being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this
end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason shows him
nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however,
can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures
of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them
with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as
wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the
man who despairs marches toward nothingness, the one who has
placed his faith in the archetype fol ows the tracks of life and lives
right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the
one lives against his instincts, the other with them.
The figures from the unconscious are uninformed too, and need
man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain to knowledge.
When I began working with the unconscious, I found myself much
involved with the figures of Salome and Elijah. Then they receded,
but after about two years they reappeared. To my enormous
astonishment, they were completely unchanged; they spoke and
acted as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile. In actuality the
most incredible things had taken place in my life. I had, as it were,
to begin from the beginning again, to tel them al about what had
been going on, and explain things to them. At the time I had been
greatly surprised by this situation. Only later did I understand what
had happened: in the interval the two had sunk back into the
unconscious and into themselves I might equal y wel put it, into
timelessness. They remained out of contact with the ego and the
ego's changing circumstances, and therefore were ignorant of what
had happened in the world of consciousness.
Quite early I had learned that it was necessary for me to instruct the
figures of the unconscious, or that other group which is often
indistinguishable from them, the "spirits of the departed." The first
time I experienced this was on a bicycle trip through upper Italy
which I took with a friend in 1911. On the way home we cycled from
Pavia to Arona, on the lower part of Lake Maggiore, and spent the
night there. We had intended to pedal on along the lake and then
through the Tessin as far as Faido, where we were going to take
the train to Zurich. But in Arona I had a dream which upset our
plans.
In the dream I was in an assemblage of distinguished spirits of
earlier centuries; the feeling was similar to the one I had later
toward the "il ustrious ancestors" in the black rock temple of my
1944 vision. The conversation was conducted in Latin. A gentleman
with a long, curly wig addressed me and asked a difficult question,
the gist of which I could no longer recal after I woke up. I understood
him, but did not have a sufficient command of the language to
answer him in Latin. I felt so profoundly humiliated by this that the
emotion awakened me.
At the very moment of awakening I thought of the book I was then
working on, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, and had such
intense inferiority feelings about the unanswered question that I
immediately took the train home in order to get back to work. It
would have been impossible for me to continue the bicycle trip and
lose another three days. I had to work, to find the answer.
Not until years later did I understand the dream and my reaction.
The bewigged gentleman was a kind of ancestral spirit, or spirit of
the dead, who had addressed questions to me in vain! It was stil
too soon, I had not yet come so far, but I had an obscure feeling that
by working on my book I would be answering the question that had
been asked. It had been asked by, as it were, my spiritual
forefathers, in the hope and expectation that they would learn what
they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since
the answer had first to be created in the centuries that fol owed. If
question and answer had already been in existence in eternity, had
always been there, no effort on my part would have been necessary,
and it could al have been discovered in any other century. There
does seem to be unlimited knowledge present in nature, it is true,
but it can be comprehended by consciousness only when the time
is ripe for it. The process, presumably, is like what happens in the
individual psyche: a man may go about for many years with an
inkling of something, but grasps it clearly only at a particular
moment.
Later, when I wrote the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, once again
it was the dead who addressed crucial questions to me. They came
so they said "back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they
sought." This had surprised me greatly at the time, for according to
the traditional views the dead are the possessors of great
knowledge. People have the idea that the dead know far more than
we, for Christian doctrine teaches that in the hereafter we shal "see
face to face." Apparently, however, the souls of the dead "know"
only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond
that. Hence their endeavor to penetrate into life in order to share in
the knowledge of men. I frequently have a feeling that they are
standing directly behind us, waiting to hear what answer we wil give
to them, and what answer to destiny. It seems to me as if they were
dependent on the living for receiving answers to their questions,
that is, on those who have survived them and exist in a world of
change: as if omniscience or, as I might put it, omni-consciousness,
were not at their disposal, but could flow only into the psyche of the
living, into a soul bound to a body. The mind of the living appears,
therefore, to hold an advantage over that of the dead in at least one
point: in the capacity for attaining clear and decisive cognitions. As
I see it, the three-dimensional world in time and space is like a
system of co-ordinates; what is here separated into ordinates and
abscissae may appear ' there," in space-timelessness, as a
primordial image with many aspects, perhaps as a diffuse cloud of
cognition surrounding an archetype. Yet a system of co-ordinates is
necessary if any distinction of discrete contents is to be possible.
Any such operation seems to us unthinkable in a state of diffuse
omniscience, or, as the case may be, of subjectless
consciousness, with no spatio-temporal demarcations. Cognition,
like generation, presupposes an opposition, a here and there, an
above and below, a before and after.
If there were to be a conscious existence after death, it would, so it
seems to me, have to continue on the level of consciousness
attained by humanity, which in any age has an upper though
variable limit. There are many human beings who throughout their
lives and at the moment of death lag behind their own potentialities
and even more important behind the knowledge which has been
brought to consciousness by other human beings during their own
lifetimes. Hence their demand to attain in death that share of
awareness which they failed to win in life.
I have come to this conclusion through observation of dreams about
the dead. I dreamed once that I was paying a visit to a friend who
had died about two weeks before. In life, this friend had never
espoused anything but a conventional view of the world, and had
remained stuck in this unreflecting attitude. In the dream his home
was on a hil similar to the Tul inger hil near Basel. The wal s of an
old castle surrounded a square consisting of a smal church and a
few smal er buildings. It reminded me of the square in front of the
castle of Rapperswil. It was autumn. The leaves of the ancient trees
had turned gold, and the whole scene was transfigured by gentle
sunlight. My friend sat at a table with his daughter, who had studied
psychology in Zurich. I knew that she was tel ing him about
psychology. He was so fascinated by what she was saying that he
greeted me only with a casual wave of the hand, as though to
intimate: "Don't disturb me." The greeting was at the same time a
dismissal. The dream told me that now, in a manner which of
course remains incomprehensible to me, he was required to grasp
the reality of his psychic existence, which he had never been
capable of doing during his life.
I had another experience of the evolution of the soul after death
when about a year after my wife's death I suddenly awoke one night
and knew that I had been with her in the south of France, in
Provence, and had spent an entire day with her. She was engaged
on studies of the Grail there. That seemed significant to me, for she
had died before completing her work on this subject. Interpretation
on the subjective level that my anima had not yet finished with the
work she had to do yielded nothing of interest; I know quite wel that
I am not yet finished with that. But the thought that my wife was
continuing after death to work on her further spiritual development
however that may be conceived struck me as meaningful and held a
measure of reassurance for me.
Ideas of this sort are, of course, inaccurate, and give a wrong
picture, like a body projected on a plane or, conversely, like the
construction of a four-dimensional model out of a three-dimensional
body. They use the terms of a three-dimensional world in order to
represent themselves to us. Mathematics goes to great pains to
create expressions for relationships which pass empirical
comprehension. In much the same way, it is al -important for a
disciplined imagination to build up images of intangibles by logical
principles and on the basis of empirical data, that is, on the
evidence of dreams. The method employed is what I have cal ed
"the method of the necessary statement." It represents the principle
of amplification in the interpretation of dreams, but can most easily
be demonstrated by the statements implicit in simple whole
numbers.
One, as the first numeral, is unity. But it is also "the unity," the One,
Al -Oneness, individuality and non-duality not a numeral but a
philosophical concept, an archetype and attribute of God, the
monad. It is quite proper that the human intel ect should make these
statements; but at the same time the intel ect is determined and
limited by its conception of oneness and its implications. In other
words, these statements are not arbitrary. They are governed by the
nature of oneness and therefore are necessary statements.
Theoretical y, the same logical operation could be performed for
each of the fol owing conceptions of number, but in practice the
process soon comes to an end because of the rapid increase in
complications, which become too numerous to handle.
Every further unit introduces new properties and new modifications.
Thus, it is a property of the number four that equations of the fourth
degree can be solved, whereas equations of the fifth degree
cannot. The necessary statement of the number four, therefore, is
that, among other things, it is an apex and simultaneously the end of
a preceding ascent. Since with each additional unit one or more
new mathematical properties appear, the statements attain such a
complexity that they can no longer be formulated.
The infinite series of natural numbers corresponds to the infinite
number of individual creatures. That series likewise consists of
individuals, and the properties even of its first ten members
represent if they represent anything at al an abstract cosmogony
derived from the monad. The properties of numbers are, however,
simultaneously properties of matter, for which reason certain
equations can anticipate its behavior.
Therefore I submit that other than mathematical statements (i.e.,
statements implicit in nature) are likewise capable of pointing to
irrepresentable realities beyond themselves such, for example, as
those products of the imagination which enjoy universal acceptance
or are distinguished by the frequency of their occurrence, like the
whole class of archetypal motifs. Just as in the case of some
factors in mathematical equations we cannot say to what physical
realities they correspond, so in the case of some mythological
products we do not know at first to what psychic realities they refer.
Equations governing the turbulence of heated gases existed long
before the problems of such gases had been precisely
investigated. Similarly, we have long been in possession of
mythologems which express the dynamics of certain subliminal
processes, though these processes were only given names in very
recent times.
The maximum awareness which has been attained anywhere
forms, so it seems to me, the upper limit of knowledge to which the
dead can attain. That is probably why earthly life is of such great
significance, and why it is that what a human being "brings over" at
the time of his death is so important. Only here, in life on earth,
where the opposites clash together, can the general level of
consciousness be raised. That seems to be man's metaphysical
task which he cannot accomplish without "mythologizing." Myth is
the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between
unconscious and conscious cognition. True, the unconscious knows
more than consciousness does; but it is knowledge of a special
sort, knowledge in eternity, usual y without reference to the here and
now, not couched in language of the intel ect. Only when we let its
statements amplify themselves, as has been shown above by the
example of numerals, does it come within the range of our
understanding; only then does a new aspect become perceptible to
us. This process is convincingly repeated in every successful
dream analysis. That is why it is so important not to have any
preconceived, doctrinaire opinions about the statements made by
dreams. As soon as a certain "monotony of interpretation" strikes
us, we know that our approach has become doctrinaire and hence
sterile.
Although there is no way to marshal valid proof of continuance of
the soul after death, there are nevertheless experiences which
make us thoughtful. I take them as hints, and do not presume to
ascribe to them the significance of insights.
One night I lay awake thinking of the sudden death of a friend
whose funeral had taken place the day before. I was deeply
concerned. Suddenly I felt that he was in the room. It seemed to me
that he stood at the foot of my bed and was asking me to go with
him. I did not have the feeling of an apparition; rather, it was an
inner visual image of him, which I explained to myself as a fantasy.
But in al honesty I had to ask myself, "Do I have any proof that this
is a fantasy? Suppose it is not a fantasy, suppose my friend is real y
here and I decided he was only a fantasy would that not be
abominable of me?" Yet I had equal y little proof that he stood
before me as an apparition. Then I said to myself, "Proof is neither
here nor there! Instead of explaining him away as a fantasy, I might
just as wel give him the benefit of the doubt and for experiment's
sake credit him with reality." The moment I had that thought, he went
to the door and beckoned me to fol ow him. So I was going to have
to play along with him! That was something I hadn't bargained for. I
had to repeat my argument to myself once more. Only then did I
fol ow him in my imagination.
He led me out of the house, into the garden, out to the road, and
final y to his house, (In reality it was several hundred yards away
from mine.) I went in, and he conducted me into his study. He
climbed on a stool and showed me the second of five books with
red bindings which stood on the second shelf from the top. Then the
vision broke off. I was not acquainted with his library and did not
know what books he owned. Certainly I could never have made out
from below the titles of the books he had pointed out to me on the
second shelf from the top.
This experience seemed to me so curious that next morning I went
to his widow and asked whether I could look up something in my
friend's library. Sure enough, there was a stool standing under the
bookcase I had seen in my vision, and even before I came closer I
could see the five books with red bindings. I stepped up on the stool
so as to be able to read the titles. They were translations of the
novels of Emile Zola. The title of the second volume read: "The
Legacy of the Dead." The contents seemed to me of no interest.
Only the title was extremely significant in connection with this
experience.
Equal y important to me were the dream-experiences I had before
my mother's death. News of her death came to me while I was
staying in the Tessin. I was deeply shaken, for it had come with
unexpected suddenness. The night before her death I had a
frightening dream. I was in a dense, gloomy forest; fantastic,
gigantic boulders lay about among huge jungle-like trees. It was a
heroic, primeval landscape. Suddenly I heard a piercing whistle that
seemed to resound through the whole universe. My knees shook.
Then there were crashings in the underbrush, and a gigantic
wolfhound with a fearful, gaping maw burst forth. At the sight of it,
the blood froze in my veins. It tore past me, and I suddenly knew: the
Wild Huntsman had commanded it to carry away a human soul. I
awoke in deadly terror, and the next morning I received the news of
my mother's passing.
Seldom has a dream so shaken me, for upon superficial
consideration it seemed to say that the devil had fetched her. But to
be accurate the dream said that it was the Wild Huntsman, the
"Grunhutl" or Wearer of the Green Hat, who hunted with his wolves
that night it was the season of Fohn storms in January. It was
Wotan, the god of my Alemannic forefathers, who had gathered my
mother to her ancestors negatively to the "wild horde," but positively
to the "salig lut" the blessed folk. It was the Christian missionaries
who made Wotan into a devil. In himself he is an important god--a
Mercury or Hermes, as the Romans correctly realized, a nature
spirit who returned to life again in the Merlin of the Grail legend and
became, as the spiritus Mercurialis, the sought-after arcanum of the
alchemists. Thus the dream says that the soul of my mother was
taken into that greater territory of the self which lies beyond the
segment of Christian morality, taken into that wholeness of nature
and spirit in which conflicts and contradictions are resolved.
I went home immediately, and while I rode in the night train I had a
feeling of great grief, but in my heart of hearts I could not be
mournful, and this for a strange reason: during the entire journey I
continual y heard dance music, laughter, and jol ity, as though a
wedding were being celebrated. This contrasted violently with the
devastating impression the dream had made on me. Here was gay
dance music, cheerful laughter, and it was impossible to yield
entirely to my sorrow. Again and again it was on the point of
overwhelming me, but the next moment I would find myself once
more engulfed by the merry melodies. One side of me had a feeling
of warmth and joy, and the other of terror and grief; I was thrown
back and forth between these contrasting emotions.
This paradox can be explained if we suppose that at one moment
death was being represented from the point of view of the ego, and
at the next from that of the psyche. In the first case it appeared as a
catastrophe; that is how it so often strikes us, as if wicked and
pitiless powers had put an end to a human life.
And so it is death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality; there is no
sense pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event,
but far more so psychical y: a human being is torn away from us,
and what remains is the icy stil ness of death. There no longer
exists any hope of a relationship, for al the bridges have been
smashed at one blow. Those who deserve a long life are cut off in
the prime of their years, and good-for-nothings live to a ripe old
age. This is a cruel reality which we have no right to sidestep. The
actual experience of the cruelty and wantonness of death can so
embitter us that we conclude there is no merciful God, no justice,
and no kindness.
From another point of view, however, death appears as a joyful
event. In the light of eternity, it is a wedding, a mysterium
coniunctionis. The soul attains, as it were, its missing half, it
achieves wholeness. On Greek sarcophagi the joyous element was
represented by dancing girls, on Etruscan tombs by banquets.
When the pious Cabbalist Rabbi Simon ben Jochai came to die,
his friends said that he was celebrating his wedding. To this day it
is the custom in many regions to hold a picnic on the graves on Al
Souls' Day. Such customs express the feeling that death is real y a
festive occasion.
Several months before my mother's death, in September 1922, I
had a dream which presaged it. It concerned my father, and made a
deep impression upon me. I had not dreamed of my father since his
death in 1896. Now he once more appeared in a dream, as if he
had returned from a distant journey. He looked rejuvenated, and
had shed his appearance of paternal authoritarianism. I went into
my library with him, and was greatly pleased at the prospect of
finding out what he had been up to. I was also looking forward with
particular joy to introducing my wife and children to him, to showing
him my house, and to tel ing him al that had happened to me and
what I had become in the meanwhile. I wanted also to tel him about
my book on psychological types, which had recently been
published. But I quickly saw that al this would be inopportune, for
my father looked preoccupied. Apparently he wanted something
from me. I felt that plainly, and so I refrained from talking about my
own concerns.
He then said to me that since I was after al a psychologist, he
would like to consult me about marital psychology. I made ready to
give him a lengthy lecture on the complexities of marriage, but at
this point I awoke. I could not properly understand the dream, for it
never occurred to me that it might refer to my mother's death. I
realized that only when she died suddenly in January 1923.
My parents' marriage was not a happy one, but ful of trials and
difficulties and tests of patience. Both made the mistakes typical of
many couples. My dream was a forecast of my mother's death, for
here was my father who, after an absence of twenty-six years,
wished to ask a psychologist about the newest insights and
information on marital problems, since he would soon have to
resume this relationship again. Evidently he had acquired no better
understanding in his