in around the Tower, on both sides, with a great deal of loud
trampling, laughing, singing, and playing of accordions. Irritably, I
thought, "This is real y the limit! I thought it was a dream and now it
turns out to be reality!" At this point, I woke up. Once again I jumped
up, opened the window and shutters, and found everything just the
same as before: a deathly stil moonlit night. Then I thought: "Why,
this is simply a case of haunting!"
Natural y I asked myself what it meant when a dream was so
insistent on its reality and at the same time on my being awake.
Usual y we experience that only when we see a ghost. Being awake
means perceiving reality. The dream therefore represented a
situation equivalent to reality, in which it created a kind of wakened
state. In this sort of dream, as opposed to ordinary dreams, the
unconscious seems bent on conveying a powerful impression of
reality to the dreamer, an impression which is emphasized by
repetition. The sources of such realities are known to be physical
sensations on the one hand, and archetypal figures on the other.
That night everything was so completely real, or at least seemed to
be so, that I could scarcely sort out the two realities. Nor could I
make anything of the dream itself. What was the meaning of these
music-making peasant boys passing by in a long procession? It
seemed to me they had come out of curiosity, in order to look at the
Tower.
Never again did I experience or dream anything similar, and I
cannot recal ever having heard of a paral el to it. It was only much
later that I found an explanation. This was when I came across the
seventeenth-century Lucerne chronicle by Rennward Cysat. He tel s
the fol owing story: On a high pasture of Mount Pilatus, which is
particularly notorious for spooks it is said that Wotan to this day
practices his magic arts there Cysat, while climbing the mountain,
was disturbed one night by a procession of men who poured past
his hut on both sides, playing music and singing precisely what I
had experienced at the Tower.
The next morning Cysat asked the herdsman with whom he had
spent that night what could have been the meaning of it. The man
had a ready explanation: those must be the departed folk--salig Lut,
in Swiss dialect; the phrase also means blessed folk namely,
Wotan's army of departed souls. These, he said, were in the habit
of walking abroad and showing themselves.
It may be suggested that this is a phenomenon of solitude, the
outward emptiness and silence being compensated by the image
of a crowd of people. This would put it in the same class with the
hal ucinations of hermits, which are likewise compensatory. But do
we know what realities such stories may be founded on? It is also
possible that I had been so sensitized by the solitude that I was able
to perceive the procession of "departed folk" who passed by.
The explanation of this experience as a psychic compensation
never entirely satisfied me, and to say that it was a hal ucination
seemed to me to beg the question. I felt obliged to consider the
possibility of its reality, especial y in view of the seventeenth-century
account which had come my way.
It would seem most likely to have been a synchronistic
phenomenon. Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or
visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.
There actual y existed, as I discovered, a real paral el to my
experience. In the Middle Ages just such gatherings of young men
took place. These were the Reislaufer (mercenaries) who usual y
assembled in spring, marched from Central Switzerland to Locarno,
met at the Casa di Ferro in Minusio and then marched on together
to Milan. In Italy they served as soldiers, fighting for foreign princes.
My vision, therefore, might have been one of these gatherings
which took place regularly each spring when the young men, with
singing and jol ity, bade farewel to their native land.
When we began to build at Bol ingen in 1923, my eldest daughter
came to see the spot, and exclaimed, "What, you're building here?
There are corpses about!" Natural y I thought, "Ridiculous! Nothing
of the sort!" But when we were constructing the annex four years
later, we did come upon a skeleton. It lay at a depth of seven feet in
the ground. An old rifle bul et was imbedded in the elbow. From
various indications it seemed evident that the body had been
thrown into the grave in an advanced state of decay. It belonged to
one of the many dozens of French soldiers who were drowned in
the Linth in 1799 and were later washed up on the shores of the
Upper Lake. These men were drowned when the Austrians blew up
the bridge of Grynau which the French were storming. A photograph
of the open grave with the skeleton and the date of its discovery
August 22, 1927 is preserved at the Tower.
I arranged a regular burial on my property, and fired a gun three
times over the soldier's grave. Then I set up a gravestone with an
inscription for him. My daughter had sensed the presence of the
dead body. Her power to sense such things is something she
inherits from my grandmother on my mother's side.
In the winter of 1955-56 I chiseled the names of my paternal
ancestors on three stone tablets and placed them in the court- yard
of the Tower. I painted the ceiling with motifs from my own and my
wife's arms, and from those of my sons-in-law. The Jung family
original y had a phoenix for its arms, the bird obviously being
connected with "young," "youth," "rejuvenation." My grandfather
changed the elements of the arms, probably out of a spirit of
resistance toward his father. He was an ardent Freemason and
Grand Master of the Swiss lodge. This had a good deal to do with
the changes he made in the armorial bearings. I mention this point,
in itself of no consequence, because it belongs in the historical
nexus of my thinking and my life.
In keeping with this revision of my grandfather's, my coat of arms no
longer contains the original phoenix. Instead there is a cross azure
in chief dexter and in base sinister a blue bunch of grapes in a field
d'or; separating these is an estoile d'or in a fess azure.[3] The
symbolism of these arms is Masonic, or Rosicrucian. Just as cross
and rose represent the Rosicrucian problem of opposites ("per
crucem ad rosam"), that is, the Christian and Dionysian elements,
so cross and grapes are symbols of the heavenly and the chthonic
spirit. The uniting symbol is the gold star, the aurum philosophorum.
3 Translated from the language of heraldry: a blue cross in the upper right
and blue grapes in the lower left in a field of gold; a blue bar with a gold star.
The Rosicrucians derived from Hermetic or alchemical philosophy.
One of their founders was Michael Maier ( 1568-1622), a wel -
known alchemist and younger contemporary of the relatively
unknown but more important Gerardus Dorneus (end of the
sixteenth century), whose treatises fil the first volume of the
Theatrum Chemicum of 1602. The two men lived in Frankfurt, which
seems to have been a center of alchemical philosophy at the time.
In any case, as Count Palatine and court physician to Rudolph I ,
Michael Maier was something of a local celebrity. In neighboring
Mainz at that time lived Dr. med. et. jur. Carl Jung (died 1654), of
whom nothing else is known, since the family tree breaks off with
my great-great-grandfather who lived at the beginning of the
eighteenth century. This was Sigmund Jung, a civis Moguntinus,
citizen of Mainz. The hiatus is due to the fact that the municipal
archives of Mainz were burned in the course of a siege during the
War of the Spanish Succession. It is a safe surmise that this
evidently learned Dr. Carl Jung was familiar with the writings of the
two alchemists, for the pharmacology of the day was stil very much
under the influence of Paracelsus. Dorneus was an outspoken
Paracelsist and even composed a voluminous commentary on the
Paracelsan treatise, De Vita Longa. He also, more than al the
other alchemists, dealt with the process of individuation. In view of
the fact that a large part of my life work has revolved around the
study of the problem of opposites, and especial y their alchemical
symbolism, al this is not without a certain interest.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the
fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I
am under the influence of things or questions which were left
incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and
more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an
impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents
to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer
questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had
not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps
continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult
to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or
more of a general (col ective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is
the case. A col ective problem, if not recognized as such, always
appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give
the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the
personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but
such disturbances need not be primary; they may wel be
secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the
social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be
sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the col ective
situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little
into account.
Like anyone who is capable of some introspection, I had early
taken it for granted that the split in my personality was my own
purely personal affair and responsibility. Faust, to be sure, had
made the problem somewhat easier for me by confessing, "Two
souls, alas, are housed within my breast"; but he had thrown no light
on the cause of this dichotomy. His insight seemed, in a sense,
directed straight at me. In the days when I first read Faust I could not
remotely guess the extent to which Goethe's strange heroic myth
was a col ective experience and that it prophetical y anticipated the
fate of the Germans. Therefore I felt personal y implicated, and
when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of
Philemon and Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had
helped commit the murder of the two old people. This strange idea
alarmed me, and I regarded it as my responsibility to atone for this
crime, or to prevent its repetition.
My false conclusion was further supported by a bit of odd
information that I picked up during those early years, I heard that it
had been bruited about that my grandfather Jung had been an
il egitimate son of Goethe's.[4] This annoying story made an
impression upon me insofar as it at once corroborated and
seemed to explain my curious reactions to Faust. It is true that I did
not believe in reincarnation, but I was instinctively familiar with that
concept which the Indians cal karma. Since in those days I had no
idea of the existence of the unconscious, I could not have had any
psychological understanding of my reactions. I also did not know no
more than, even today, it is general y known that the future is
unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be
guessed by clairvoyants. Thus, when the news arrived of the
crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I at Versail es, Jakob Burckhardt
exclaimed, "That is the doom of Germany." The archetypes of
Wagner were already knocking at the gates, and along with them
came the Dionysian experience of Nietzsche which might better be
ascribed to the god of ecstasy, Wotan. The hubris of the Wilhelmine
era alienated Europe and paved the way for the disaster of 1914.
4 See above, Chap. II, n. i, pp. 35-36.
In my youth (around 1890) I was unconsciously caught up by this
spirit of the age, and had no methods at hand for extricating myself
from it. Faust struck a chord in me and pierced me through in a way
that I could not but regard as personal. Most of al , it awakened in
me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter,
of light and darkness, Faust, the inept, purblind philosopher,
encounters the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow,
Mephistopheles, who in spite of his negating disposition represents
the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar who hovers on the
brink of suicide. My own inner contradictions appeared here in
dramatized form; Goethe had written virtual y a basic outline and
pattern of my own conflicts and solutions. The dichotomy of Faust-
Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person,
and I was that person. In other words, I was directly struck, and
recognized that this was my fate. Hence, al the crises of the drama
affected me personal y; at one point I had passionately to agree, at
another to oppose. No solution could be a matter of indifference to
me. Later I consciously linked my work to what Faust had passed
over: respect for the eternal rights of man, recognition of "the
ancient," and the continuity of culture and intel ectual history.[5]
Our souls as wel as our bodies are composed of individual
elements which were al already present in the ranks of our an-
cestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly
varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul
therefore have an intensely historical character and find no
5 Jung's attitude is shown in the inscription he placed over the gate of the
Tower: Philemonis Sacrum Fausti Poenftentia (Shrine of Philemon
Repentance of Faust) . When the gate was walled up, he put the same
words above the entrance to the second tower. A. J.
proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into
being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at
home in such things. We are very far from having finished
completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity,
as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged
down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with
ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the
past has been breached, it is usual y annihilated, and there is no
stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of
connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to
the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that
we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden
age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary
background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into
novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction,
and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on
promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the
darkness of the future, which, we expect, wil at last bring the proper
sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased
at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of
greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the
state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most bril iant
discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what
our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand
ourselves, and thus we help with al our might to rob the individual of
his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in
the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche cal ed the spirit of gravity.
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of
course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and
in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the
contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are
deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications
which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with
less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est al
haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.
Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less
expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the
simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest
use of newspapers, radio, television, and al supposedly timesaving
innovations.
In this book I have devoted considerable space to my subjective
view of the world, which, however, is, not a product of rational
thinking. It is rather a vision such as wil come to one who
undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat
closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being. If our
impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of
the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches
listen to and understand the present in other words, how our
unconscious is responding to it. Thus we remain ignorant of
whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification
in our lives, or whether they are repel ed. Inner peace and
contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the
historical family which is inherent in the individual can be
harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.
In the Tower at Bol ingen it is as if one lived in many centuries
simultaneously. The place wil outlive me, and in its location and
style it points backward to things of long ago. There is very little
about it to suggest the present. If a man of the sixteenth century
were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamp and the
matches would be new to him; otherwise, he would know his way
about without difficulty. There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither
electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestors' souls are
sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them
the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough
answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the wal s. It is as
if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were
peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see
life in the round, as something forever coming into being and
passing on.
IX
Travels
i. NORTH AFRICA
AT THE BEGINNING of 1920 a friend told me that he had a
business trip to make to Tunis, and would I like to accompany him?
I said yes immediately. We set out in March, going first to Algiers.
Fol owing the coast, we reached Tunis and from there Sousse,
where I left my friend to his business affairs.
At last I was where I had longed to be: in a non-European country
where no European language was spoken and no Christian
conceptions prevailed, where a different race lived and a different
historical tradition and philosophy had set its stamp upon the face
of the crowd. I had often wished to be able for once to see the
European from outside, his image reflected back at him by an
altogether foreign milieu. To be sure, there was my ignorance of the
Arabic language, which I deeply regretted; but to make up for this I
was al the more attentive in observing the people and their
behavior. Frequently I sat for hours in an Arab coffee house,
listening to conversations of which I understood not a word. But I
studied the people's gestures, and especial y their expression of
emotions; I observed the subtle change in their gestures when they
spoke with a European, and thus learned to see to some extent with
different eyes and to know the white man outside his own
environment.
What the Europeans regard as Oriental calm and apathy seemed
to me a mask; behind it I sensed a restlessness, a degree of
agitation, which I could not explain. Strangely, in setting foot upon
Moorish soil, I found myself haunted by an impression which I myself
could not understand: I kept thinking that the land smel ed queer. It
was the smel of blood, as though the soil were soaked with blood.
This strip of land, it occurred to me, had already borne the brunt of
three civilizations: Carthaginian, Roman, and Christian. What the
technological age wil do with Islam remains to be seen.
When I left Sousse, I traveled south to Sfax, and thence into the
Sahara, to the oasis city of Tozeur. The city lies on a slight
elevation, on the margin of a plateau, at whose foot lukewarm,
slightly saline springs wel up profusely and irrigate the oasis
through a thousand little canals. Towering date palms formed a
green, shady roof overhead, under which peach, apricot, and fig
trees flourished, and beneath these alfalfa of an unbelievable green.
Several kingfishers, shining like jewels, flitted through the foliage. In
the comparative coolness of this green shade strol ed figures clad
in white, among them a great number of affectionate couples
holding one another in close embrace obviously homosexual
friendships. I felt suddenly transported to the times of classical
Greece, where this inclination formed the cement of a society of
men and of the pol s based on that society. It was clear that men
spoke to men and women to women here. Only a few of the latter
were to be seen, nunlike, heavily veiled figures. I saw a few without
veils. These, my dragoman explained, were prostitutes. On the
main streets the scene was dominated by men and children.
My dragoman confirmed my impression of the prevalence of
homosexuality, and of its being taken for granted, and promptly
made me offers. The good fel ow could have no notion of the
thoughts which had struck me like a flash of lightning, suddenly
il uminating my point of observation. I felt cast back many centuries
to an infinitely more naive world of adolescents who were
preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to
emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness, in which
they had existed from time immemorial, and to become aware of
their own existence, in self-defense against the forces threatening
them from the North.
While I was stil caught up in this dream of a static, age-old
existence, I suddenly thought of my pocket watch, the symbol of the
European's accelerated tempo. This, no doubt, was the dark cloud
that hung threateningly over the heads of these unsuspecting souls.
They suddenly seemed to me like game who do not see the hunter
but, vaguely uneasy, scent him--"him" being the god of time who wil
inevitably chop into the bits and pieces of days, hours, minutes, and
seconds that duration which is stil the close