity of substance is still expressed in the idea ofthe fallen angel, as well as in the close connection betweenJehovah and Satan in the Old Testament. There may be an echo ofthis primitive connection in the Lord’s Prayer, where we say“Lead us not into temptation”—for is not this really the businessof the tempter , the devil himself?
This brings us to a point we have not considered at all in the
395
course of our observations so far. We have availed ourselves ofcultural and everyday conceptions which are the product ofhuman consciousness and its re ﬂections, in order to form a pic-
ture of the psychic modes of manifestation of the factor “spirit.”But we have yet to consider that because of its original auton-omy,
6 about which there can be no doubt in the psychological
sense, the spirit is quite capable of staging its own manifestationsspontaneously.
6Even if one accepts the view that a self-revelation of spirit—an apparition for
instance—is nothing but an hallucination, the fact remains that this is a spon-taneous psychic event not subject to our control. At any rate it is an autono-mous complex, and that is quite su ﬃcient for our purpose.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
109

II SELF-REPRESENTATION OF THE SPIRIT
IN DREAMS
The psychic manifestations of the spirit indicate at once that 396
they are of an archetypal nature—in other words, the phenom-
enon we call spirit depends on the existence of an autonomousprimordial image which is universally present in the pre-conscious makeup of the human psyche. As usual, I ﬁrst came up
against this problem when investigating the dreams of mypatients. It struck me that a certain kind of father-complex has a“spiritual” character, so to speak, in the sense that the father-image gives rise to statements, actions, tendencies, impulses,opinions, etc., to which one could hardly deny the attribute“spiritual.” In men, a positive father-complex very often pro-duces a certain credulity with regard to authority and a distinctwillingness to bow down before all spiritual dogmas and values;while in women, it induces the liveliest spiritual aspirations andinterests. In dreams, it is always the father- ﬁgure from whom the
decisive convictions, prohibitions, and wise counsels emanate.The invisibility of this source is frequently emphasized by thefact that it consists simply of an authoritative voice which passesﬁnal judgments.
7 Mostly, therefore, it is the ﬁgure of a “wise old
man” who symbolizes the spiritual factor. Sometimes the part isplayed by a “real” spirit, namely the ghost of one dead, or, morerarely, by grotesque gnome-like ﬁgures or talking animals. The
dwarf forms are found, at least in my experience, mainly inwomen; hence it seems to me logical that in Ernst Barlach’s playDer tote T ag (1912), the gnome-like ﬁgure of Steissbart (“Rump-
beard”) is associated with the mother, just as Bes is associatedwith the mother-goddess at Karnak. In both sexes the spirit canalso take the form of a boy or a youth. In women he correspondsto the so-called “positive” animus who indicates the possibility
7Cf. Psychology and Alchemy , par. 115.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 110

of conscious spiritual e ﬀort. In men his meaning is not so sim-
ple. He can be positive, in which case he signi ﬁes the “higher”
personality, the self or ﬁlius regius as conceived by the alchemists.8
But he can also be negative, and then he signi ﬁes the infantile
shadow.9 In both cases the boy means some form of spirit.10
Graybeard and boy belong together. The pair of them play aconsiderable role in alchemy as symbols of Mercurius.
It can never be established with one-hundred-per-cent cer-
397
tainty whether the spirit- ﬁgures in dreams are morally good.
Very often they show all the signs of duplicity, if not of outrightmalice. I must emphasize, however, that the grand plan on whichthe unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccess-ible to our understanding that we can never know what evil maynot be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia,and what good may very possibly lead to evil. Sometimes theprobate spiritus recommended by John cannot, with the best will in
the world, be anything other than a cautious and patient waitingto see how things will ﬁnally turn out.
The ﬁgure of the wise old man can appear so plastically, not
398
only in dreams but also in visionary meditation (or what we call
“active imagination”), that, as is sometimes apparently the casein India, it takes over the role of a guru.
11 The wise old man
appears in dreams in the guise of a magician, doctor, priest,
8Cf. the vision of the “naked boy” in Meister Eckhart (trans. by Evans, I, p.
438).
9I would remind the reader of the “boys” in Bruno Goetz’s novel Das Reich ohne
Raum.
10Cf. the paper on the “Child Archetype” in this volume, pars. 268f.
11Hence the many miraculous stories about rishis and mahatmas. A cultured
Indian with whom I once conversed on the subject of gurus told me when Iasked him who his guru had been, that it was Shankaracharya (who lived in the8th and 9th cents.) “But that’s the celebrated commentator,” I remarked inamazement. Whereupon he replied, “Yes, so he was; but naturally it was hisspirit,” not in the least perturbed by my Western bewilderment.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
111

teacher, professor, grandfather, or any other person possessing
authority. The archetype of spirit in the shape of a man, hob-goblin, or animal always appears in a situation where insight,understanding, good advice, determination, planning, etc., areneeded but cannot be mustered on one’s own resources. Thearchetype compensates this state of spiritual de ﬁciency by con-
tents designed to ﬁll the gap. An excellent example of this is the
dream about the white and black magicians, which tried tocompensate the spiritual di ﬃculties of a young theological stu-
dent. I did not know the dreamer myself, so the question of mypersonal in ﬂuence is ruled out. He dreamed he was standing in the
presence of a sublime hieratic ﬁgure called the “white magician,” who was
nevertheless clothed in a long black robe. This magician had just ended a lengthydiscourse with the words “And for that we require the help of the black magi-cian.” Then the door suddenly opened and another old man came in, the “blackmagician,” who however was dressed in a white robe. He too looked noble andsublime. The black magician evidently wanted to speak with the white, buthesitated to do so in the presence of the dreamer. At that the white magician,pointing to the dreamer, said, “Speak, he is an innocent.” So the black magician
began to relate a strange story of how he had found the lost keys of Paradise anddid not know how to use them. He had, he said, come to the white magician for anexplanation of the secret of the keys. He told him that the king of the country inwhich he lived was seeking a suitable tomb for himself. His subjects had chancedto dig up an old sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of a virgin. The kingopened the sarcophagus, threw away the bones, and had the empty sarcophagusburied again for later use. But no sooner had the bones seen the light of day thanthe being to whom they once had belonged—the virgin—changed into a blackhorse that galloped o ﬀ into the desert. The black magician pursued it across the
sandy wastes and beyond, and there after many vicissitudes and di ﬃculties he
found the lost keys of Paradise . That was the end of his story, and also,
unfortunately, of the dream.
Here the compensation certainly did not fall out as the
399
dreamer would wish, by handing him a solution on a plate;rather it confronted him with a problem to which I have alreadyphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 112

alluded, and one which life is always bringing us up against:
namely, the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewilderinginterplay of good and evil, and the remorseless concatenation ofguilt, su ﬀering, and redemption. This path to the primordial
religious experience is the right one, but how many can recog-nize it? It is like a still small voice, and it sounds from afar. It isambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardousadventure; a razor-edged path, to be trodden for God’s sake only,without assurance and without sanction.
III THE SPIRIT IN FAIRYTALES
I would gladly present the reader with some more modern 400
dream-material, but I fear that the individualism of dreamswould make too high a demand upon our exposition and wouldclaim more space than is here at our disposal. We shall thereforeturn to folklore, where we need not get involved in the grimconfrontations and entanglements of individual case historiesand can observe the variations of the spirit motif withouthaving to consider conditions that are more or less unique. Inmyths and fairytales, as in dreams, the psyche tells its own story,and the interplay of the archetypes is revealed in its naturalsetting as “formation, transformation/the eternal Mind’s eternalrecreation.”
The frequency with which the spirit-type appears as an old
401
man is about the same in fairytales as in dreams.12 The old man
always appears when the hero is in a hopeless and desperatesituation from which only profound re ﬂection or a lucky idea—
in other words, a spiritual function or an endopsychic automa-tism of some kind—can extricate him. But since, for internal andexternal reasons, the hero cannot accomplish this himself, the
12I am indebted to Mrs. H. von Roques and Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz for the
fairytale material used here.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 113

knowledge needed to compensate the de ﬁciency comes in the
form of a personi ﬁed thought, i.e., in the shape of this sagacious
and helpful old man. An Estonian fairytale,13 for instance, tells
how an ill-treated little orphan boy who had let a cow escapewas afraid to return home again for fear of more punishment. Sohe ran away, chancing to luck. He naturally got himself into ahopeless situation, with no visible way out. Exhausted, he fellinto a deep sleep. When he awoke, “it seemed to him that he hadsomething liquid in his mouth, and he saw a little old man witha long grey beard standing before him, who was in the act ofreplacing the stopper in his little milk- ﬂask. ‘Give me some more
to drink,’ begged the boy. ‘You have had enough for today,’
replied the old man. ‘If my path had not chanced to lead me toyou, that would assuredly have been your last sleep, for when Ifound you, you were half dead.’ Then the old man asked the boywho he was and where he wanted to go. The boy recountedeverything he could remember happening to him up to thebeating he had received the previous evening. ‘My dear child,’said the old man, ‘you are no better and no worse o ﬀ than many
others whose dear protectors and comforters rest in their co ﬃns
under the earth. You can no longer turn back. Now that you haverun away, you must seek a new fortune in the world. As I haveneither house nor home, nor wife nor child, I cannot take fur-ther care of you, but I will give you some good advice fornothing.’”
So far the old man has been expressing no more than what the
402
boy, the hero of the tale, could have thought out for himself.Having given way to the stress of emotion and simply run o ﬀ
13Finnische und estnische Volksmärchen , No. 68, p. 208 [“How an Orphan Boy
Unexpectedly Found His Luck”]. [All German collections of tales here cited arelisted under “Folktales” in the bibliography, q.v. English titles of tales are givenin brackets, though no attempt has been made to locate publishedtranslations.—E  .]phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
114

like that into the blue, he would at least have had to re ﬂect that
he needed food. It would also have been necessary, at such amoment, to consider his position. The whole story of his life upto the recent past would then have passed before his mind, as isusual in such cases. An anamnesis of this kind is a purposefulprocess whose aim is to gather the assets of the whole personal-ity together at the critical moment, when all one’s spiritual andphysical forces are challenged, and with this united strength toﬂing open the door of the future. No one can help the boy to do
this; he has to rely entirely on himself. There is no going back.This realization will give the necessary resolution to his actions.By forcing him to face the issue, the old man saves him thetrouble of making up his mind. Indeed the old man is himselfthis purposeful re ﬂection and concentration of moral and phys-
ical forces that comes about spontaneously in the psychic spaceoutside consciousness when conscious thought is not yet—or isno longer—possible. The concentration and tension of psychicforces have something about them that always looks like magic:they develop an unexpected power of endurance which is oftensuperior to the conscious e ﬀort of will. One can observe this
experimentally in the arti ﬁcial concentration induced by hyp-
nosis: in my demonstrations I used regularly to put an hysteric,of weak bodily build, into a deep hypnotic sleep and then get herto lie with the back of her head on one chair and her heelsresting on another, sti ﬀ as a board, and leave her there for about
a minute. Her pulse would gradually go up to 90. A husky youngathlete among the students tried in vain to imitate this feat witha conscious e ﬀort of will. He collapsed in the middle with his
pulse racing at 120.
When the clever old man had brought the boy to this point he
403
could begin his good advice, i.e., the situation no longer lookedhopeless. He advised him to continue his wanderings, always tothe eastward, where after seven years he would reach the greatmountain that betokened his good fortune. The bigness andphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 115

tallness of the mountain are allusions to his adult personality.14
Concentration of his powers brings assurance and is therefore
the best guarantee of success.15 From now on he will lack for
nothing. “Take my scrip and my ﬂask,” says the old man, “and
each day you will ﬁnd in them all the food and drink you need.”
At the same time he gave him a burdock leaf that could changeinto a boat whenever the boy had to cross water.
Often the old man in fairytales asks questions like who? why?
404
whence? and whither?16 for the purpose of inducing self-
reﬂection and mobilizing the moral forces, and more often still
he gives the necessary magical talisman,17 the unexpected and
improbable power to succeed, which is one of the peculiarities
14The mountain stands for the goal of the pilgrimage and ascent, hence it often
has the psychological meaning of the self. The I Ching describes the goal thus:
“The king introduces him/To the Western Mountain” (Wilhelm/Baynes trans.,1967, p. 74—Hexagram 17, Sui, “Following”). Cf. Honorius of Autun ( Expositio
in Cantica canticorum , col. 389): “The mountains are prophets.” Richard of
St. Victor says: “Vis videre Christum trans ﬁguratum? Ascende in montem
istum, disce cognoscere te ipsum” (Do you wish to see the trans ﬁgured
Christ? Ascend that mountain and learn to know yourself). ( Benjamin minor , cols.
53–56.)
15In this respect we would call attention to the phenomenology of yoga.
16There are numerous examples of this: Spanische und Portugiesische Volksmärchen , pp.
158, 199 [“The White Parrot” and “Queen Rose, or Little Tom”]; Russische
Volksmärchen , p. 149 [“The Girl with No Hands”]; Balkanmärchen , p. 64 [“The
Shepherd and the Three Samovilas (Nymphs)”]; Märchen aus Iran , pp. 150 ﬀ.
[“The Secret of the Bath of Windburg”]; Nordische Volksmärchen , I, p. 231 [“The
Werewolf”].
17To the girl looking for her brothers he gives a ball of thread that rolls towards
them ( Finnische und Estnische Volksmärchen , p. 260 [“The Contending Brothers”]).
The prince who is searching for the kingdom of heaven is given a boat thatgoes by itself ( Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm , pp. 381f. [“The Iron Boots”]). Other
gifts are a ﬂute that sets everybody dancing ( Balkanmärchen , p. 173 [“The Twelve
Crumbs”]), or the path- ﬁnding ball, the sta ﬀ of invisibility ( Nordische Volksm-
ärchen , I. p. 97 [“The Princess with Twelve Pairs of Golden Shoes”]), miraculous
dogs (ibid., p. 287 [“The Three Dogs”]), or a book of secret wisdom ( Chine-
sische Volksmärchen , p. 258 [“Jang Liang”]).phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
116

of the uni ﬁed personality in good or bad alike. But the inter-
vention of the old man—the spontaneous objectivation ofthe archetype—would seem to be equally indispensable, sincethe conscious will by itself is hardly ever capable of uniting thepersonality to the point where it acquires this extraordinarypower to succeed. For that, not only in fairytales but in lifegenerally, the objective intervention of the archetype is needed,which checks the purely a ﬀective reactions with a chain of inner
confrontations and realizations. These cause the who? where?how? why? to emerge clearly and in this wise bring knowledgeof the immediate situation as well as of the goal. The resultantenlightenment and untying of the fatal tangle often has some-thing positively magical about it—an experience not unknownto the psychotherapist.
The tendency of the old man to set one thinking also takes the
405
form of urging people to “sleep on it.” Thus he says to the girlwho is searching for her lost brothers: “Lie down: morning iscleverer than evening.”
18 He also sees through the gloomy situ-
ation of the hero who has got himself into trouble, or at least cangive him such information as will help him on his journey. Tothis end he makes ready use of animals, particularly birds. To theprince who has gone in search of the kingdom of heaven the oldhermit says: “I have lived here for three hundred years, but neveryet has anybody asked me about the kingdom of heaven. I cannottell you myself; but up there, on another ﬂoor of the house, live
all kinds of birds, and they can surely tell you.”
19 The old man
knows what roads lead to the goal and points them out to thehero.
20 He warns of dangers to come and supplies the means of
18Finnische und estnische Volksmärchen , loc. cit.
19Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm , p. 382 [op. cit.]. In one Balkan tale ( Balkanmärchen , p.
65 [“The Shepherd and the Three Samovilas”]) the old man is called the “Czarof all the birds.” Here the magpie knows all the answers. Cf. the mysterious“master of the dovecot” in Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der weisse Dominikaner .
20Märchen aus Iran , p. 152 [op. cit.].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 117

meeting them e ﬀectively. For instance, he tells the boy who has
gone to fetch the silver water that the well is guarded by a lionwho has the deceptive trick of sleeping with his eyes open andwatching with his eyes shut;
21 or he counsels the youth who is
riding to a magic fountain in order to fetch the healing draughtfor the king, only to draw the water at a trot because of thelurking witches who lasso everybody that comes to the foun-tain.
22 He charges the princess whose lover has been changed
into a werewolf to make a ﬁre and put a cauldron of tar over it.
Then she must plunge her beloved white lily into the boiling tar,and when the werewolf comes, she must empty the cauldronover its head, which will release her lover from the spell.
23
Occasionally the old man is a very critical old man, as in theCaucasian tale of the youngest prince who wanted to build aﬂawless church for his father, so as to inherit the kingdom. This
he does, and nobody can discover a single ﬂaw, but then an old
man comes along and says, “That’s a ﬁne church you’ve built, to
be sure! What a pity the main wall is a bit crooked!” The princehas the church pulled down again and builds a new one, buthere too the old man discovers a ﬂaw, and so on for the third
time.
24
The old man thus represents knowledge, re ﬂection, insight, 406
wisdom, cleverness, and intuition on the one hand, and on the
other, moral qualities such as goodwill and readiness to help,which make his “spiritual” character su ﬃciently plain. Since
the archetype is an autonomous content of the unconscious, thefairytale, which usually concretizes the archetypes, can cause theold man to appear in a dream in much the same way as happensin modern dreams. In a Balkan tale the old man appears to the
21Spanische und Portugiesische Märchen , p. 158 [“The White Parrot”].
22Ibid., p. 199 [“Queen Rose, or Little Tom”].
23Nordische Volksmärchen , Vol. I, p. 231f. [“The Werewolf”].
24Kaukasische Märchen , pp. 35f. [“The False and the True Nightingale”].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 118

hard-pressed hero in a dream and gives him good advice about
accomplishing the impossible tasks that have been imposedupon him.
25 His relation to the unconscious is clearly expressed
in one Russian fairytale, where he is called the “King of theForest.” As the peasant sat down wearily on a tree stump, a littleold man crept out: “all wrinkled he was and a green beard hungdown to his knees.” “Who are you?” asked the peasant. “I amOch, King of the Forest,” said the manikin. The peasant hiredout his pro ﬂigate son to him, “and the King of the Forest
departed with the young man, and conducted him to that otherworld under the earth and brought him to a green hut . . . In thehut everything was green: the walls were green and the benches,Och’s wife was green and the children were green . . . and thelittle water-women who waited on him were as green as rue.”Even the food was green. The King of the Forest is here a vegeta-tion or tree numen who reigns in the woods and, through thenixies, also has connections with water, which clearly shows hisrelation to the unconscious since the latter is frequentlyexpressed through wood and water symbols.
There is equally a connection with the unconscious when the
407
old man appears as a dwarf. The fairytale about the princess whowas searching for her lover says: “Night came and the darkness,and still the princess sat in the same place and wept. As she satthere lost in thought, she heard a voice greeting her: ‘Goodevening, pretty maid! Why are you sitting here so lonely andsad?’ She sprang up hastily and felt very confused, and that wasno wonder. But when she looked round there was only a tinylittle old man standing before her, who nodded his head at herand looked so kind and simple.” In a Swiss fairytale, the peas-ant’s son who wants to bring the king’s daughter a basket ofapples encounters “es chlis isigs Männdli, das frogt-ne, was er doi dem Chratte häig?” (a little iron man who asked what he had
25Balkanmärchen , p. 217 [“The Lubi (She-Devil) and the Fair of the Earth”].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 119

there in the basket). In another passage the “Männdli” has “es
isigs Chlaidli a” (iron clothes on). By “isig” presumably “eisern”(iron) is meant, which is more probable than “eisig” (icy). Inthe latter case it would have to be “es Chlaidli vo Is” (clothes ofice).
26 There are indeed little ice men, and little metal men too;
in fact, in a modern dream I have even come across a little blackiron man who appeared at a critical juncture, like the one in thisfairytale of the country bumpkin who wanted to marry theprincess.
In a modern series of visions in which the ﬁgure of the wise
408
old man occurred several times, he was on one occasion of
normal size and appeared at the very bottom of a crater sur-rounded by high rocky walls; on another occasion he was a tinyﬁgure on the top of a mountain, inside a low, stony enclosure.
We ﬁnd the same motif in Goethe’s tale of the dwarf princess
who lived in a casket.
27 In this connection we might also men-
tion the Anthroparion, the little leaden man of the Zosimosvision,
28 as well as the metallic men who dwell in the mines, the
crafty dactyls of antiquity, the homunculi of the alchemists, andthe gnomic throng of hobgoblins, brownies, gremlins, etc. How“real” such conceptions are became clear to me on the occasionof a serious mountaineering accident: after the catastrophe twoof the climbers had the collective vision, in broad daylight, ofa little hooded man who scrambled out of an inaccessiblecrevasse in the ice face and passed across the glacier, creating aregular panic in the two beholders. I have often encounteredmotifs which made me think that the unconscious must be theworld of the in ﬁnitesimally small. Such an idea could be derived
26This occurs in the tale of the gri ﬃn, No. 84 in the volume of children’s
fairytales collected by the brothers Grimm (1912), II, pp. 84 ﬀ. The text swarms
with phonetic mistakes. [The English text (trans. by Margaret Hunt, rev. byJames Stern, no. 165) has “hoary.”—T .]
27Goethe, “Die neue Melusine.”
28Cf. “The Visions of Zosimos,” par. 87 (III, i, 2–3).phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 120

rationalistically from the obscure feeling that in all these visions
we are dealing with something endopsychic, the inference beingthat a thing must be exceedingly small in order to ﬁt inside the
head. I am no friend of any such “rational” conjectures, though Iwould not say that they are all beside the mark. It seems to memore probable that this liking for diminutives on the one handand for superlatives—giants, etc.—on the other is connectedwith the queer uncertainty of spatial and temporal relations inthe unconscious.
29 Man’s sense of proportion, his rational con-
ception of big and small, is distinctly anthropomorphic, and itloses its validity not only in the realm of physical phenomenabut also in those parts of the collective unconscious beyond therange of the speci ﬁcally human. The atman is “smaller than
small and bigger than big,” he is “the size of a thumb” yet he“encompasses the earth on every side and rules over the ten-ﬁnger space.” And of the Cabiri Goethe says: “little in length/
mighty in strength.” In the same way, the archetype of the wiseold man is quite tiny, almost imperceptible, and yet it possesses afateful potency, as anyone can see when he gets down to funda-mentals. The archetypes have this peculiarity in common withthe atomic world, which is demonstrating before our eyes thatthe more deeply the investigator penetrates into the universe ofmicrophysics the more devastating are the explosive forces heﬁnds enchained there. That the greatest e ﬀects come from the
smallest causes has become patently clear not only in physics butin the ﬁeld of psychological research as well. How often in the
critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to bea mere nothing!
In certain primitive fairytales, the illuminating quality of our
409
archetype is expressed by the fact that the old man is identi ﬁed
with the sun. He brings a ﬁrebrand with him which he uses for
29In one Siberian fairytale ( Märchen aus Sibirien , no. 13 [“The Man Turned to
Stone”]) the old man is a white shape towering up to heaven.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 121

roasting a pumpkin. After he has eaten, he takes the ﬁre away
again, which causes mankind to steal it from him.30 In a North
American Indian tale, the old man is a witch-doctor who ownsthe ﬁre.
31 Spirit too has a ﬁery aspect, as we know from the
language of the Old Testament and from the story of the Pente-costal miracle.
Apart from his cleverness, wisdom, and insight, the old man,
410
as we have already mentioned, is also notable for his moral qual-ities; what is more, he even tests the moral qualities of others andmakes his gifts dependent on this test. There is a particularlyinstructive example of this in the Estonian fairytale of the step-daughter and the real daughter. The former is an orphan dis-tinguished for her obedience and good behaviour. The storybegins with her dista ﬀ falling into a well. She jumps in after it,
but does not drown, and comes to a magic country where, con-tinuing her quest, she meets a cow, a ram, and an appletreewhose wishes she ful ﬁls. She now comes to a wash-house where
a dirty old man is sitting who wants her to wash him. Thefollowing dialogue develops: “Pretty maid, pretty maid, washme, do, it is hard for me to be so dirty!” “What shall I heat thestove with?” “Collect wooden pegs and crows’ dung and make aﬁre with that.” But she fetches sticks, and asks, “Where shall I
get the bath-water?” “Under the barn there stands a white mare.Get her to piss into the tub!” But she takes clean water, and asks,“Where shall I get a bath-switch?” “Cut o ﬀ the white mare’s tail
and make a bath-switch of that!” But she makes one out ofbirch-twigs, and asks, “Where shall I get soap?” “Take a pumice-
stone and scrub me with that!” But she fetches soap from thevillage and with that she washes the old man.
As a reward he gives her a bag full of gold and precious stones.
411
30Indianermärchen aus Südamerika , p. 285 [“The End of the World and the Theft of
Fire”—Bolivian].
31Indianermärchen aus Nordamerika , p. 74 [Tales of Manabos: “The Theft of Fire”].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 122

The daughter of the house naturally becomes jealous, throws
her dista ﬀ into the well, where she ﬁnds it again instantly.
Nevertheless she goes on and does everything wrong that thestepdaughter had done right, and is rewarded accordingly. Thefrequency of this motif makes further examples super ﬂuous.
The ﬁgure of the superior and helpful old man tempts one to
412
connect him somehow or other with God. In the German tale of
the soldier and the black princess32 it is related how the princess,
on whom a curse has been laid, creeps out of her iron co ﬃn
every night and devours the soldier standing guard over thetomb. One soldier, when his turn came, tried to escape. “Thatevening he stole away, ﬂed over the ﬁelds and mountains, and
came to a beautiful meadow. Suddenly a little man stood beforehim with a long grey beard, but it was none other than the LordGod himself, who could no longer go on looking at all themischief the devil wrought every night. ‘Whither away?’ said thelittle grey man, ‘may I come with you?’ And because the littleold man looked so friendly the soldier told him that he had runaway and why he had done so.” Good advice follows, as always.In this story the old man is taken for God in the same naïve waythat the English alchemist, Sir George Ripley,
33 describes the
“old king” as “antiquus dierum”—“the Ancient of Days.”
Just as all archetypes have a positive, favourable, bright side 413
that points upwards, so also they have one that points down-wards, partly negative and unfavourable, partly chthonic, butfor the rest merely neutral. To this the spirit archetype is noexception. Even his dwarf form implies a kind of limitation andsuggests a naturalistic vegetation-numen sprung from theunderworld. In one Balkan tale, the old man is handicapped bythe loss of an eye. It has been gouged out by the Vili, a species ofwinged demon, and the hero is charged with the task of getting
32Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm , pp. 189 ﬀ.
33In his “Cantilena” (15 cent.), [Cf. Mysterium Coniunctionis , par. 374.].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 123

them to restore it to him. The old man has therefore lost part of
his eyesight—that is, his insight and enlightenment—to thedaemonic world of darkness; this handicap is reminiscent of thefate of Osiris, who lost an eye at the sight of a black pig (hiswicked brother Set), or again of Wotan, who sacri ﬁced his eye at
the spring of Mimir. Characteristically enough, the animal rid-den by the old man in our fairytale is a goat, a sign that hehimself has a dark side. In a Siberian tale, he appears as a one-legged, one-handed, and one-eyed greybeard who wakens adead man with an iron sta ﬀ. In the course of the story the latter,
after being brought back to life several times, kills the old manby a mistake, and thus throws away his good fortune. The story isentitled “The One-sided Old Man,” and in truth his handicapshows that he consists of one half only. The other half is invis-ible, but appears in the shape of a murderer who seeks the hero’slife. Eventually the hero succeeds in killing his persistent mur-derer, but in the struggle he also kills the one-sided old man, sothat the identity of the two victims is clearly revealed. It is thuspossible that the old man is his own opposite, a life-bringer aswell as a death-dealer—“ad utrumque peritus” (skilled in both),
as is said of Hermes.
34
In these circumstances, whenever the “simple” and “kindly” 414
old man appears, it is advisable for heuristic and other reasons toscrutinize the context with some care. For instance, in the Esto-nian tale we ﬁrst mentioned, about the hired boy who lost the
cow, there is a suspicion that the helpful old man who happenedto be on the spot so opportunely had surreptitiously made awaywith the cow beforehand in order to give his protégé an excel-lent reason for taking to ﬂight. This may very well be, for every-
day experience shows that it is quite possible for a superior,though subliminal, foreknowledge of fate to contrive some
34Prudentius, Contra Symmachum , I, 94 (trans. by Thompson, I, p. 356). See
Hugo Rahner, “Die seelenheilende Blume.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 124

annoying incident for the sole purpose of bullying our Simple
Simon of an ego-consciousness into the way he should go,which for sheer stupidity he would never have found by himself.Had our orphan guessed that it was the old man who hadwhisked o ﬀ his cow as if by magic, he would have seemed like a
spiteful troll or a devil. And indeed the old man has a wickedaspect too, just as the primitive medicine-man is a healer andhelper and also the dreaded concocter of poisons. The very word
/phialtα´ ρµαχον means ‘poison’ as well as ‘antidote,’ and poison can
in fact be both.
The old man, then, has an ambiguous el ﬁn character— 415
witness the extremely instructive ﬁgure of Merlin—seeming, in
certain of his forms, to be good incarnate and in others an aspectof evil. Then again, he is the wicked magician who, from sheeregoism, does evil for evil’s sake. In a Siberian fairytale, he is anevil spirit “on whose head were two lakes with two ducksswimming in them.” He feeds on human ﬂesh. The story relates
how the hero and his companions go to a feast in the nextvillage, leaving their dogs at home. These, acting on the principle“when the cat’s away the mice do play,” also arrange a feast, atthe climax of which they all hurl themselves on the stores ofmeat. The men return home and chase out the dogs, who dashoﬀ into the wilderness. “Then the Creator spoke to Ememqut
[the hero of the tale]: ‘Go and look for the dogs with yourwife.’” But he gets caught in a terrible snow-storm and has toseek shelter in the hut of the evil spirit. There now follows thewell-known motif of the biter bit. The “Creator” is Ememqut’sfather, but the father of the Creator is called the “Self-created”because he created himself. Although we are nowhere told thatthe old man with the two lakes on his head lured the hero andhis wife into the hut in order to satisfy his hunger, it may beconjectured that a very peculiar spirit must have got into thedogs to cause them to celebrate a feast like the men andafterwards—contrary to their nature—to run away, so thatphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 125

Ememqut had to go out and look for them; and that the hero was
then caught in a snow-storm in order to drive him into the armsof the wicked old man. The fact that the Creator, son of theSelfcreated, was a party to the advice raises a knotty problemwhose solution we had best leave to the Siberian theologians.
In a Balkan fairytale the old man gives the childless Czarina a
416
magic apple to eat, from which she becomes pregnant and bearsa son, it being stipulated that the old man shall be his godfather.The boy, however, grows up into a horrid little tough who bul-lies all the children and slaughters the cattle. For ten years he isgiven no name. Then the old man appears, sticks a knife into hisleg, and calls him the “Knife Prince.” The boy now wants to setforth on his adventures, which his father, after long hesitation,ﬁnally allows him to do. The knife in his leg is of vital import-
ance: if he draws it out himself, he will live; if anybody else doesso, he will die. In the end the knife becomes his doom, for an oldwitch pulls it out when he is asleep. He dies, but is restored tolife by the friends he has won.
35 Here the old man is a helper, but
also the contriver of a dangerous fate which might just as easilyhave turned out for the bad. The evil showed itself early andplainly in the boy’s villainous character.
In another Balkan tale, there is a variant of our motif that is
417
worth mentioning: a king is looking for his sister who has beenabducted by a stranger. His wanderings bring him to the hut ofan old woman, who warns him against continuing the search.But a tree laden with fruit, ever receding before him, lures himaway from the hut. When at last the tree comes to a halt, an oldman climbs down from the branches. He regales the king andtakes him to a castle, where the sister is living with the old manas his wife. She tells her brother that the old man is a wickedspirit who will kill him. And sure enough, three days afterwards,
35Balkanmärchen , pp. 34 ﬀ. [“The Deeds of the Czar’s Son and His Two
Companions”].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 126

the king vanishes without trace. His younger brother now takes
up the search and kills the wicked spirit in the form of a dragon.A handsome young man is thereby released from the spell andforthwith marries the sister. The old man, appearing at ﬁrst as a
tree-numen, is obviously connected with the sister. He is a mur-derer. In an interpolated episode, he is accused of enchanting awhole city by turning it to iron, i.e., making it immovable, rigid,and locked up.
36 He also holds the king’s sister a captive and will
not let her return to her relatives. This amounts to saying that thesister is animus-possessed. The old man is therefore to beregarded as her animus. But the manner in which the king isdrawn into this possession, and the way he seeks for his sister,make us think that she has an anima signi ﬁcance for her brother.
The fateful archetype of the old man has accordingly ﬁrst taken
possession of the king’s anima—in other words, robbed him ofthe archetype of life which the anima personi ﬁes—and forced
him to go in search of the lost charm, the “treasure hard toattain,” thus making him the mythical hero, the higher personal-ity who is an expression of the self. Meanwhile, the old man actsthe part of the villain and has to be forcibly removed, only toappear at the end as the husband of the sister-anima, or moreproperly as the bridegroom of the soul, who celebrates the sac-red incest that symbolizes the union of opposites and equals.This bold enantiodromia, a very common occurrence, not onlysigni ﬁes the rejuvenation and transformation of the old man, but
hints at a secret inner relation of evil to good and vice versa.
So in this story we see the archetype of the old man in the
418
guise of an evil-doer, caught up in all the twists and turns of anindividuation process that ends suggestively with the hieros gamos .
Conversely, in the Russian tale of the Forest King, he starts bybeing helpful and benevolent, but then refuses to let his hiredboy go, so that the main episodes in the story deal with the boy’s
36Ibid., pp. 177 ﬀ. [“The Son-in-Law from Abroad”].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 127

repeated attempts to escape from the clutches of the magician.
Instead of the quest we have ﬂight, which nonetheless appears to
win the same reward as adventures valiantly sought, for in theend the hero marries the king’s daughter. The magician, how-ever, must rest content with the role of the biter bit.
IV THERIOMORPHIC SPIRIT SYMBOLISM
IN FAIRYTALES
The description of our archetype would not be complete if we 419
omitted to consider one special form of its manifestation,
namely its animal form. This belongs essentially to the therio-morphism of gods and demons and has the same psychologicalsigni ﬁcance. The animal form shows that the contents and func-
tions in question are still in the extrahuman sphere, i.e., on aplane beyond human consciousness, and consequently have ashare on the one hand in the daemonically superhuman and onthe other in the bestially subhuman. It must be remembered,however, that this division is only true within the sphere ofconsciousness, where it is a necessary condition of thought.Logic says tertium non datur , meaning that we cannot envisage the
opposites in their oneness. In other words, while the abolition ofan obstinate antinomy can be no more than a postulate for us,this is by no means so for the unconscious, whose contents arewithout exception paradoxical or antinomial by nature, notexcluding the category of being. If anyone unacquainted withthe psychology of the unconscious wants to get a workingknowledge of these matters, I would recommend a study ofChristian mysticism and Indian philosophy, where he will ﬁnd
the clearest elaboration of the antinomies of the unconscious.
Although the old man has, up to now, looked and behaved
420
more or less like a human being, his magical powers and hisspiritual superiority suggest that, in good and bad alike, he isoutside, or above, or below the human level. Neither for thephenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 128

primitive nor for the unconscious does his animal aspect imply
any devaluation, for in certain respects the animal is superior toman. It has not yet blundered into consciousness nor pitted aself-willed ego against the power from which it lives; on thecontrary, it ful ﬁls the will that actuates it in a well-nigh perfect
manner. Were it conscious, it would be morally better than man.There is deep doctrine in the legend of the fall: it is the expres-sion of a dim presentiment that the emancipation of egocon-sciousness was a Luciferian deed. Man’s whole history consistsfrom the very beginning in a con ﬂict between his feeling of
inferiority and his arrogance. Wisdom seeks the middle path andpays for this audacity by a dubious a ﬃnity with daemon and
beast, and so is open to moral misinterpretation.
Again and again in fairytales we encounter the motif of help-
421
ful animals. These act like humans, speak a human language, anddisplay a sagacity and a knowledge superior to man’s. In thesecircumstances we can say with some justi ﬁcation that the arche-
type of the spirit is being expressed through an animal form. AGerman fairytale
37 relates how a young man, while searching for
his lost princess, meets a wolf, who says, “Do not be afraid! Buttell me, where is your way leading you?” The young manrecounts his story, whereupon the wolf gives him as a magic gifta few of his hairs, with which the young man can summon hishelp at any time. This intermezzo proceeds exactly like the meet-ing with the helpful old man. In the same story, the archetypealso displays its other, wicked side. In order to make this clear Ishall give a summary of the story:
While the young man is watching his pigs in the wood, he
422
discovers a large tree, whose branches lose themselves in theclouds. “How would it be,” says he to himself, “if you were to
look at the world from the top of that great tree?” So he climbsup, all day long he climbs, without even reaching the branches.
37Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm , pp. 1 ﬀ. [“The Princess in the Tree”].phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 129

Evening comes, and he has to pass the night in a fork of the tree.
Next day he goes on climbing and by noon has reached thefoliage. Only towards evening does he come to a village nestlingin the branches. The peasants who live there give him food andshelter for the night. In the morning he climbs still further.Towards noon, he reaches a castle in which a young girl lives.Here he ﬁnds that the tree goes no higher. She is a king’s daugh-
ter, held prisoner by a wicked magician. So the young man stayswith the princess, and she allows him to go into all the rooms ofthe castle: one room alone she forbids him to enter. But curiosityis too strong. He unlocks the door, and there in the room heﬁnds a raven ﬁxed to the wall with three nails. One nail goes
through his throat, the two others through the wings. The ravencomplains of thirst and the young man, moved by pity, giveshim water to drink. At each sip a nail falls out, and at the thirdsip the raven is free and ﬂies out at the window. When the
princess hears of it she is very frightened and says, “That was thedevil who enchanted me! It won’t be long now before he fetchesme again.” And one ﬁne morning she has indeed vanished.
The young man now sets out in search of her and, as we have
423
described above, meets the wolf. In the same way he meets a bearand a lion, who also give him some hairs. In addition the lioninforms him that the princess is imprisoned nearby in ahunting-lodge. The young man ﬁnds the house and the princess,
but is told that ﬂight is impossible, because the hunter possesses
a three-legged white horse that knows everything and wouldinfallibly warn its master. Despite that, the young man tries toﬂee away with her, but in vain. The hunter overtakes him but,
because he had saved his life as a raven, lets him go and rides o ﬀ
again with the princess. When the hunter has disappeared intothe wood, the young man creeps back to the house and per-suades the princess to wheedle from the hunter the secret ofhow he obtained his clever white horse. This she successfullydoes in the night, and the young man, who has hidden himselfphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 130

under the bed, learns that about an hour’s journey from the
hunting-lodge there dwells a witch who breeds magic horses.Whoever was able to guard the foals for three days might choosea horse as a reward. In former times, said the hunter, she used tomake a gift of twelve lambs into the bargain, in order to satisfythe hunger of the twelve wolves who lived in the woods near thefarmstead, and prevent them from attacking; but to him she gaveno lambs. So the wolves followed him as he rode away, andwhile crossing the borders of her domain they succeeded intearing o ﬀ one of his horse’s hoofs. That was why it had only
three legs.
Then the young man made haste to seek out the witch and
424
agreed to serve her on condition that she gave him not only ahorse of his own choosing but twelve lambs as well. To this sheconsented. Instantly she commanded the foals to run away, and,to make him sleepy, she gave him brandy. He drinks, falls asleep,and the foals escape. On the ﬁrst day he catches them with the
help of the wolf, on the second day the bear helps him, and onthe third the lion. He can now go and choose his reward. Thewitch’s little daughter tells him which horse her mother rides.This is naturally the best horse, and it too is white. Hardly has hegot it out of the stall when the witch pierces the four hoofs andsucks the marrow out of the bones. From this she bakes a cakeand gives it to the young man for his journey. The horse growsdeathly weak, but the young man feeds it on the cake, where-upon the horse recovers its former strength. He gets out of thewoods unscathed after quieting the twelve wolves with thetwelve lambs. He then fetches the princess and rides away withher. But the three-legged horse calls out to the hunter, who setsoﬀ in pursuit and quickly catches up with them, because the
four-legged horse refuses to gallop. As the hunter approaches,the four-legged horse cries out to the three-legged, “Sister,throw him o ﬀ!” The magician is thrown and trampled to pieces
by the two horses. The young man sets the princess on thephenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 131

three-legged horse, and the pair of them ride away to her father’s
kingdom, where they get married. The four-legged horse begshim to cut o ﬀ both their heads, for otherwise they would bring
disaster upon him. This he does, and the horses are transformedinto a handsome prince and a wonderfully beautiful princess,who after a while repair “to their own kingdom.” They hadbeen changed into horses by the hunter, long ago.
Apart from the theriomorphic spirit symbolism in this tale, it
425
is especially interesting to note that the function of knowing andintuition is represented by a riding-animal. This is as much as tosay that the spirit can be somebody’s property. The three-leggedwhite horse is thus the property of the demonic hunter, and thefour-legged one the property of the witch. Spirit is here partly afunction, which like any other object (horse) can change itsowner, and partly an autonomous subject (magician as owner ofthe horse). By obtaining the four-legged horse from the witch,the young man frees a spirit or a thought of some special kindfrom the grip of the unconscious. Here as elsewhere, the witchstands for a mater natura or the original “matriarchal” state of the
unconscious, indicating a psychic constitution in which theunconscious is opposed only by a feeble and still-dependent con-sciousness. The four-legged horse shows itself superior to thethree-legged, since it can command the latter. And since thequaternity is a symbol of wholeness and wholeness plays a con-siderable role in the picture-world of the unconscious,
38 the
victory of four-leggedness over three-leggedness is notaltogether unexpected. But what is the meaning of the oppos-ition between threeness and fourness, or rather, what doesthreeness mean as compared with wholeness? In alchemy thisproblem is known as the axiom of Maria and runs all throughalchemical philosophy for more than a thousand years, ﬁnally to
38With reference to the quaternity I would call attention to my earlier writings,
and in particular to Psychology and Alchemy and “Psychology and Religion.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 132

be taken up again in the Cabiri scene in Faust. The earliest literary
version of it is to be found in the opening words of Plato’sTimaeus ,
39 of which Goethe gives us a reminder. Among the
alchemists we can see clearly how the divine Trinity has its coun-terpart in a lower, chthonic triad (similar to Dante’s three-headed devil). This represents a principle which, by reason of itssymbolism, betrays a ﬃnities with evil, though it is by no means
certain that it expresses nothing but evil. Everything pointsrather to the fact that evil, or its familiar symbolism, belongs tothe family of ﬁgures which describe the dark, nocturnal, lower,
chthonic element. In this symbolism the lower stands to thehigher as a correspondence
40 in reverse; that is to say it is con-
ceived, like the upper, as a triad. Three, being a masculine num-ber, is logically correlated with the wicked hunter, who can bethought of alchemically as the lower triad. Four, a femininenumber, is assigned to the old woman. The two horses aremiraculous animals that talk and know and thus represent theunconscious spirit, which in one case is subordinated to thewicked magician and in the other to the old witch.
Between the three and the four there exists the primary
426
opposition of male and female, but whereas fourness is a symbolof wholeness, threeness is not. The latter, according to alchemy,denotes polarity, since one triad always presupposes another,just as high presupposes low, lightness darkness, good evil. Interms of energy, polarity means a potential, and wherever apotential exists there is the possibility of a current, a ﬂow of
39The oldest representation I know of this problem is that of the four sons of
Horus, three of whom are occasionally depicted with the heads of animals, andthe other with the head of a man. Chronologically this links up with Ezekiel’svision of the four creatures, which then reappear in the attributes of the fourevangelists. Three have animal heads and one a human head (the angel). [Cf.frontispiece to Psychology and Religion: West and East .—E .]
40According to the dictum in the “Tabula smaragdina,” “Quod est inferius, est
sicut quod est superius” (That which is below is like that which is above).phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 133

events, for the tension of opposites strives for balance. If one
imagines the quaternity as a square divided into two halves by adiagonal, one gets two triangles whose apices point in oppositedirections. One could therefore say metaphorically that if thewholeness symbolized by the quaternity is divided into equalhalves, it produces two opposing triads. This simple re ﬂection
shows how three can be derived from four, and in the sameway the hunter of the captured princess explains how his horse,from being four-legged, became three-legged, through havingone hoof torn o ﬀ by the twelve wolves. The three-leggedness is
due to an accident, therefore, which occurred at the verymoment when the horse was leaving the territory of the darkmother. In psychological language we should say that whenthe unconscious wholeness becomes manifest, i.e., leaves theunconscious and crosses over into the sphere of consciousness,one of the four remains behind, held fast by the horror vacui of the
unconscious. There thus arises a triad, which as we know—notfrom the fairytale but from the history of symbolism—constellates a corresponding triad in opposition to it
41—in other
words, a con ﬂict ensues. Here too we could ask with Socrates,
“One, two, three—but, my dear Timaeus, of those who yester-day were the banqueters and today are the banquet-givers,where is the fourth?”
42 He has remained in the realm of the dark
mother, caught by the wol ﬁsh greed of the unconscious, which
is unwilling to let anything escape from its magic circle save atthe cost of a sacri ﬁce.
The hunter or old magician and the witch correspond to the
427
negative parental imagos in the magic world of the unconscious.The hunter ﬁrst appears in the story as a black raven. He has
stolen away the princess and holds her a prisoner. She describes
41Cf. Psychology and Alchemy , ﬁg. 54 and par. 539; and, for a more detailed
account, “The Spirit Mercurius,” par. 271.
42This unexplained passage has been put down to Plato’s “drollery.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 134

him as “the devil.” But it is exceedingly odd that he himself is
locked up in the one forbidden room of the castle and ﬁxed to
the wall with three nails, as though cruciﬁed. He is imprisoned,
like all jailers, in his own prison, and bound like all who curse.The prison of both is a magic castle at the top of a gigantic tree,presumably the world-tree. The princess belongs to the upperregion of light near the sun. Sitting there in captivity on theworld-tree, she is a kind of anima mundi who has got herself into
the power of darkness. But this catch does not seem to have donethe latter much good either, seeing that the captor is cruci ﬁed
and moreover with three nails. The cruci ﬁxion evidently
betokens a state of agonizing bondage and suspension, ﬁt pun-
ishment for one foolhardy enough to venture like a Prometheusinto the orbit of the opposing principle. This was what the raven,who is identical with the hunter, did when he ravished a pre-cious soul from the upper world of light; and so, as a punish-ment, he is nailed to the wall in that upper world. That this is aninverted re ﬂection of the primordial Christian image should be
obvious enough. The Saviour who freed the soul of humanityfrom the dominion of the prince of this world was nailed to across down below on earth, just as the thieving raven is nailed tothe wall in the celestial branches of the world-tree for his pre-sumptuous meddling. In our fairytale, the peculiar instrument ofthe magic spell is the triad of nails. Who it was that made theraven captive is not told in the tale, but it sounds as if a spell hadbeen laid upon him in the triune name.
43
Having climbed up the world-tree and penetrated into the 428
magic castle where he is to rescue the princess, our young herois permitted to enter all the rooms but one, the very room inwhich the raven is imprisoned. Just as in paradise there was onetree of which it was forbidden to eat, so here there is one room
43In Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm (I, p. 256 [“The Mary-Child”]) it is said that the
“Three-in-One” is in the forbidden room, which seems to me worth noting.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 135

that is not to be opened, with the natural result that it is entered
at once. Nothing excites our interest more than a prohibition. Itis the surest way of provoking disobedience. Obviously there issome secret scheme afoot to free not so much the princess asthe raven. As soon as the hero catches sight of him, the ravenbegins to cry piteously and to complain of thirst,
44 and the
young man, moved by the virtue of compassion, slakes it, notwith hyssop and gall, but with quickening water, whereuponthe three nails fall out and the raven escapes through the openwindow. Thus the evil spirit regains his freedom, changes intothe hunter, steals the princess for the second time, but this timelocks her up in his hunting-lodge on earth. The secret scheme ispartially unveiled: the princess must be brought down fromthe upper world to the world of men, which was evidentlynot possible without the help of the evil spirit and man’sdisobedience.
But since in the human world, too, the hunter of souls is the
429
princess’s master, the hero has to intervene anew, to which end,as we have seen, he ﬁlches the four-legged horse from the witch
and breaks the three-legged spell of the magician. It was the triadthat ﬁrst trans ﬁxed the raven, and the triad also represents the
44Aelian ( De natura animalium , I, 47) relates that Apollo condemned the ravens to
perpetual thirst because a raven sent to fetch water dallied too long. In Germanfolklore it is said that the raven has to su ﬀer from thirst in June or August, the
reason given being that he alone did not mourn at the death of Christ, and thathe failed to return when Noah sent him forth from the ark. (Köhler, Kleinere
Schriften zur Märchenforschung , p. 3.) For the raven as an allegory of evil, see the
exhaustive account by Hugo Rahner, “Earth Spirit and Divine Spirit in PatristicTheology.” On the other hand the raven is closely connected with Apollo as hissacred animal, and in the Bible too he has a positive signi ﬁcance. See Psalm
147:9: “He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry”;
Job 38:41: “Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cryunto God, they wander for lack of meat.” Cf. also Luke 12:24. Ravens appear astrue “ministering spirits” in I Kings 17:6, where they bring Elijah the Tishbitehis daily fare.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
136

power of the evil spirit. These are the two triads that point in
opposite directions.
Turning now to quite another ﬁeld, the realm of psycho- 430
logical experience, we know that three of the four functions of
consciousness can become di ﬀerentiated, i.e., conscious, while
the other remains connected with the matrix, the unconscious,and is known as the “inferior” function. It is the Achilles heel ofeven the most heroic consciousness: somewhere the strong manis weak, the clever man foolish, the good man bad, and thereverse is also true. In our fairytale the triad appears as a muti-lated quaternity. If only one leg could be added to the otherthree, it would make a whole. The enigmatic axiom of Mariaruns: “. . . from the third comes the one as the fourth” (
ἐκ τοῦ
τρίτου τὸ ἓν τέταρτον )—which presumably means, when the
third produces the fourth it at once produces unity. The lostcomponent which is in the possession of the wolves belongingto the Great Mother is indeed only a quarter, but, together withthe three, it makes a whole which does away with division andconﬂict.
But how is it that a quarter, on the evidence of symbolism, is
431
at the same time a triad? Here the symbolism of our fairytaleleaves us in the lurch, and we are obliged to have recourse to thefacts of psychology. I have said previously that three functionscan become di ﬀerentiated, and only one remains under the spell
of the unconscious. This statement must be de ﬁned more
closely. It is an empirical fact that only one function becomes
more or less successfully di ﬀerentiated, which on that account is
known as the superior or main function, and together withextraversion or introversion constitutes the type of consciousattitude. This function has associated with it one or two partiallydiﬀerentiated auxiliary functions which hardly ever attain the
same degree of di ﬀerentiation as the main function, that is,
the same degree of applicability by the will. Accordingly theypossess a higher degree of spontaneity than the main function,phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 137

which displays a large measure of reliability and is amenable to
our intentions. The fourth, inferior function proves on the otherhand to be inaccessible to our will. It appears now as a teasingand distracting imp, now as a deus ex machina . But always it comes
and goes of its own volition. From this it is clear that even thediﬀerentiated functions have only partially freed themselves
from the unconscious; for the rest they are still rooted in it andto that extent they operate under its rule. Hence the three “dif-ferentiated” functions at the disposal of the ego have three cor-responding unconscious components that have not yet brokenloose from the unconscious.
45 And just as the three conscious
and di ﬀerentiated parts of these functions are confronted by a
fourth, undi ﬀerentiated function which acts as a painfully dis-
turbing factor, so also the superior function seems to have itsworst enemy in the unconscious. Nor should we omit to men-tion one ﬁnal turn of the screw: like the devil who delights in
disguising himself as an angel of light, the inferior functionsecretly and mischievously in ﬂuences the superior function
most of all, just as the latter represses the former moststrongly.
46
These unfortunately somewhat abstract formulations are 432
necessary in order to throw some light on the tricky and allusiveassociations in our—save the mark!—“childishly simple” fairy-
tale. The two antithetical triads, the one banning and the otherrepresenting the power of evil, tally to a hair’s breadth with thefunctional structure of the conscious and unconscious psyche.Being a spontaneous, naïve, and uncontrived product of the psy-che, the fairytale cannot very well express anything except whatthe psyche actually is. It is not only our fairytale that depicts these
45Pictured as three princesses, buried neck deep, in Nordische Volksmärchen , II, pp.
126ﬀ. [“The Three Princesses in the White Land”].
46For the function theory, see Psychological T ypes .phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 138

structural psychic relations, but countless other fairytales do the
same.47
Our fairytale reveals with unusual clarity the essentially anti- 433
thetical nature of the spirit archetype, while on the other hand itshows the bewildering play of antinomies all aiming at the greatgoal of higher consciousness. The young swineherd who climbsfrom the animal level up to the top of the giant world-tree andthere, in the upper world of light, discovers his captive anima,the high-born princess, symbolizes the ascent of consciousness,rising from almost bestial regions to a lofty perch with a broadoutlook, which is a singularly appropriate image for theenlargement of the conscious horizon.
48 Once the masculine
consciousness has attained this height, it comes face to face withits feminine counterpart, the anima.
49 She is a personi ﬁcation of
the unconscious. The meeting shows how inept it is to designatethe latter as the “subconscious”: it is not merely “below” con-
sciousness but also above it, so far above it indeed that the herohas to climb up to it with considerable e ﬀort. This “upper”
unconscious, however, is far from being a “superconconscious”in the sense that anyone who reaches it, like our hero, wouldstand as high above the “subconscious” as above the earth’ssurface. On the contrary, he makes the disagreeable discoverythat his high and mighty anima, the Princess Soul, is bewitchedup there and no freer than a bird in a golden cage. He may pathimself on the back for having soared up from the ﬂatlands and
47I would like to add, for the layman’s bene ﬁt, that the theory of the psyche’s
structure was not derived from fairytales and myths, but is grounded on empir-ical observations made in the ﬁeld of medico-psychological research and was
corroborated only secondarily through the study of comparative symbology, inspheres very far removed from ordinary medical practice.
48A typical enantiodromia is played out here: as one cannot go any higher
along this road, one must now realize the other side of one’s being, and climbdown again.
49The young man asks himself, on catching sight of the tree, “How would it be
if you were to look at the world from the top of that great tree?”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 139

from almost bestial stupidity, but his soul is in the power of an
evil spirit, a sinister father-imago of subterrene nature in theguise of a raven, the celebrated theriomorphic ﬁgure of the devil.
What use now is his lofty perch and his wide horizon, when hisown dear soul is languishing in prison? Worse, she plays thegame of the underworld and ostensibly tries to stop the youngman from discovering the secret of her imprisonment, by for-bidding him to enter that one room. But secretly she leads himto it by the very fact of her veto. It is as though the unconscioushad two hands of which one always does the opposite of theother. The princess wants and does not want to be rescued. Butthe evil spirit too has got himself into a ﬁx, by all accounts: he
wanted to ﬁlch a ﬁne soul from the shining upper world—
which he could easily do as a winged being—but had not bar-gained on being shut up there himself. Black spirit though he is,he longs for the light. That is his secret justi ﬁcation, just as his
being spellbound is a punishment for his transgression. But solong as the evil spirit is caught in the upper world, the princesscannot get down to earth either, and the hero remains lost inparadise. So now he commits the sin of disobedience andthereby enables the robber to escape, thus causing the abductionof the princess for the second time—a whole chain of calamities.In the result, however, the princess comes down to earth and thedevilish raven assumes the human shape of the hunter. Theother-worldly anima and the evil principle both descend to thehuman sphere, that is, they dwindle to human proportions andthus become approachable. The three-legged, all-knowing horserepresents the hunter’s own power: it corresponds to theunconscious components of the di ﬀerentiated functions.
50 The
50The “omniscience” of the unconscious components is naturally an exagger-
ation. Nevertheless they do have at their disposal—or are in ﬂuenced by—
subliminal perceptions and memories of the unconscious, as well as by itsinstinctive archetypal contents. It is these that give unconscious activities theirunexpectedly accurate information.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
140

hunter himself personi ﬁes the inferior function, which also
manifests itself in the hero as his inquisitiveness and love ofadventure. As the story unfolds, he becomes more and morelike the hunter: he too obtains his horse from the witch. But,unlike him, the hunter omitted to obtain the twelve lambs inorder to feed the wolves, who then injured his horse. Heforgot to pay tribute to the chthonic powers because he wasnothing but a robber. Through this omission the hero learnsthat the unconscious lets its creatures go only at the cost ofsacriﬁce.
51 The number 12 is presumably a time symbol, with
the subsidiary meaning of the twelve labours ( α/tildelenisθλα)52 that
have to be performed for the unconscious before one can getfree.
53 The hunter looks like a previous unsuccessful attempt
of the hero to gain possession of his soul through robberyand violence. But the conquest of the soul is in reality a workof patience, self-sacri ﬁce, and devotion. By gaining possession
of the four-legged horse the hero steps right into the shoes ofthe hunter and carries o ﬀ the princess as well. The quaternity
in our tale proves to be the greater power, for it integratesinto its totality that which it still needed in order to becomewhole.
The archetype of the spirit in this, be it said, by no means
434
primitive fairytale is expressed theriomorphically as a system ofthree functions which is subordinated to a unity, the evil spirit,in the same way that some unnamed authority has cruci ﬁed the
raven with a triad of three nails. The two supraordinate unitiescorrespond in the ﬁrst case to the inferior function which is the
51The hunter has reckoned without his host, as generally happens. Seldom or
never do we think of the price exacted by the spirit’s activity.
52Cf. the Heracles cycle.
53The alchemists stress the long duration of the work and speak of the “longis-
sima via,” “diuturnitas immensae meditationis,” etc. The number 12 may beconnected with the ecclesiastical year, in which the redemptive work of Christis ful ﬁlled. The lamb-sacri ﬁce probably comes from this source too.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales
141

arch-enemy of the main function, namely to the hunter; and in
the second case to the main function, namely to the hero. Hunterand hero are ultimately equated with one another, so that thehunter’s function is resolved in the hero. As a matter of fact, thehero lies dormant in the hunter from the very beginning, egginghim on, with all the unmoral means at his disposal, to carry outthe rape of the soul, and then causing him to play her into thehero’s hands against the hunter’s will. On the surface a furiousconﬂict rages between them, but down below the one goes
about the other’s business. The knot is unravelled directly thehero succeeds in capturing the quaternity—or in psychologicallanguage, when he assimilates the inferior function into theternary system. That puts an end to the con ﬂict at one blow, and
the ﬁgure of the hunter melts into thin air. After this victory, the
hero sets his princess upon the three-legged steed and togetherthey ride away to her father’s kingdom. From now on she rulesand personi ﬁes the realm of spirit that formerly served the
wicked hunter. Thus the anima is and remains the representativeof that part of the unconscious which can never be assimilatedinto a humanly attainable whole.
Postscript . Only after the completion of my manuscript was my
435
attention drawn by a friend to a Russian variant of our story. It
bears the title “Maria Morevna.”54 The hero of the story is no
swineherd, but Czarevitch Ivan. There is an interesting explan-ation of the three helpful animals: they correspond to Ivan’sthree sisters and their husbands, who are really birds. The threesisters represent an unconscious triad of functions related toboth the animal and spiritual realms. The bird-men are a speciesof angel and emphasize the auxiliary nature of the unconsciousfunctions. In the story they intervene at the critical momentwhen the hero—unlike his German counterpart—gets into thepower of the evil spirit and is killed and dismembered (the
54“Daughter of the sea.”—Afanas’ev, Russian Fairy T ales , pp. 553 ﬀ.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 142

typical fate of the God-man!).55 The evil spirit is an old man who
is often shown naked and is called Koschei56 the Deathless. The
corresponding witch is the well-known Baba Yaga. The threehelpful animals of the German variant are doubled here, appear-ing ﬁrst as the bird-men and then as the lion, the strange bird,
and the bees. The princess is Queen Maria Morevna, a redoubt-able martial leader—Mary the queen of heaven is lauded in theRussian Orthodox hymnal as “leader of hosts!”—who haschained up the evil spirit with twelve chains in the forbiddenroom in her castle. When Ivan slakes the old devil’s thirst hemakes o ﬀ with the queen. The magic riding animals do not in
the end turn into human beings. This Russian story has a dis-tinctly more primitive character.
V SUPPLEMENT
The following remarks lay no claim to general interest, being 436
in the main technical. I wanted at ﬁrst to delete them from this
revised version of my essay, but then I changed my mind andappended them in a supplement. The reader who is not speci ﬁc-
ally interested in psychology can safely skip this section. For, inwhat follows, I have dealt with the abstruse-looking problem ofthe three- and four-leggedness of the magic horses, and pre-sented my re ﬂections in such a way as to demonstrate the
method I have employed. This piece of psychological reasoningrests ﬁrstly on the irrational data of the material, that is, of the
fairytale, myth, or dream, and secondly on the conscious realiz-ation of the “latent” rational connections which these data havewith one another. That such connections exist at all is somethingof a hypothesis, like that which asserts that dreams have a
55The old man puts the dismembered body into a barrel which he throws into
the sea. This is reminiscent of the fate of Osiris (head and phallus).
56From kost, “bone,” and pakost, kapost , “disgusting, dirty.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 143

meaning. The truth of this assumption is not established a priori :
its usefulness can only be proved by application. It thereforeremains to be seen whether its methodical application toirrational material enables one to interpret the latter in a mean-ingful way. Its application consists in approaching the materialas if it had a coherent inner meaning. For this purpose most ofthe data require a certain ampli ﬁcation, that is, they need to be
clariﬁed, generalized, and approximated to a more or less gen-
eral concept in accordance with Cardan’s rule of interpretation.For instance, the three-leggedness, in order to be recognized forwhat it is, has ﬁrst to be separated from the horse and then
approximated to its speci ﬁc principle—the principle of three-
ness. Likewise, the four-leggedness in the fairytale, when raisedto the level of a general concept, enters into relationship with thethreeness, and as a result we have the enigma mentioned in theTimaeus , the problem of three and four. Triads and tetrads repre-
sent archetypal structures that play a signi ﬁcant part in all sym-
bolism and are equally important for the investigation of mythsand dreams. By raising the irrational datum (three-leggednessand four-leggedness) to the level of a general concept we elicitthe universal meaning of this motif and encourage the inquiringmind to tackle the problem seriously. This task involves a seriesof re ﬂections and deductions of a technical nature which I
would not wish to withhold from the psychologically interestedreader and especially from the professional, the less so as thislabour of the intellect represents a typical unravelling of symbolsand is indispensable for an adequate understanding of the prod-ucts of the unconscious. Only in this way can the nexus ofunconscious relationships be made to yield their own meaning,in contrast to those deductive interpretations derived from apreconceived theory, e.g., interpretations based on astronomy,meteorology, mythology, and—last but not least—the sexualtheory.
The three-legged and four-legged horses are in truth a
437phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 144

recondite matter worthy of closer examination. The three and
the four remind us not only of the dilemma we have already metin the theory of psychological functions, but also of the axiom ofMaria Prophetissa, which plays a considerable role in alchemy. Itmay therefore be rewarding to examine more closely the mean-ing of the miraculous horses.
The ﬁrst thing that seems to me worthy of note is that the
438
three-legged horse which is assigned to the princess as her
mount is a mare, and is moreover herself a bewitched princess.Threeness is unmistakably connected here with femininity,whereas from the dominating religious standpoint of conscious-ness it is an exclusively masculine a ﬀair, quite apart from the fact
that 3, as an uneven number, is masculine in the ﬁrst place. One
could therefore translate threeness as “masculinity” outright, thisbeing all the more signi ﬁcant when one remembers the ancient
Egyptian triunity of God, Ka-mutef,
57 and Pharaoh.
Three-leggedness, as the attribute of some animal, denotes the 439
unconscious masculinity immanent in a female creature. In a realwoman it would correspond to the animus who, like the magichorse, represents “spirit.” In the case of the anima, however,threeness does not coincide with any Christian idea of the Trin-ity but with the “lower triangle,” the inferior function triad thatconstitutes the “shadow.” The inferior half of the personality isfor the greater part unconscious. It does not denote the whole ofthe unconscious, but only the personal segment of it. The anima,on the other hand, so far as she is distinguished from theshadow, personi ﬁes the collective unconscious. If threeness is
assigned to her as a riding-animal, it means that she “rides” theshadow, is related to it as the mar.
58 In that case she possesses the
shadow. But if she herself is the horse, then she has lost her
57Ka-mutef means “bull of his mother.” See Jacobsohn, “Die dogmatische
Stellung des Königs in der Theologie der alten Aegypter,” pp. 17, 35, 41 ﬀ.
58Cf. Symbols of Transformation , pp. 249–51, 277.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 145

dominating position as a personi ﬁcation of the collective
unconscious and is “ridden”—possessed—by Princess A, spouseof the hero. As the fairytale rightly says, she has been changed bywitchcraft into the three-legged horse (Princess B).
We can sort out this imbroglio more or less as follows:1. Princess A is the anima
59 of the hero. She rides—that is, 440
possesses—the three-legged horse, who is the shadow, theinferior function-triad of her later spouse. To put it more simply:she has taken possession of the inferior half of the hero’s per-sonality. She has caught him on his weak side, as so often hap-pens in ordinary life, for where one is weak one needs supportand completion. In fact, a woman’s place is on the weak side of aman. This is how we would have to formulate the situation if weregarded the hero and Princess A as two ordinary people. Butsince it is a fairy-story played out mainly in the world of magic,we are probably more correct in interpreting Princess A as thehero’s anima. In that case the hero has been wafted out of theprofane world through his encounter with the anima, like Mer-lin by his fairy: as an ordinary man he is like one caught in amarvellous dream, viewing the world through a veil of mist.
2. The matter is now considerably complicated by the
441
unexpected fact that the three-legged horse is a mare, an equiva-lent of Princess A. She (the mare) is Princess B, who in the shapeof a horse corresponds to Princess A’s shadow (i.e., her inferiorfunction-triad). Princess B, however, di ﬀers from Princess A in
that, unlike her, she does not ride the horse but is contained in it:she is bewitched and has thus come under the spell of a mascu-line triad. Therefore, she is possessed by a shadow.
3. The question now is, whose shadow? It cannot be the shadow
442
of the hero, for this is already taken up by the latter’s anima. The
59The fact that she is no ordinary girl, but is of royal descent and moreover the
electa of the evil spirit, proves her nonhuman, mythological nature. I must
assume that the reader is acquainted with the idea of the anima.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 146

fairytale gives us the answer: it is the hunter or magician who
has bewitched her. As we have seen, the hunter is somehowconnected with the hero, since the latter gradually puts himselfin his shoes. Hence one could easily arrive at the conjecture thatthe hunter is at bottom none other than the shadow of the hero.But this supposition is contradicted by the fact that the hunterstands for a formidable power which extends not only to thehero’s anima but much further, namely to the royal brother-sister pair of whose existence the hero and his anima have nonotion, and who appear very much out of the blue in the storyitself. The power that extends beyond the orbit of the individualhas a more than individual character and cannot therefore beidenti ﬁed with the shadow, if we conceive and de ﬁne this as
the dark half of the personality. As a supra-individual factorthe numen of the hunter is a dominant of the collectiveunconscious, and its characteristic features—hunter, magician,raven, miraculous horse, cruci ﬁxion or suspension high up in
the boughs of the world-tree
60—touch the Germanic psyche
very closely. Hence the Christian Weltanschauung , when re ﬂected
in the ocean of the (Germanic) unconscious, logically takes onthe features of Wotan.
61 In the ﬁgure of the hunter we meet an
60“I ween that I hung/on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded,/and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none/may ever know
What root beneath it runs.”
—Hovamol , 139 (trans. by H. A. Bellows, p. 60).
61Cf. the experience of God as described by Nietzsche in “Ariadne’s Lament”:
“I am but thy quarry,
Cruellest of hunters!Thy proudest captive,Thou brigand back of the clouds!”
—Gedichte und Sprüche , pp. 155ff.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 147

imago dei , a God-image, for Wotan is also a god of winds and
spirits, on which account the Romans ﬁttingly interpreted him
as Mercury.
4. The Prince and his sister, Princess B, have therefore been 443
seized by a pagan god and changed into horses, i.e., thrust downto the animal level, into the realm of the unconscious. The infer-ence is that in their proper human shape the pair of them oncebelonged to the sphere of collective consciousness. But who arethey?
In order to answer this question we must proceed from the
444
fact that these two are an undoubted counterpart of the hero andPrincess A. They are connected with the latter also because theyserve as their mounts, and in consequence they appear as theirlower, animal halves. Because of its almost total unconsciousness,the animal has always symbolized the psychic sphere in manwhich lies hidden in the darkness of the body’s instinctual life.The hero rides the stallion, characterized by the even (feminine)number 4; Princess A rides the mare who has only three legs (3= a masculine number). These numbers make it clear that thetransformation into animals has brought with it a modi ﬁcation
of sex character: the stallion has a feminine attribute, the mare amasculine one. Psychology can con ﬁrm this development as fol-
lows: to the degree that a man is over-powered by the (collect-ive) unconscious there is not only a more unbridled intrusion ofthe instinctual sphere, but a certain feminine character alsomakes its appearance, which I have suggested should be called“anima.” If, on the other hand, a woman comes under the dom-ination of the unconscious, the darker side of her femininenature emerges all the more strongly, coupled with markedlymasculine traits. These latter are comprised under the term“animus.”
62
5. According to the fairytale, however, the animal form of the 445
62Cf. Emma Jung, “On the Nature of the Animus.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 148

brother-sister pair is “unreal” and due simply to the magic in ﬂu-
ence of the pagan hunter-god. If they were nothing but animals,we could rest content with this interpretation. But that would beto pass over in unmerited silence the singular allusion to amodi ﬁcation of sex character. The white horses are no ordinary
horses: they are miraculous beasts with supernatural powers.Therefore the human ﬁgures out of which the horses were
magically conjured must likewise have had something super-natural about them. The fairytale makes no comment here, but ifour assumption is correct that the two animal forms correspondto the subhuman components of hero and princess, then it fol-lows that the human forms—Prince and Princess B—must cor-respond to their superhuman components. The superhumanquality of the original swineherd is shown by the fact that hebecomes a hero, practically a half-god, since he does not staywith his swine but climbs the world-tree, where he is very nearlymade its prisoner, like Wotan. Similarly, he could not havebecome like the hunter if he did not have a certain resemblanceto him in the ﬁrst place. In the same way the imprisonment of
Princess A on the top of the world-tree proves her electness, andin so far as she shares the hunter’s bed, as stated by the tale, she isactually the bride of God.
It is these extraordinary forces of heroism and election, bor-
446
dering on the superhuman, which involve two quite ordinaryhumans in a superhuman fate. Accordingly, in the profane worlda swineherd becomes a king, and a princess gets an agreeablehusband. But since, for fairytales, there is not only a profane butalso a magical world, human fate does not have the ﬁnal word.
The fairytale therefore does not omit to point out what happensin the world of magic. There too a prince and princess have gotinto the power of the evil spirit, who is himself in a tight cornerfrom which he cannot extricate himself without extraneoushelp. So the human fate that befalls the swineherd and Princess Ais paralleled in the world of magic. But in so far as the hunter is aphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 149

pagan God-image and thus exalted above the world of heroes
and paramours of the gods, the parallelism goes beyond themerely magical into a divine and spiritual sphere, where the evilspirit, the Devil himself—or at least a devil—is bound by the
spell of an equally mighty or even mightier counter-principleindicated by the three nails. This supreme tension of opposites,the mainspring of the whole drama, is obviously the con ﬂict
between the upper and lower triads, or, to put it in theologicalterms, between the Christian God and the devil who hasassumed the features of Wotan.
63
6. We must, it seems, start from this highest level if we want to 447
understand the story correctly, for the drama takes its rise fromthe initial transgression of the evil spirit. The immediate con-sequence of this is his cruci ﬁxion. In that distressing situation he
needs outside help, and as it is not forthcoming from above, itcan only be summoned from below. A young swineherd, pos-sessed with the boyish spirit of adventure, is reckless and inquisi-tive enough to climb the world-tree. Had he fallen and brokenhis neck, no doubt everybody would have said, “What evil spiritcould have given him the crazy idea of climbing up an enor-mous tree like that!” Nor would they have been altogetherwrong, for that is precisely what the evil spirit was after. Thecapture of Princess A was a transgression in the profane world,and the bewitching of the—as we may suppose—semidivinebrother-sister pair was just such an enormity in the magicalworld. We do not know, but it is possible, that this heinous crimewas committed before the bewitching of Princess A. At any rate,both episodes point to a transgression of the evil spirit in themagical world as well as in the profane.
It is assuredly not without a deeper meaning that the rescuer
448
63As regards the triadic nature of Wotan cf. Ninck, Wodan und germanischer Schick-
salsglaube , p. 142. His horse is also described as, among other things, three-
legged.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 150

or redeemer should be a swineherd, like the Prodigal Son. He is
of lowly origin and has this much in common with the curiousconception of the redeemer in alchemy. His ﬁrst liberating act is
to deliver the evil spirit from the divine punishment meted outto him. It is from this act, representing the ﬁrst stage of the lysis,
that the whole dramatic tangle develops.
7. The moral of this story is in truth exceedingly odd. The
449
ﬁnale satis ﬁes in so far as the swineherd and Princess A are
married and become the royal pair. Prince and Princess B like-wise celebrate their wedding, but this—in accordance with thearchaic prerogative of kings—takes the form of incest, which,though somewhat repellent, must be regarded as more or lesshabitual in semidivine circles.
64 But what, we may ask, happens
to the evil spirit, whose rescue from condign punishment setsthe whole thing in motion? The wicked hunter is trampled topieces by the horses, which presumably does no lasting damageto a spirit. Apparently he vanishes without trace, but only appar-ently, for he does after all leave a trace behind him, namely ahard-won happiness in both the profane and the magical world.Two halves of the quaternity, represented on one side by theswineherd and Princess A and on the other by Prince and Prin-cess B, have each come together and united: two marriage-pairsnow confront one another, parallel but otherwise divided, inas-much as the one pair belongs to the profane and the other to themagical world. But in spite of this indubitable division, secretpsychological connections, as we have seen, exist between themwhich allow us to derive the one pair from the other.
Speaking in the spirit of the fairytale, which unfolds its drama
450
from the highest point, one would have to say that the world of
64The assumption that they are a brother-sister pair is supported by the fact
that the stallion addresses the mare as “sister.” This may be just a ﬁgure of
speech; on the other hand sister means sister, whether we take it ﬁguratively or
non- ﬁguratively. Moreover, incest plays a signi ﬁcant part in mythology as well
as in alchemy.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 151

half-gods is anterior to the profane world and produces it out of
itself, just as the world of half-gods must be thought of as pro-ceeding from the world of gods. Conceived in this way, theswineherd and Princess A are nothing less than earthly simulacraof Prince and Princess B, who in their turn would be the des-cendants of divine prototypes. Nor should we forget that thehorse-breeding witch belongs to the hunter as his female coun-terpart, rather like an ancient Epona (the Celtic goddess ofhorses). Unfortunately we are not told how the magical conjur-ation into horses happened. But it is evident that the witch had ahand in the game because both the horses were raised from herstock and are thus, in a sense, her productions. Hunter and witchform a pair—the re ﬂection, in the nocturnal-chthonic part of the
magical world, of a divine parental pair. The latter is easily rec-ognized in the central Christian idea of sponsus et sponsa , Christ and
his bride, the Church.
If we wanted to explain the fairytale personalistically, the
451
attempt would founder on the fact that archetypes are notwhimsical inventions but autonomous elements of the un-conscious psyche which were there before any invention wasthought of. They represent the unalterable structure of a psychicworld whose “reality” is attested by the determining e ﬀects it
has upon the conscious mind. Thus, it is a signi ﬁcant psychic
reality that the human pair
65 is matched by another pair in the
unconscious, the latter pair being only in appearance a re ﬂection
of the ﬁrst. In reality the royal pair invariably comes ﬁrst, as an a
priori, so that the human pair has far more the signi ﬁcance of an
individual concretization, in space and time, of an eternal andprimordial image—at least in its mental structure, which isimprinted upon the biological continuum.
We could say, then, that the swineherd stands for the “ani-
452
mal” man who has a soul-mate somewhere in the upper world.
65Human in so far as the anima is replaced by a human person.phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 152

By her royal birth she betrays her connection with the pre-
existent, semidivine pair. Looked at from this angle, the latterstands for everything a man can become if only he climbs highenough up the world-tree.
66 For to the degree that the young
swineherd gains possession of the patrician, feminine half ofhimself, he approximates to the pair of half-gods and lifts him-self into the sphere of royalty, which means universal validity.We come across the same theme in Christian Rosencreutz’sChymical Wedding , where the king’s son must ﬁrst free his bride
from the power of a Moor, to whom she has voluntarily givenherself as a concubine. The Moor represents the alchemicalnigredo in which the arcane substance lies hidden, an idea that
forms yet another parallel to our mythologem, or, as we wouldsay in psychological language, another variant of this archetype.
As in alchemy, our fairytale describes the unconscious pro-
453
cesses that compensate the conscious, Christian situation. Itdepicts the workings of a spirit who carries our Christian think-ing beyond the boundaries set by ecclesiastical concepts, seekingan answer to questions which neither the Middle Ages nor thepresent day have been able to solve. It is not di ﬃcult to see in the
image of the second royal pair a correspondence to the ecclesi-astical conception of bridegroom and bride, and in that of thehunter and witch a distortion of it, veering towards an atavistic,unconscious Wotanism. The fact that it is a German fairytale makes
the position particularly interesting, since this same Wotanismwas the psychological godfather of National Socialism, a phe-nomenon which carried the distortion to the lowest pitch beforethe eyes of the world.
67 On the other hand, the fairytale makes it
66The great tree corresponds to the arbor philosophica of the alchemists. The
meeting between an earthly human being and the anima, swimming down inthe shape of a mermaid, is to be found in the so-called “Ripley Scrowle.” Cf.Psychology and Alchemy , ﬁg. 257.
67Cf. my “Wotan.”phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 153

clear that it is possible for a man to attain totality, to become
whole, only with the cooperation of the spirit of darkness,indeed that the latter is actually a causa instrumentalis of redemption
and individuation. In utter perversion of this goal of spiritualdevelopment, to which all nature aspires and which is also pre-ﬁgured in Christian doctrine, National Socialism destroyed
man’s moral autonomy and set up the nonsensical totalitarian-ism of the State. The fairytale tells us how to proceed if we wantto overcome the power of darkness: we must turn his ownweapons against him, which naturally cannot be done if themagical underworld of the hunter remains unconscious, and ifthe best men in the nation would rather preach dogmatisms andplatitudes than take the human psyche seriously.
VI CONCLUSION
When we consider the spirit in its archetypal form as it 454
appears to us in fairytales and dreams, it presents a picture thatdiﬀers strangely from the conscious idea of spirit, which is split
up into so many meanings. Spirit was originally a spirit inhuman or animal form, a daimonion that came upon man from
without. But our material already shows traces of an expansionof consciousness which has gradually begun to occupy that ori-ginally unconscious territory and to transform those daimonia , at
least partially, into voluntary acts. Man conquers not only nature,but spirit also, without realizing what he is doing. To the man ofenlightened intellect it seems like the correction of a fallacywhen he recognizes that what he took to be spirits is simply thehuman spirit and ultimately his own spirit. All the superhumanthings, whether good or bad, that former ages predicated of thedaimonia , are reduced to “reasonable” proportions as though they
were pure exaggeration, and everything seems to be in the bestpossible order. But were the unanimous convictions of the pastreally and truly only exaggerations? If they were not, then thephenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 154

integration of the spirit means nothing less than its demoniza-
tion, since the superhuman spiritual agencies that were formerlytied up in nature are introjected into human nature, thus endow-ing it with a power which extends the bounds of the personalityad inﬁnitum, in the most perilous way. I put it to the enlightened
rationalist: has his rational reduction led to the bene ﬁcial control
of matter and spirit? He will point proudly to the advances inphysics and medicine, to the freeing of the mind from medievalstupidity and—as a well-meaning Christian—to our deliverancefrom the fear of demons. But we continue to ask: what have allour other cultural achievements led to? The fearful answer isthere before our eyes: man has been delivered from no fear, ahideous nightmare lies upon the world. So far reason has failedlamentably, and the very thing that everybody wanted to avoidrolls on in ghastly progression. Man has achieved a wealth ofuseful gadgets, but, to o ﬀset that, he has torn open the abyss, and
what will become of him now—where can he make a halt? Afterthe last World War we hoped for reason: we go on hoping. Butalready we are fascinated by the possibilities of atomic ﬁssion
and promise ourselves a Golden Age—the surest guarantee thatthe abomination of desolation will grow to limitless dimensions.And who or what is it that causes all this? It is none other thanthat harmless (!), ingenious, inventive, and sweetly reasonablehuman spirit who unfortunately is abysmally unconscious of thedemonism that still clings to him. Worse, this spirit does every-thing to avoid looking himself in the face, and we all help himlike mad. Only, heaven preserve us from psychology— that
depravity might lead to self-knowledge! Rather let us have wars,for which somebody else is always to blame, nobody seeing thatall the world is driven to do just what all the world ﬂees from in
terror.
It seems to me, frankly, that former ages did not exaggerate,
455
that the spirit has not sloughed o ﬀ its demonisms, and
that mankind, because of its scienti ﬁc and technologicalphenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 155

development, has in increasing measure delivered itself over to
the danger of possession. True, the archetype of the spirit iscapable of working for good as well as for evil, but it dependsupon man’s free—i.e., conscious—decision whether the goodalso will be perverted into something satanic. Man’s worst sin isunconsciousness, but it is indulged in with the greatest pietyeven by those who should serve mankind as teachers andexamples. When shall we stop taking man for granted in thisbarbarous manner and in all seriousness seek ways and means toexorcize him, to rescue him from possession and unconscious-ness, and make this the most vital task of civilization? Can we notunderstand that all the outward tinkerings and improvements donot touch man’s inner nature, and that everything ultimatelydepends upon whether the man who wields the science and thetechnics is capable of responsibility or not? Christianity hasshown us the way, but, as the facts bear witness, it has notpenetrated deeply enough below the surface. What depths ofdespair are still needed to open the eyes of the world’s respon-sible leaders, so that at least they can refrain from leading them-selves into temptation?phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales 156

Part IV
On the Psychology of the Trickster-
Figure

1
ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE TRICKSTER-FIGURE1
It is no light task for me to write about the ﬁgure of the 456
trickster in American Indian mythology within the con ﬁned
space of a commentary. When I ﬁrst came across Adolf Bande-
lier’s classic on this subject, The Delight Makers , many years ago, I
was struck by the European analogy of the carnival in the medi-eval Church, with its reversal of the hierarchic order, which isstill continued in the carnivals held by student societies today.Something of this contradictoriness also inheres in the medievaldescription of the devil as simia dei (the ape of God), and in his
characterization in folklore as the “simpleton” who is “fooled”or “cheated.” A curious combination of typical trickster motifscan be found in the alchemical ﬁgure of Mercurius; for instance,
1[Originally published as part 5 of Der göttliche Schelm , by Paul Radin, with
commentaries by C. G. Jung and Carl Kerényi (Zurich, 1954). The presenttranslation then appeared in the English version of the volume: The Trickster: A
Study in American Indian Mythology (London and New York, 1956); it is republished
here with only minor revisions.—E  .]

his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a
shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, hisexposure to all kinds of tortures, and—last but not least—hisapproximation to the ﬁgure of a saviour. These qualities make
Mercurius seem like a daemonic being resurrected from primi-tive times, older even than the Greek Hermes. His rogueries relatehim in some measure to various ﬁgures met with in folklore and
universally known in fairytales: Tom Thumb, Stupid Hans, or thebuﬀoon-like Hanswurst, who is an altogether negative hero and
yet manages to achieve through his stupidity what others fail toaccomplish with their best e ﬀorts. In Grimm’s fairytale, the
“Spirit Mercurius” lets himself be outwitted by a peasant lad, andthen has to buy his freedom with the precious gift of healing.
Since all mythical ﬁgures correspond to inner psychic experi-
457
ences and originally sprang from them, it is not surprising to
ﬁnd certain phenomena in the ﬁeld of parapsychology which
remind us of the trickster. These are the phenomena connectedwith poltergeists, and they occur at all times and places in theambience of pre-adolescent children. The malicious tricksplayed by the poltergeist are as well known as the low level of hisintelligence and the fatuity of his “communications.” Ability tochange his shape seems also to be one of his characteristics, asthere are not a few reports of his appearance in animal form.Since he has on occasion described himself as a soul in hell, themotif of subjective su ﬀering would seem not to be lacking
either. His universality is co-extensive, so to speak, with that ofshamanism, to which, as we know, the whole phenomenologyof spiritualism belongs. There is something of the trickster in thecharacter of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, oftenplays malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn tothe vengeance of those whom he has injured. For this reason, hisprofession sometimes puts him in peril of his life. Besides that,the shamanistic techniques in themselves often cause themedicine-man a good deal of discomfort, if not actual pain. Aton the psychology of the trickster-figure 160

all events the “making of a medicine-man” involves, in many
parts of the world, so much agony of body and soul that per-manent psychic injuries may result. His “approximation to thesaviour” is an obvious consequence of this, in con ﬁrmation of
the mythological truth that the wounded wounder is the agentof healing, and that the su ﬀerer takes away su ﬀering.
These mythological features extend even to the highest
458
regions of man’s spiritual development. If we consider, forexample, the daemonic features exhibited by Yahweh in the OldTestament, we shall ﬁnd in them not a few reminders of the
unpredictable behaviour of the trickster, of his senseless orgies ofdestruction and his self-imposed su ﬀerings, together with the
same gradual development into a saviour and his simultaneoushumanization. It is just this transformation of the meaninglessinto the meaningful that reveals the trickster’s compensatoryrelation to the “saint.” In the early Middle Ages, this led to somestrange ecclesiastical customs based on memories of the ancientsaturnalia. Mostly they were celebrated on the days immediatelyfollowing the birth of Christ—that is, in the New Year—withsinging and dancing. The dances were the originally harmlesstripudia of the priests, lower clergy, children, and subdeacons and
took place in church. An episcopus puerorum (children’s bishop) was
elected on Innocents’ Day and dressed in ponti ﬁcal robes. Amid
uproarious rejoicings he paid an o ﬃcial visit to the palace of the
archbishop and bestowed the episcopal blessing from one of thewindows. The same thing happened at the tripudium hypodiacono-
rum, and at the dances for other priestly grades. By the end of the
twelfth century, the subdeacons’ dance had degenerated into areal festum stultorum (fools’ feast). A report from the year 1198
says that at the Feast of the Circumcision in Notre Dame, Paris,“so many abominations and shameful deeds” were committedthat the holy place was desecrated “not only by smutty jokes, buteven by the shedding of blood.” In vain did Pope Innocent IIIinveigh against the “jests and madness that make the clergy aon the psychology of the trickster-figure 161

mockery,” and the “shameless frenzy of their play-acting.” Two
hundred and ﬁfty years later (March 12, 1444), a letter from the
Theological Faculty of Paris to all the French bishops was stillfulminating against these festivals, at which “even the priests andclerics elected an archbishop or a bishop or pope, and namedhim the Fools’ Pope” ( fatuorum papam ). “In the very midst of
divine service masqueraders with grotesque faces, disguised aswomen, lions, and mummers, performed their dances, sangindecent songs in the choir, ate their greasy food from a cornerof the altar near the priest celebrating mass, got out their gamesof dice, burned a stinking incense made of old shoe leather, andran and hopped about all over the church.”
2
It is not surprising that this veritable witches’ sabbath was 459
uncommonly popular, and that it required considerable time andeﬀort to free the Church from this pagan heritage.
3
In certain localities even the priests seem to have adhered to 460
the “libertas decembrica,” as the Fools’ Holiday was called, in
spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that the older level ofconsciousness could let itself rip on this happy occasion with allthe wildness, wantonness, and irresponsibility of paganism.
4
2Du Cange, Glossarium , s.v. Kalendae, p. 1666. Here there is a note to the e ﬀect
that the French title “sou-diacres” means literally ‘saturi diaconi’ or ‘diacressaouls’ (drunken deacons).
3These customs seem to be directly modelled on the pagan feast known as
“Cervula” or “Cervulus.” It took place on the kalends of January and was a kindof New Year’s festival, at which people exchanged strenae (étrennes, ‘gifts’),
dressed up as animals or old women, and danced through the streets singing,to the applause of the populace. According to Du Cange (s.v. cervulus), sacri-legious songs were sung. This happened even in the immediate vicinity of St.Peter’s in Rome.
4Part of the festum fatuorum in many places was the still unexplained ballgame
played by the priests and captained by the bishop or archbishop, “ut etiam sesead lusum pilae demittent” (that they also may indulge in the game of pelota).Pila or pelota is the ball which the players throw to one another. See Du Cange, s.v.
Kalendae and pelota.on the psychology of the trickster-figure
162

These ceremonies, which still reveal the spirit of the trickster in
his original form, seem to have died out by the beginning of thesixteenth century. At any rate, the various conciliar decreesissued from 1581 to 1585 forbade only the festum puerorum and
the election of an episcopus puerorum .
Finally, we must also mention in this connection the festum
461
asinorum , which, so far as I know, was celebrated mainly in France.
Although considered a harmless festival in memory of Mary’sﬂight into Egypt, it was celebrated in a somewhat curious man-
ner which might easily have given rise to misunderstandings. InBeauvais, the ass procession went right into the church.
5 At the
conclusion of each part (Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) of the highmass that followed, the whole congregation brayed , that is, they all
went “Y-a” like a donkey (“hac modulatione hinham conclude-bantur”). A codex dating apparently from the eleventh centurysays: “At the end of the mass, instead of the words ‘Ite missa est,’the priest shall bray three times ( ter hinhamabit ), and instead of the
words ‘Deo gratias,’ the congregation shall answer ‘Y-a’ ( hinham )
three times.”
Du Cange cites a hymn from this festival:
462
Orientis partibus
Adventavit AsinusPulcher et fortissimusSarcinis aptissimus.
Each verse was followed by the French refrain:
Hez, Sire Asnes, car chantezBelle bouche rechignez
5“Puella, quae cum asino a parte Evangelii prope altare collocabatur” (the girl
who stationed herself with the ass at the side of the altar where the gospel isread). Du Cange, s.v. festum asinorum.on the psychology of the trickster-figure
163

Vous aurez du foin assez
Et de l’avoine à plantez.
The hymn had nine verses, the last of which was:
Amen, dicas, Asine ( hic genuﬂectebatur )
Jam satur de gramine.Amen, amen, iteraAspernare vetera.
6
Du Cange says that the more ridiculous this rite seemed, the 463
greater the enthusiasm with which it was celebrated. In other
places the ass was decked with a golden canopy whose cornerswere held “by distinguished canons”; the others present had to
“don suitably festive garments, as at Christmas.” Since therewere certain tendencies to bring the ass into symbolic relation-ship with Christ, and since, from ancient times, the god of theJews was vulgarly conceived to be an ass—a prejudice whichextended to Christ himself,
7 as is shown by the mock cruci ﬁxion
6Caetera instead of vetera? [Trans. by A. S. B. Glover:
From the furthest Eastern clime
Came the Ass in olden time,Comely, sturdy for the road,Fit to bear a heavy load.
Sing then loudly, master Ass,
Let the tempting titbit pass:You shall have no lack of hayAnd of oats ﬁnd good supply.
Say Amen, Amen, good ass, ( here a genuﬂection is made )
Now you’ve had your ﬁll of grass;Ancient paths are left behind:Sing Amen with gladsome mind.]
7Cf. also Tertullian, Apologeticus adversus gentes , XVI.on the psychology of the trickster-figure 164

scratched on the wall of the Imperial Cadet School on the
Palatine8—the danger of theriomorphism lay uncomfortably
close. Even the bishops could do nothing to stamp out this cus-tom, until ﬁnally it had to be suppressed by the “auctoritas
supremi Senatus.” The suspicion of blasphemy becomes quiteopen in Nietzsche’s “Ass Festival,” which is a deliberatelyblasphemous parody of the mass.
9
These medieval customs demonstrate the role of the trickster 464
to perfection, and, when they vanished from the precincts of theChurch, they appeared again on the profane level of Italian the-atricals, as those comic types who, often adorned with enor-mous ithyphallic emblems, entertained the far from prudishpublic with ribaldries in true Rabelaisian style. Callot’s engrav-ings have preserved these classical ﬁgures for posterity—the
Pulcinellas, Cucorognas, Chico Sgarras, and the like.
10
In picaresque tales, in carnivals and revels, in magic rites of 465
healing, in man’s religious fears and exaltations, this phantom ofthe trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes inquite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modulatedguise.
11 He is obviously a “psychologem,” an archetypal psychic
structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations heis a faithful re ﬂection of an absolutely undi ﬀerentiated human
consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left theanimal level. That this is how the trickster ﬁgure originated can
hardly be contested if we look at it from the causal and historical
8[Reproduced in Symbols of Transformation , pl. XLIII.—E  .]
9Thus Spake Zarathustra , Part. IV , ch. LXXVIII.
10I am thinking here of the series called “Balli di Sfessania.” The name is
probably a reference to the Etrurian town of Fescennia, which was famous forits lewd songs. Hence “Fescennina licentia” in Horace, Fescenninus being theequivalent of /phialtαλλικό/sigmaalt .
11Cf. the article “Daily Paper Pantheon,” by A. McGlashan, in The Lancet (1953).
p. 238, pointing out that the ﬁgures in comic-strips have remarkable archetypal
analogies.on the psychology of the trickster-figure 165

angle. In psychology as in biology we cannot a ﬀord to overlook
or underestimate this question of origins, although the answerusually tells us nothing about the functional meaning. For thisreason biology should never forget the question of purpose, foronly by answering that can we get at the meaning of a phenom-enon. Even in pathology, where we are concerned with lesionswhich have no meaning in themselves, the exclusively causalapproach proves to be inadequate, since there are a number ofpathological phenomena which only give up their meaningwhen we inquire into their purpose. And where we are con-cerned with the normal phenomena of life, this question ofpurpose takes undisputed precedence.
When, therefore, a primitive or barbarous consciousness
466
forms a picture of itself on a much earlier level of developmentand continues to do so for hundreds or even thousands of years,undeterred by the contamination of its archaic qualities withdiﬀerentiated, highly developed mental products, then the causal
explanation is that the older the archaic qualities are, the moreconservative and pertinacious is their behaviour. One simplycannot shake o ﬀ the memory-image of things as they were, and
drags it along like a senseless appendage.
This explanation, which is facile enough to satisfy the ration-
467
alistic requirements of our age, would certainly not meet withthe approval of the Winnebagos, the nearest possessors of thetrickster cycle. For them the myth is not in any sense aremnant—it is far too amusing for that, and an object ofundivided enjoyment. For them it still “functions,” providedthat they have not been spoiled by civilization. For them there isno earthly reason to theorize about the meaning and purpose ofmyths, just as the Christmas-tree seems no problem at all to thenaïve European. For the thoughtful observer, however, bothtrickster and Christmas-tree a ﬀord reason enough for re ﬂection.
Naturally it depends very much on the mentality of the observerwhat he thinks about these things. Considering the crudeon the psychology of the trickster-figure 166

primitivity of the trickster cycle, it would not be surprising if
one saw in this myth simply the re ﬂection of an earlier, rudimen-
tary stage of consciousness, which is what the trickster obviouslyseems to be.
12
The only question that would need answering is whether such 468
personi ﬁed re ﬂections exist at all in empirical psychology. As a
matter of fact they do, and these experiences of split or doublepersonality actually form the core of the earliest psychopatho-logical investigations. The peculiar thing about these dissoci-ations is that the split-o ﬀ personality is not just a random one,
but stands in a complementary or compensatory relationship tothe ego-personality. It is a personi ﬁcation of traits of character
which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those theego-personality possesses. A collective personi ﬁcation like the
trickster is the product of an aggregate of individuals and iswelcomed by each individual as something known to him,which would not be the case if it were just an individualoutgrowth.
Now if the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one
469
would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into thegreat rubbish-heap of the past, and why it continues to make itsinﬂuence felt on the highest levels of civilization, even where, on
account of his stupidity and grotesque scurrility, the trickster nolonger plays the role of a “delight-maker.” In many cultures hisﬁgure seems like an old river-bed in which the water still ﬂows.
One can see this best of all from the fact that the trickster motifdoes not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just asnaïvely and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man—
12Earlier stages of consciousness seem to leave perceptible traces behind them.
For instance, the chakras of the Tantric system correspond by and large to theregions where consciousness was earlier localized, anahata corresponding to the
breast region, manipura to the abdominal region, svadhistana to the bladder region,
and visuddha to the larynx and the speech-consciousness of modern man. Cf.
Avalon, The Serpent Power .on the psychology of the trickster-figure
167

whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying
“accidents” which thwart his will and his actions with appar-ently malicious intent. He then speaks of “hoodoos” and“jinxes” or of the “mischievousness of the object.” Here thetrickster is represented by counter-tendencies in theunconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality,of a puerile and inferior character, not unlike the personalitieswho announce themselves at spiritualistic séances and cause allthose ine ﬀably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I
have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character-component when I called it the shadow .
13 On the civilized level, it
is regarded as a personal “ga ﬀe,” “slip,” “faux pas,” etc., which
are then chalked up as defects of the conscious personality. Weare no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like thereare remnants of a collective shadow ﬁgure which prove that the
personal shadow is in part descended from a numinous collect-ive ﬁgure. This collective ﬁgure gradually breaks up under the
impact of civilization, leaving traces in folklore which are dif-ﬁcult to recognize. But the main part of him gets personalized
and is made an object of personal responsibility.
Radin’s trickster cycle preserves the shadow in its pristine
470
mythological form, and thus points back to a very much earlierstage of consciousness which existed before the birth of themyth, when the Indian was still groping about in a similar men-tal darkness. Only when his consciousness reached a higher levelcould he detach the earlier state from himself and objectify it,that is, say anything about it. So long as his consciousness wasitself trickster-like, such a confrontation could obviously nottake place. It was possible only when the attainment of a newerand higher level of consciousness enabled him to look back on alower and inferior state. It was only to be expected that a good
13The same idea can be found in the Church Father Irenaeus, who calls it the
“umbra.” Adversus haereses , I, ii, 1.on the psychology of the trickster-figure 168

deal of mockery and contempt should mingle with this retro-
spect, thus casting an even thicker pall over man’s memories ofthe past, which were pretty unedifying anyway. This phenom-enon must have repeated itself innumerable times in the historyof his mental development. The sovereign contempt with whichour modern age looks back on the taste and intelligence of earl-ier centuries is a classic example of this, and there is anunmistakable allusion to the same phenomenon in the New Tes-tament, where we are told in Acts 17:30 that God looked downfrom above (
ὑπεριδών , despiciens ) on the χρόνοι τῆ/sigmaalt α ᾿ γνοία/sigmaalt ,
the times of ignorance (or unconsciousness).
This attitude contrasts strangely with the still commoner and 471
more striking idealization of the past, which is praised notmerely as the “good old days” but as the Golden Age—and notjust by uneducated and superstitious people, but by all thoselegions of theosophical enthusiasts who resolutely believe in theformer existence and lofty civilization of Atlantis.
Anyone who belongs to a sphere of culture that seeks the
472
perfect state somewhere in the past must feel very queerlyindeed when confronted by the ﬁgure of the trickster. He is a
forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal atonce. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and div-ine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is hisunconsciousness. Because of it he is deserted by his (evidentlyhuman) companions, which seems to indicate that he has fallenbelow their level of consciousness. He is so unconscious of him-self that his body is not a unity, and his two hands ﬁght each
other. He takes his anus o ﬀ and entrusts it with a special task.
Even his sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turnhimself into a woman and bear children. From his penis hemakes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his originalnature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of agod.
On the other hand he is in many respects stupider than the
473on the psychology of the trickster-figure 169

animals, and gets into one ridiculous scrape after another.
Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious thingsfrom sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness. His imprison-ment in animal unconsciousness is suggested by the episodewhere he gets his head caught inside the skull of an elk, and thenext episode shows how he overcomes this condition byimprisoning the head of a hawk inside his own rectum. True, hesinks back into the former condition immediately afterwards, byfalling under the ice, and is outwitted time after time by theanimals, but in the end he succeeds in tricking the cunningcoyote, and this brings back to him his saviour nature. The trick-ster is a primitive “cosmic” being of divine-animal nature, on the
one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities,and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreasonand unconsciousness. He is no match for the animals either,because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct.These defects are the marks of his human nature, which is not so
well adapted to the environment as the animal’s but, instead, hasprospects of a much higher development of consciousness basedon a considerable eagerness to learn, as is duly emphasized in themyth.
What the repeated telling of the myth signi ﬁes is the thera-
474
peutic anamnesis of contents which, for reasons still to be
discussed, should never be forgotten for long. If they werenothing but the remnants of an inferior state it would beunderstandable if man turned his attention away from them,feeling that their reappearance was a nuisance. This is evidentlyby no means the case, since the trickster has been a source ofamusement right down to civilized times, where he can still berecognized in the carnival ﬁgures of Pulcinella and the clown.
That is one important reason for his still continuing to func-tion. But it is not the only one, and certainly not the reasonwhy this re ﬂection of an extremely primitive state of
consciousness solidi ﬁed into a mythological personage. Mereon the psychology of the trickster-figure 170

vestiges of an early state that is dying out usually lose their
energy at an increasing rate, otherwise they would never disap-pear. The last thing we would expect is that they would have thestrength to solidify into a mythological ﬁgure with its own
cycle of legends—unless, of course, they received energy fromoutside, in this case from a higher level of consciousness orfrom sources in the unconscious which are not yet exhausted.To take a legitimate parallel from the psychology of the indi-vidual, namely the appearance of an impressive shadow ﬁgure
antagonistically confronting a personal consciousness: this ﬁg-
ure does not appear merely because it still exists in the indi-
vidual, but because it rests on a dynamism whose existence canonly be explained in terms of his actual situation, for instancebecause the shadow is so disagreeable to his ego-consciousnessthat it has to be repressed into the unconscious. This explan-ation does not quite meet the case here, because the tricksterobviously represents a vanishing level of consciousness whichincreasingly lacks the power to take express and assert itself.Furthermore, repression would prevent it from vanishing,because repressed contents are the very ones that have the bestchance of survival, as we know from experience that nothing iscorrected in the unconscious. Lastly, the story of the trickster isnot in the least disagreeable to the Winnebago consciousness orincompatible with it but, on the contrary, pleasurable andtherefore not conducive to repression. It looks, therefore, as ifthe myth were actively sustained and fostered by consciousness.This may well be so, since that is the best and most successfulmethod of keeping the shadow ﬁgure conscious and subjecting
it to conscious criticism. Although, to begin with, this criticismhas more the character of a positive evaluation, we may expectthat with the progressive development of consciousness thecruder aspects of the myth will gradually fall away, even ifthe danger of its rapid disappearance under the stress ofwhite civilization did not exist. We have often seen how certainon the psychology of the trickster-figure 171

customs, originally cruel or obscene, became mere vestiges in
the course of time.14
The process of rendering this motif harmless takes an 475
extremely long time, as its history shows; one can still detecttraces of it even at a high level of civilization. Its longevity couldalso be explained by the strength and vitality of the state ofconsciousness described in the myth, and by the secret attractionand fascination this has for the conscious mind. Although purelycausal hypotheses in the biological sphere are not as a rule verysatisfactory, due weight must nevertheless be given to the factthat in the case of the trickster a higher level of consciousnesshas covered up a lower one, and that the latter was already inretreat. His recollection, however, is mainly due to the interestwhich the conscious mind brings to bear on him, the inevitableconcomitant being, as we have seen, the gradual civilizing, i.e.,assimilation, of a primitive daemonic ﬁgure who was originally
autonomous and even capable of causing possession.
To supplement the causal approach by a ﬁnal one therefore
476
enables us to arrive at more meaningful interpretations not only
in medical psychology, where we are concerned with individualfantasies originating in the unconscious, but also in the case ofcollective fantasies, that is myths and fairytales.
As Radin points out, the civilizing process begins within the
477
framework of the trickster cycle itself, and this is a clear indica-tion that the original state has been overcome. At any rate themarks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead ofacting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trick-ster’s behaviour towards the end of the cycle becomes quiteuseful and sensible. The devaluation of his earlier unconscious-ness is apparent even in the myth, and one wonders what has
14For instance, the ducking of the “Ueli” (from Udalricus = Ulrich, yokel, oaf,
fool) in Basel during the second half of January was, if I remember correctly,forbidden by the police in the 1860s, after one of the victims died ofpneumonia.on the psychology of the trickster-figure
172

happened to his evil qualities. The naïve reader may imagine that
when the dark aspects disappear they are no longer there inreality. But that is not the case at all, as experience shows. Whatactually happens is that the conscious mind is then able to freeitself from the fascination of evil and is no longer obliged to liveit compulsively. The darkness and the evil have not gone up insmoke, they have merely withdrawn into the unconscious owingto loss of energy, where they remain unconscious so long as allis well with the conscious. But if the conscious should ﬁnd itself
in a critical or doubtful situation, then it soon becomes apparentthat the shadow has not dissolved into nothing but is only wait-ing for a favourable opportunity to reappear as a projection uponone’s neighbour. If this trick is successful, there is immediatelycreated between them that world of primordial darkness whereeverything that is characteristic of the trickster can happen—even on the highest plane of civilization. The best examples ofthese “monkey tricks,” as popular speech aptly and truthfullysums up this state of a ﬀairs in which everything goes wrong and
nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the lastmoment, are naturally to be found in politics.
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He
478
remembers him only ﬁguratively and metaphorically, when,
irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing trickson him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that hisown hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualitieswhose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon aspeople get together in masses and submerge the individual, theshadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even bepersoni ﬁed and incarnated.
The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psy-
479
che from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for
the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the indi-vidual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation,and makes society pay for his ine ﬃciency. He thinks theon the psychology of the trickster-figure 173

meaning of existence would be discovered if food and clothing
were delivered to him gratis on his own doorstep, or if every-body possessed an automobile. Such are the puerilities that riseup in place of an unconscious shadow and keep it unconscious.As a result of these prejudices, the individual feels totallydependent on his environment and loses all capacity for intro-spection. In this way his code of ethics is replaced by a know-ledge of what is permitted or forbidden or ordered. How, underthese circumstances, can one expect a soldier to subject an orderreceived from a superior to ethical scrutiny? He has not yet madethe discovery that he might be capable of spontaneous ethicalimpulses, and of performing them—even when no one islooking.
From this point of view we can see why the myth of the
480
trickster was preserved and developed: like many other myths, itwas supposed to have a therapeutic e ﬀect. It holds the earlier low
intellectual and moral level before the eyes of the more highlydeveloped individual, so that he shall not forget how thingslooked yesterday. We like to imagine that something which wedo not understand does not help us in any way. But that is notalways so. Seldom does a man understand with his head alone,least of all when he is a primitive. Because of its numinosity themyth has a direct e ﬀect on the unconscious, no matter whether
it is understood or not. The fact that its repeated telling has notlong since become obsolete can, I believe, be explained by itsusefulness. The explanation is rather di ﬃcult because two con-
trary tendencies are at work: the desire on the one hand to getout of the earlier condition and on the other hand not to forgetit.
15 Apparently Radin has also felt this di ﬃculty, for he says:
“Viewed psychologically, it might be contended that the history
15Not to forget something means keeping it in consciousness. If the enemy
disappears from my ﬁeld of vision, then he may possibly be behind me—and
even more dangerous.on the psychology of the trickster-figure 174

of civilization is largely the account of the attempts of man to
forget his transformation from an animal into a human being.”16
A few pages further on he says (with reference to the GoldenAge): “So stubborn a refusal to forget is not an accident.”
17 And
it is also no accident that we are forced to contradict ourselves assoon as we try to formulate man’s paradoxical attitude to myth.Even the most enlightened of us will set up a Christmas-tree forhis children without having the least idea what this custommeans, and is invariably disposed to nip any attempt at interpret-ation in the bud. It is really astonishing to see how many so-called superstitions are rampant nowadays in town and countryalike, but if one took hold of the individual and asked him,loudly and clearly, “Do you believe in ghosts? In witches? Inspells and magic?” he would deny it indignantly. It is a hundredto one he has never heard of such things and thinks it all rubbish.But in secret he is all for it, just like a jungle-dweller. The publicknows very little of these things anyway, for everyone is con-vinced that in our enlightened society that kind of superstitionhas long since been eradicated, and it is part of the generalconvention to act as though one had never heard of such things,not to mention believing in them.
But nothing is ever lost, not even the blood pact with the
481
devil. Outwardly it is forgotten, but inwardly not at all. We actlike the natives on the southern slopes of Mount Elgon, in EastAfrica, one of whom accompanied me part of the way into thebush. At a fork in the path we came upon a brand new “ghosttrap,” beautifully got up like a little hut, near the cave where helived with his family. I asked him if he had made it. He denied itwith all the signs of extreme agitation, asserting that only chil-dren would make such a “ju-ju.” Whereupon he gave the hut akick, and the whole thing fell to pieces.
16Radin, The World of Primitive Man , p. 3.
17Ibid., p. 5.on the psychology of the trickster-figure 175

This is exactly the reaction we can observe in Europe today. 482
Outwardly people are more or less civilized, but inwardly they
are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclinedto give up his beginnings, and something else believes it haslong since got beyond all that. This contradiction was oncebrought home to me in the most drastic manner when I waswatching a “Strudel” (a sort of local witch-doctor) taking thespell o ﬀ a stable. The stable was situated immediately beside the
Gotthard railway line, and several international expresses spedpast during the ceremony. Their occupants would hardly havesuspected that a primitive ritual was being performed a fewyards away.
The con ﬂict between the two dimensions of consciousness is
483
simply an expression of the polaristic structure of the psyche,
which like any other energic system is dependent on the tensionof opposites. That is also why there are no general psychologicalpropositions which could not just as well be reversed; indeed,their reversibility proves their validity. We should never forgetthat in any psychological discussion we are not saying anythingabout the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about
itself. It is no use thinking we can ever get beyond the psyche by
means of the “mind,” even though the mind asserts that it is notdependent on the psyche. How could it prove that? We can say, ifwe like, that one statement comes from the psyche, is psychicand nothing but psychic, and that another comes from the mind,is “spiritual” and therefore superior to the psychic one. Both aremere assertions based on the postulates of belief.
The fact is, that this old trichotomous hierarchy of psychic
484
contents (hylic, psychic, and pneumatic) represents the polaris-tic structure of the psyche, which is the only immediate objectof experience. The unity of our psychic nature lies in the middle,just as the living unity of the waterfall appears in the dynamicconnection between above and below. Thus, the living e ﬀect of
the myth is experienced when a higher consciousness, rejoicingon the psychology of the trickster-figure 176

in its freedom and independence, is confronted by the auton-
omy of a mythological ﬁgure and yet cannot ﬂee from its fascin-
ation, but must pay tribute to the overwhelming impression. Theﬁgure works, because secretly it participates in the observer’s
psyche and appears as its re ﬂection, though it is not recognized
as such. It is split o ﬀ from his consciousness and consequently
behaves like an autonomous personality. The trickster is a col-lective shadow ﬁgure, a summation of all the inferior traits of
character in individuals. And since the individual shadow isnever absent as a component of personality, the collective ﬁgure
can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, asa mythological ﬁgure, but, in consequence of the increasing
repression and neglect of the original mythologems, as a corres-ponding projection on other social groups and nations.
If we take the trickster as a parallel of the individual shadow,
485
then the question arises whether that trend towards meaning,which we saw in the trickster myth, can also be observed in thesubjective and personal shadow. Since this shadow frequentlyappears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-de ﬁned ﬁg-
ure, we can answer this question positively: the shadow,although by de ﬁnition a negative ﬁgure, sometimes has certain
clearly discernible traits and associations which point to a quitediﬀerent background. It is as though he were hiding meaningful
contents under an unprepossessing exterior. Experience con-ﬁrms this; and what is more important, the things that are hid-
den usually consist of increasingly numinous ﬁgures. The one
standing closest behind the shadow is the anima,
18 who is
18By the metaphor “standing behind the shadow” I am attempting to illustrate
the fact that, to the degree in which the shadow is recognized and integrated,the problem of the anima, i.e., of relationship, is constellated. It is understand-able that the encounter with the shadow should have an enduring e ﬀect on the
relations of the ego to the inside and outside world, since the integration of theshadow brings about an alteration of personality. Cf. Aion, Part II of this vol.,
pars. 13 ﬀ.on the psychology of the trickster-figure
177

endowed with considerable powers of fascination and posses-
sion. She often appears in rather too youthful form, and hidesin her turn the powerful archetype of the wise old man (sage,magician, king, etc.). The series could be extended, but itwould be pointless to do so, as psychologically one onlyunderstands what one has experienced oneself. The conceptsof complex psychology are, in essence, not intellectual formu-lations but names for certain areas of experience, and thoughthey can be described they remain dead and irrepresentable toanyone who has not experienced them. Thus, I have noticedthat people usually have not much di ﬃculty in picturing to
themselves what is meant by the shadow, even if they wouldhave preferred instead a bit of Latin or Greek jargon thatsounds more “scienti ﬁc.” But it costs them enormous di ﬃcul-
ties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easilyenough when she appears in novels or as a ﬁlm star, but she is
not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role sheplays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that aman can never get the better of and never ﬁnishes coping
with. Therefore it remains in a perpetual state of emotionalitywhich must not be touched. The degree of unconsciousnessone meets with in this connection is, to put it mildly, astound-ing. Hence it is practically impossible to get a man who isafraid of his own femininity to understand what is meant bythe anima.
Actually, it is not surprising that this should be so, since
486
even the most rudimentary insight into the shadow sometimescauses the greatest di ﬃculties for the modern European. But
since the shadow is the ﬁgure nearest his consciousness and
the least explosive one, it is also the ﬁrst component of per-
sonality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious. A min-atory and ridiculous ﬁgure, he stands at the very beginning of
the way of individuation, posing the deceptively easy riddle ofon the psychology of the trickster-figure 178

the Sphinx, or grimly demanding answer to a “quaestio
crocodilina.”19
If, at the end of the trickster myth, the saviour is hinted at, this 487
comforting premonition or hope means that some calamity orother has happened and been consciously understood. Only outof disaster can the longing for the saviour arise—in other words,the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow cre-ate such a harrowing situation that nobody but a saviour canundo the tangled web of fate. In the case of the individual, theproblem constellated by the shadow is answered on the plane ofthe anima, that is, through relatedness. In the history of thecollective as in the history of the individual, everything dependson the development of consciousness. This gradually brings lib-eration from imprisonment in α ᾿ γνοία , “unconsciousness,”
20 and
is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing.
As in its collective, mythological form, so also the individual 488
shadow contains within it the seed of an enantiodromia, of aconversion into its opposite.
19A crocodile stole a child from its mother. On being asked to give it back to
her, the crocodile replied that he would grant her wish if she could give a trueanswer to his question: “Shall I give the child back?” If she answers “Yes,” it isnot true, and she won’t get the child back. If she answers “No,” it is again nottrue, so in either case the mother loses the child.
20Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness , passim.on the psychology of the trickster-figure 179

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185

INDEX
abaissement du niveau mental 61,
62, 87
ablution 73Acts of the Apostles 169Adam, Second 79 n, 89
Aelian 136 n
Afanas’ev, E. N. 142 n
Africa, East 32; see also Kenya
albedo 88n
alchemists/alchemy 78–9, 89 n;
Chinese; and ﬁsh 87–8; andprolongation of life 85; and spirit103, 111; triad in 133; and union ofopposites 48
alcheringamijina 68, 70 n
alcohol 104Aldrovandus, Ulysses 67 n
Alexander the Great 93, 94Amnesias 62anaesthetic areas 62ancestors, identiﬁcation with 70ancestral: roles 68; souls 67,
68
ancestress 14Ancient of Days 123angel(s): fallen 109; ﬁrst 92angelos 92
anima 66, 139f, 142, 145ff, 177f; an
archetype 16, 31; derivation 104;as Mercurius 106 n; old man as
127; possession caused by 67; assoul 106
anima mundi 135
animal(s): archetype as 112; in
fairytales 117, 129f; helpful 129,142; poltergeist as 160; psyche of69; talking 110
animosity 31animus 148; derivation 104; old
man as 127; “positive” 110;possession by 67; representsspirit 145

Anthroparion 120
Antichrist 89ape of God 159Apollo 136 n
apparition 109 n
apple(s) 119, 126Apuleius 45, 72aqua permanens 87
arbor philosophica 153n
archetype(s): dynamism of 39;
mother as carrier of 39; origin of39; positive and negative sides123; relatively autonomous 118;see also anima; animus; father;
mother; self; shadow; wise oldman
Aristotle 7Aristotelian reasoning 9Ars chemica 78n
Artis auriferae 79n, 88n, 89n
ascension of Christ 55asses: feast of 163Assumption see Mary, the Virgin
Astrampsychos 79 n
Aswan 80Athi plains 32Atlantis 169atman/Atman 90, 121atomic ﬁssion 155atomic world 121attitude 137; conscious,
onesidedness of 86,137
Augustine, St. 7“Aurea hora” 79 n
Australian Aborigines 70 n; and
ancestors 68
authority: magic of female
15
Avalon, Arthur 167 nBaba Yaga 142
ball: game of, on fools’ feast 162 n;
path-ﬁnding 116 n
Balli di Sfessani 165 n
Bandelier, Adolf 159Barlach, Ernst 110Basel 172 n
Bataks 40bath: baptismal 73Baubo 23bear 130, 131Beauvais 163Berthelot, Marcellin 79 n, 88n
Bes 44, 110Bible 89, 136 n; see also New
Testament; Old Testament;names of individual books
Bin Gorion 94 n
biology and purpose 166bird(s): in fairytales 117, 142–3; see
also crow; hawk; magpie; raven
bishop: children’s 142boat: self-propelled 116 n
body: subtle 54, 107bogies 15book of secret wisdom 116 n
Bousset, Wilhelm 83 n
boy(s): naked 111 n; spirit as 110–11
bread: Christ as 90bridegroom and bride 153brother–sister pair: royal 148fbrownies 120Buddha 90; and mandala 75Buddhism: reincarnation in 53–4Budge, Ernest A. Wallis 82 n
Bultmann, Rudolf 42 n
Buri, F. 42
Cabiri 121, 133
“Calidis liber secretorum” 79 nindex
188

Callot, Jacques 165
cancer: imaginary 43Cardan, Jerome (Hieronymus
Cardanus) 144
carnival 159, 168castration, self- 20categories 9; of the imagination 12Catholic Church: ritual of 72–3cave 15, 82, 88“Cave, The” 81Cervula/Cervulus 162 n
chakra 167n
children: ancestors reincarnated in
68
Chinese philosophy 48Christ 46; ascension 55; as ass 164;
birth of, festivities 161f; as bread90; and the Church 152; as friend79; in inner colloquy 72; outerand inner 72; sacriﬁce of, in Mass59; symbol of immortal man 64;transﬁguration 55; see also bread;
Jesus
Christ-child 72Christianity 72, 156; and Jewish
God-concept 40; monotheism of41; spirit in 106, 109
Christmas tree(s) 166, 175Church, the: bride of Christ 152;
freedom and obedience in 83 n
church, crooked 118fCircumcision, Feast of 161city 14; beloved 95clown 171cognition 9colloquy: internal 76fcomic strips 165 n
Communism 71complex(es): father- 20, 110;
feminine 24 n; in men andwomen 100; mother- 19ff; of
daughter 20–1; feminine 31;negative 26, 35ff; positive,protection of 37; of son 20ff;possession and 65
complexio oppositorum 96; see also
opposites
conception: failure of 27coniunctio 88
consciousness 90; conﬂict within
176; dissociation/dissociabilityof 42; dissolution of 94;expansion of 154; higher 89; whyseek? 32; primitive, lackscoherence 61; relics of earlystages 167 n; requires recognition
of unconscious 114–15; return todarkness 96; unity of, only adesideratum 43; see also ego-
consciousness
cooking vessel 15cornucopia 15corpus, gloriﬁcationis/gloriﬁcatum 54
Corpus Hermeticum 8
country 14cow 15, 125; leathern 73coyote 170crocodile 179 n
cross: Virgin Mary as 15–16crowd: individual in 69; psychology
of 69
cruciﬁxion 82; of evil spirit 150; of
raven 135f, 141
crystal 12, 13Cucorogna 165Cumont, Franz 82 n
Dactyls 120
daimonion 154
dances 161index
189

Dante 133
darkness 96; place of 88Daudet, Léon 68daughter: mother-complex in 22ff;
“nothing-but” 34f
dead: primitives and souls of 104–5“De arte chymica” 79 n
death 96; early 20; as symbol/
symbolic 15, 73
Decius 83 n
Deianeira 66deiﬁcation rites 91delight-maker 167Demeter 14, 22, 26, 56 n
Democritus (alchemist) 75devil, the 40, 46, 138, 150; “ape of
God” 159; in Faust 95; his
grandmother 41; as raven 140;spiritual character of 109; astempter 109
Dhulqarnein 92ffdiminutives 121Dionysus 46, 60Dioscuri 64, 76, 93, 96 n
dissociation 86distaff 122divinity: splitting of 40doctor 111doctrinairism 30dog(s): in Faust 95; in Khidr legend
82n; miraculous 116 n
Don Juanism 20, 21dragon(s): evil symbol 15; in
fairytales 127
drama: mystery 59dream(s): and individuation 75f;
relation to dreamer 60; spirit in110ff; of black and whitemagician 112f
dromenon 72dualism: Manichaean 41
Du Cange, Charles 162 n, 163, 164
Durkheim, Émile 12dwarf(s) 111, 119
earth 14; mother, see mother; Virgin
Mary as 46
ecclesia spiritualis 21
Eckhart, Meister 111 n
ego: differentiation from mother
39
ego-consciousness 89; awakening
of 39; emancipation of 129;identiﬁcation with self 94;possessed by shadow and anima66; supremacy of 77
Egypt: infant in tomb 80; Mary’s
ﬂight into 163
Elgon, Mount 175Elijah 89, 94, 136 n
elk 170Ememqut 125femotion(s) 33, 104; violent 62empiricism 8emptiness 35Empusa 15enantiodromia 111, 127, 139 n, 179
energy: consciousness and 90Enkidu 94enthusiasm 108Ephesians: Epistle to the 64 n
Ephesus 83 n
epidemics: psychic 71epilepsy 10episcopus puerorum 161, 163
Epona 152Eros 21; overdeveloped 23–4, 31ffeternity 96evangelists: attributes/symbols of
133nindex
190

evil: chthonic triad and 133; and
good 41, 111, 113; matter and 47
evil spirit 109, 150; transgression of
150
exercitia spiritualia 73, 76f
extraversion 137eye: of Osiris 124; of Wotan 124Ezekiel: vision of 133 n
fairytales 101ff; archetypes in 102ff;
Estonian 114; Examples: Czar’s
Son and His Two Companions126f; diagrams on wall 74–5;Ememqut and the Creator 125f;How Orphan Boy Found his Luck114ff; Maria Morevna 142; One-Sided Old Man 124f; Princess inthe Tree 129ff, 134–5, 145ff; Soldierand Black Princess 123f; Son-in-Law from Abroad 126f;Stepdaughter and Real Daughter122, see also 114–43 passim
faith 102fall, the 129fantasy: creative 11; infantile 17fate: goddesses of 15father 39; -complex, see complex;
-ﬁgure, in dreams 110
fatigue 62, 87feeling-values 40; see also functions
femininity: threeness and 145Fescennia 165 n
festum: asinorum 163; fatuorum
162n; puerorum 163; stultorum
161
ﬁeld 15Fierz-David, Linda 67 n
ﬁlius: philosophorum 97; regius 111;
sapientiae 44
ﬁre: wise old man and 121–2ﬁrst half of life 62
ﬁsh 95; alchemical “round” 87;
content of unconscious 87; inKhidr legend 86f; meals, of earlyChristians 89; “Nun” as 86;symbol 90; of mother 15;transformation of 89
Flamel, Nicholas 88 n
ﬂute 116 n
folklore 113; devil in 159folktales 113fffont, baptismal 15fools’ feast/holiday 161, 162Forest, King of the 119fountain 118; Mercurial 88 n
four: a feminine number 133; see
also numbers
fourness 133France 163Franz, Marie-Louise von 113 n
Freud, Sigmund: and aetiology of
neuroses 17
friend(s) 78, 79; friendship 21; of
Mithras and sungod 75–6; ofMoses and Khidr 64; pair of 96;parable of two friends 64f; of twobirds 64
function(s): four psychic 9, 137f;
inferior 62, 137, 138, 141, 145; loss of:hysterical 62; superior 137; three/triad of 141, 142; see also feeling
gana 61n
Garbe, Richard 16 n
garden 15Geist 104
Germanic, soul 95Germany 71ghost 110ghost trap 175index
191

Gilgamesh 94
goat 124god(s): “light” 41; seven planetary
82n; unreliability of 94f
God 106; spirit as 102, 109; wise
old man and 123
goddess: as mother 15godfather/godmother 29godhead: spirit and 106God-image 148; see also Imago Dei
Goethe 39, 42, 104, 120, 121; Faust
34n, 55, 95, 133
Goetz, Bruno 111 n
Gog 92–3, 95Golden Age 169, 175gospel(s) 73, 89governess 14grace 55, 59f, 73, 78, 80Graeae 15grail 89 n
grandfather 112grandmother 14, 39–40; devil’s 41grass 91grave 15Great Mother, see Mother, Great
green: in fairytale 119gremlins 120grifﬁn 120 n
Grimm, Brothers 120 n, 160
group: identiﬁcation with 68ff;
relation to individual 70–1
gunas 16
guru 79, 111
Hades 88 n
hallucination 109 n
Hans, Stupid 160Hanswurst 160hare 15hawk 170heaven 14; kingdom of 117; see also
Queen of Heaven
Hecate 37Helios 72hemorrhage 27Heracles 66; cycle 141 n
heredity 11Hermes 79, 124, 160; ithyphallic
44
hero(es) 113, 114, 127; birth of 89;
cult-, identiﬁcation with 72; oldman and 113; self as 95;transformations of 58
hieros gamos 48, 128
Hiranyagarbha 90hobgoblin(s) 112, 120Hollandus, Joannes Isaacus 88 n
Homeric Hymn 56 n
homo: philosophicus 79n
homosexuality 20, 21homunculus(-i) 120Honorius of Autun 116 n
hooded man 120Horace 165 n
Horneffer, Ernst 60 n
horse: black 112; three-legged 130fHorus 46; four sons of 133 n
Hovamol 147n
Hubert, H. and Mauss, M. 12hydrogen bomb 46hylozoism 103hypnosis 115
ice men 120
I Ching 116n
idea(s): as nomina 8; Platonic 7f, 12
idealization 44identiﬁcation 34; with ancestral
souls 68; with cult-hero 72; withdeceased persons 67; regressiveindex
192

70; of self and ego-
consciousness 94; see also group
identity: group 68–71Ignatius Loyola, St. 76illness 62image(s) 11; primordial 11imagination: active 111Imago Dei 148; see also God-image
immortality 59, 82, 88impotence 20incest 151; sacred 127India 44, 111; “loving and terrible
mother” in 16; Indian philosophy128; see also Sankhya philosophy
individuation 45, 75, 93ff; dream-
symbols of 75
inﬂation 94, 108initiate 59Innocent III, Pope 161Innocents’ Day 161inspiration 108instinct(s): determined in form only
13; maternal 22; overdevelopmentof 28
intellect: and spirit 106;
spontaneous development of 27
intoxication, mass 69introversion 137invisibility, staff of 116 n
Io 46Irenaeus 168 n
iron man 120Isaiah, Book of 89Isis 46Ivan, Czarevitch 142Izquierdo, Sebastian 76 n
Jacobsohn, Helmuth 145 n
James, William 104Janet, Pierre 61Jehovah 19; see also Yahweh
Jerusalem 14, 95Jesus, St. Paul and 63; see also
Christ
Jews 93; concept of God 40–1Job, Book of 136 n
John, St. (author of Epistles) 111John, St. (Evangelist) 82 n
Joshua 84f, 89Judgment, Last 96Jung, Carl Gustav: Works : Aion
87n, 89n, 177n; “Instinct and the
Unconscious” 11 n; Mysterium
Coniunctionis 123n; “On the
Psychology and Pathology ofSo-Called Occult Phenomena”65n; “Paracelsus as a Spiritual
Phenomenon” 82 n; “Psycho-
logical Approach to the Dogma ofthe Trinity, A” 64 n, 65n; Psycho-
logical Types 66n; 138n; Psychology
and Alchemy 75n, 78n, 82n, 110n,
132n, 134n, 153n; “Psychology of
Eastern Meditation, The” 74 n;
“Psychology and Religion” 82 n,
132n; Psychology and Religion:
West and East 133n; “Psychology
of the Transference” 88 n; “Spirit
and Life” 104; “Spirit Mercurius,The” 79 n, 134n; Symbols of
Transformation 15, 45 n, 89n, 94n,
145n; “Synchronicity” 48 n, 91n;
“Transformation Symbolism inthe Mass” 59 n; “Visions of
Zosimos, The” 82 n, 120 n;
“Wotan” 153 n
Jung, Emma 67 n, 148 n
Kali 16, 37, 40
Ka-Mutef 145index
193

Kant, Emmanuel 9, 10, 17
karma 54
Karnak 110Kenya 91Kerényi, Carl 59 n
Keyserling, Count 61 n
Khidr 64, 79, 81ff, 88f, 91ffKingdom of God 14; see also
Heaven, Kingdom of
Kings, First Book of 136 n
Kiswahili 91 n
Klages, Ludwig 106Knife Prince 126knowledge: critique of 38;
discriminating 16
Köhler, Reinhold 136 n
Koran 64 n, 81ff, 87, 91ff
Kore 14Koschei the Deathless 143“Krates, Book of ” 79 n
kuei(-soul) 107
labours, twelve 141
Lagneus, David 88 n
lamb(s) 131fLe Bon, Gustave 69 n
legends of gods: contradictions in
40
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 68 n, 70n;
“libertas decembrica” 162
life: perpetual continuation of 58;
prolongation of 82; stone as 79 n
light 96; archetypal, God as 8Lilith 15lingam 44lion: in fairytales 118, 130; green 88 n
listlessness 61Logos 33Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 90 n
“Long-lived One” 88Lord’s Prayer 109
lotus 15, 75Luke, Gospel of 136 n
McGlashan, Alan 165 n
madness 20Madonna 41; see also Mary, the Virgin
magic: of female 15; and rebirth 55,
73f
magician 111, 134; black and white
112f; wicked 125
Magog 92–3, 95magpie 117 n
mahatmas 111 n
maize 90Majuj, see Magog
man: carnal and spiritual 83 n;
feminine traits in 67; higher andlower 83 n; stone as 79 n
mandala 15, 75Manget, J. J. 78 n
Manichaean dualism 41mar 145
mare tenebrositatis 88
Maria, axiom of 132, 137, 145Maria Aegyptiaca 42Maria Morevna, Queen 142marriage, wrecking of 31Mary, the Virgin 14, 16: assumption
of 46, 47, 55; as earth 46; ﬂightinto Egypt 163; stone as 79 n
masculine traits, emergence of 27mass (mob), shadow and 173;
state, totalitarian 109; see also
intoxication, mass; psyche,mass; psychology s.v. mob/mass
Mass, the (religious rite) 55, parody
of 165
Mater: Dei 82n; dolorosa 28; natura
29; spiritualis 29index
194

materialism 47, 106, 109
material, element, hypertrophy of
22f; instinct, overdevelopment of28
matriarchy, primitive 31matter 14, 47, 107; Assumption and
47; mother as 27, 46; OneSubstance as 106;“psychization” of 48; relation topsyche 47; and Spirit 48, 102, 105
Matthews, Washington 82 n
medicine man 61, 125, 161meditation, in alchemy 76menstrual disturbances 27Mephistopheles 82 n, 95
Mercurius/Mercury: anima as
106n; with stone 78–9; symbols
of 111; as trickster 159–60; andWotan 147
Merlin 125, 146mermaid: anima and 153 n
messenger 92metal man 120metaphysics 9metempsychosis 53Meyrink, Gustav 117 n
microphysics 121middle 81, 86, 88Mimir 124mines 120miscarriages 27Mithras 75; Mithraic altarpieces
81–2
Moira 15Mondamin 90monotheism 40moon, mother-symbol 14Moses: and Joshua 84ff; and Khidr
64, 89
mother 39; aetiological effectsproduced by 16; archetype 7ff;
complex, see complex; Earth 44;
Great 7, 39, 43, 44; identity with24; personal 14, 16, 39; prototypeof 8; resistance to 26
Mother of God 14, 46, 47mother-goddess 7mother-image 13, 43; analogies of
43; chthonic type and Urania type44; ﬁxation on 29–30; in manand in woman 44f
mother-in-law 14, 26 n
mother-love 28Mothers, Realm of the 35mountain 116 n
Mountains, Two 92, 95M’tu-ya-kitabu 91
Mylius, Johann Daniel 88 n
mysteries 62; Eleusinian 55, 59, 82;
see also Isis
mysterium iniquitatis 41
mysticism: Christian 128; Islamic
81, 97
mythologem 153mythology: American Indian 159;
Great Mother in 44; incest in151n; and mother archetype 38
name, new 73
National Socialism 153, 154Nativity 89natural philosophy, Greek 9nature: Deity garbed as 60;
Democritus on 75; spirit and 103,105
Navaho healing ceremonies 82Nessus shirt 66Neumann, Erich 179 n
neurosis(-es) 43; aetiology of 17;
Freud and 17; infantile, motherindex
195

and 19; psychopathology of 86
New Testament 42, 43, 169; see also
names of individual books
New Year 161New York 71 n
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 42,
60, 63, 95, 147 n, 165
nightmares 15nigredo 88, 88 n, 153
Ninck, Martin 150 n
nixies 119Noah 136 n
nominalism and realism 9nonad 82 n
Norns 15Nous 45numbers: three 82 n, 133f, 144, 148;
four 82 n, 133, 134, 144, 148; seven
82n, 88n; eight 82 n; masculine
and feminine 133, 145, 148; twelve141; see also triad; tetrad;
quaternity; nonad
Nun 86nurse 14
obsession 77
Och 119old man, one-sided 124; see also
wise old man
Old Testament 109, 122, 161; see
also names of individual books
opposites: cannot be envisaged in
oneness 128; discrimination of33; male/female 133; paired 44;separation of 96; tension of 47,134, 150, 176; union of 48; see also
complexio oppositorum ; syzygies
Orandus, Eirenaeus 88 n
Osiris 59, 72, 88, 124, 143 n
oven 15padma see lotus
pair: see also syzygies; see also
brother–sister pair
Palatine, ass grafﬁto 165Pan 60Paracelsus 82Paraclete 89Paradise 14, 96; keys of 112f; tree of
135
paranoia 65parapsychology 160Paris, Notre Dame de 161participation mystique 70
past, idealization of 169pathology 166Paul, St. 63; Epistles of 83 n
pelota 162 n
Pentecost, miracle at 105, 122“perils of the soul” 94persecution, of Christians under
Decius 82 n
Persephone 26; see also Proserpina
persona 66; identity with 65personality: ancestral elements in
67; change of 82; continuity of54; dark side of 66; diminution of61: dual/multiple/double/split167; enlargement/widening of62, 65 n; negative 62;
transformation of 67
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 103Pharaoh 72, 145phobias, infantile 17physis 108pig, black 124Plato 9, 12–13; Timaeus 133, 134,
144; see also idea
Pluto 26pneuma, meaning 104pneumatikos 83n, 86index
196

poisons 125
polarity: threeness and 133Poliphilo 67 n
politics 173poltergeists 160, 168pope, fools’ 162possession 65ff, 103, 156prakr·ti 16
pregnancy: abhorrence of 27;
disturbances 27
priest 111primitive(s) (man): and ancestors
68; perception in 38; and spirits105
princess, black 123Priscus, Lucius Agatho 67 n
Prodigal Son 151professor 112prohibition 136projection(s) 38; of anima 24, 34;
need to dissolve 18
Prometheus 135Proserpina 45; see also Persephone
Protestantism: preaching of the
Word 73
Prudentius 124 n
psyche: afﬁnity with cold 104;
collective 69; individual andgroup total 69; and individuation96; loss of 86; mass 71; and“mind” 176; most tremendousfact of life 57; not homogeneous42; only can observe psyche 102;part of life’s mystery 39;preconscious 10; relation tospirit 103; uniqueness ofindividual 10; see also
unconscious
psychologem 165psychology, complex, see complexpsychology; empirical 9; mass
mob 69, 71; primitive 61, 68
psychopomp 79puer aeternus 44
Pulcinella 165, 170pumpkin 122Purusha 16, 90
quaternity 132 n, 134; in fairytale 141,
151; of wholeness 132; triad asmutilated 137
Queen of Heaven 42, 45Quito 71 n
“Rachaidibi fragmentum” 79 n
Radin, Paul 168, 172, 174–5Rahner, Hugo 124 n, 136 n
raven(s) 140, 141; and evil 136 n; in
fairytale 130f, 134ff; thirst of 136 n
realism, see nominalism
reason 30rebirth 53ff, 89, 96; indirect 55f;
magic, and mother 15; meaningsof concept 53ff; primordialafﬁrmation of mankind 58;psychic reality 57
redeemer 151; in alchemy 151redemption 154reincarnation(s) 54Reitzenstein, Richard 79 n
religion(s), comparative 7; spirit in
108; task of 108
renewal 58; magical 55, 73renovatio 54
resistance(s) 76; to mother 26;
negative 26
resurrection 54; stone as 79 n
Revelation, Book of 95Rhine, J. B. 48, 91 n
Richard of St. Victor 116 nindex
197

ring of return 60
Ripley, Sir George 123“Ripley Scrowle” 153 n
rishis 111 n
rite/ritual 176; of Catholic Church
72; friend depicted in 75;regression and 70; andtranscendence of life 58; andtransformed hero, see also
transformation
rock 15Rome, St. Peter’s 162 n
Roques, Mrs. H. von 113 n
Rosarium philosophorum 78n, 88n,
89n
rose: symbol of mother 15Rosencreutz, Christian 153“Rosinus ad Sarratantam” 79 n
Ruland, Martin 76 n
Samyutta-Nikaya 54n
Sand, George 77Sankhya philosophy 16Santa Claus 72sarcophagus 15, 112sarkikos 83n, 86
Satan 95, 109saturnalia 161Saviour 135; approximation to 161;
Mercurius as 160; tricksterforerunner of 169, 177
Schiller, Friedrich 104Schopenhauer, Arthur 66 n
science, danger of 46f; and
deiﬁcation of mother 46
scintillae 88n
sea: symbol of mother 14second half of life 36self 90, 111; attainment of 45; as
hero 95; identiﬁcation withego-consciousness 94; Khidr as
symbol of 88; Moses’ experienceof 93
self-castration 20Semele 46“Septem tractatus . . . Hermetis”
78n
serpent(s): evil symbol 15servant of God 89Set 124seven see numbers
Seven Sleepers 81, 82, 86, 88 n
shadow(s) 66, 145ff, 168, 171, 173,
177f; collective 168; of Madonna41; of Moses 86f; spirit as 111
shamanism 160Shankaracharya 111 n
shape, changing 160Shvetasvatara Upanishad 64simpleton, devil as 159Sleepers, Seven see Seven
solicitude 15solidarity, human 71Somali 92son, mother complex in 19ffSophia 14, 44soul(s): ancestral 67; in Australia
68; identiﬁcation with 68;Christian idea of 72; derivation106n; loss of 61, 86; and spirit
106; stone as 79 n; see also anima;
“perils of the soul”
Spencer, Sir Walter R., and Gillen,
F. J. 70 n
Spinoza, B. 103, 106spirit(s): in alchemy 103; archetype,
antithetical nature of 138;archetype of 123; autonomy of109; “cold breath of ” 104; indreams 110ff; evil, see evil spirit;index
198

hallmarks of 107; immateriality of
48, 107; and matter 47, 102, 105;meaning 102ff; and nature 103,105; of the age 103; religions and108; and soul 106; subjective andobjective 103, 106; theriomorphicsymbolism of 128ff
spiritualism 160spiritus 104
sponsus et sponsa , in Christianity
152
sprightliness 103square 134star(s): seven 88 n
State, and individuals 71, 173;
totalitarianism and 154
statement, in psychology 102Steissbart 110stepdaughter 122stepmother 14Stevenson, James 82 n
stone, alchemical/philosophers’
78, 79 n, 89n; animate 89; symbol
of immortal self 88
Stone Age 68, 70Strudel 176student societies 159“subconscious” 139substance, One 106Suez, Isthmus of 86suffering: subjective, in poltergeist
160
Suﬁ 91summum bonum 109
sun 92; in alchemy 88 n; wise old
man and 121
sun-barge 80sun-god 76superlatives 121supermen 42superstitions 175
symbols, mother- 14–15; of rebirth
75
sympathy 15synchronicity/synchronistic
phenomena 48
syncretism, Hellenistic 45Synesius 33syzygy(-ies) 45
“Tabula smaragdina” 45, 133 n
talisman, magic 117Tantra/Tantrism, chakra system
167n; and matter 107
tar 118teacher, wise old man as 112telepathy/telepathic phenomena
90
tempter 109tension 96; see also opposites,
tension of
Tertullian 164 n
tetrad(s) 144Theatrum chemicum 78n, 88n
Theodosius II 82 n
theosophical 169thinking/thought(s), unconscious
12
thread, ball of 116 n
three: a masculine number 133, 145;
see also numbers
threeness 133, 143–4; and
femininity 145
Tightrope Walker, Nietzsche’s 64Timaeus , see Plato
time-spirit 104Tom Thumb 160Tonquédec, Joseph de 65 n
totalitarianism 154“Tractatulus Aristotelis” 79 nindex
199

Tractatus aureus 78
transﬁguration 55transformation(s) 89; alchemical
79; archetypes of 97; inChristianity 72; collectiveexperiences of 70; continuationof life through 58; of god or hero58; immortality and 90; magicand 73f; natural 75ff; participationin 55ff; psychic 96; rebirth as 55;rites of 55, 68; subjective 60ff;technical 73f
transmigration of souls see
metempsychosis
transmutation 54treasure: “hard to obtain” 127tree, in alchemy 48; cosmic/world-
48–9, 135, 149f, 153; in fairytales126; mother archetype and 15;paradisal 135
tree-numen 127triad(s) 144; chthonic 133; two
antithetical 134, 137, 138
triangle 134trickster 159ffTrinity 145; and chthonic triad
133
tripudium hypodiaconorum 162
triunity, Egyptian 145twelve see numbers
Two-horned One 93; see also
Dhulqarnein
type(s) 28ff
Ueli 172 n
unconscious, passim ; antimonies
of 128; and immortality 90;“matriarchal” state of 132;spatial and temporal relations in121unconscious, collective: anima and
145
unconsciousness 178; and the
Logos 33; man’s worst sin156
underworld 14unity 137universals 8university 14Usener, Hermann 12uterus 15
Venus, heavenly 45
Vili 123“Visio Arislei” 88 n
vision(s): wise old man in 120visual impressions see dreams
Vollers, K. 86 n, 87n, 88n, 89n, 91,
93, 94
vomiting, excessive 27
Warnecke, Johannes 40 n
water: of life 87, 94 n; symbol, of
mother 14; of psyche/spirit/unconscious 119
Weckerling, Adol 16 n
Weimar 103well 15Wells, H. G. 71 n
werewolf 118wheat: Osiris as 59, 90wholeness: fourness symbol of 132;
“round” 90; and threeness 131f,134
Winnebagos 166, 172wisdom: grandmother and 39;
higher 89
wise old man: in dreams 111f; in
fairytales 113ff; hidden by anima178index
200

witch(es) 15; evil symbol 15; in
fairytales 118, 126, 131, 136;grandmother as 39; mother as 19
witch-doctor 122wolf(-ves) 130f, 134Wolfram von Eschenbach 89 n
woman, masculine traits in 67woods 14Word: preaching of the 73world: end of, subjective 96World War 155Wotan 124, 147, 150 n
Wundt, Wilhelm 103Wylie, Philip 16 nYahweh 40, 161; see also
Jehovah
Yajuj see Gog
yang and yin 35, 48
yoga 116 n; and transformation
73
yoni 15
youth: spirit as 110
Zacharias 88 n
Zagreus 60Zarathustra see Nietzsche
Zimmer, Heinrich 16 n
Zosimos 82 n, 120index
201

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