of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case. We
stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even
know what is before us, let alone what to pit against it. And even if
we did know, we stil could not understand "how it could happen
here." With glorious naivete a statesman comes out with the proud
declaration that he has no "imagination for evil". Quite right: we
have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not
want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the
psychological situation in the world today: some cal themselves
Christian and imagine that they can trample so-cal ed evil underfoot
by merely wil ing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see
the good. Evil today has become a visible Great Power. One half of
humanity battens and grows strong on a doctrine fabricated by
human ratiocination; the other half sickens from the lack of a myth
commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come
to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to
develop its myth further in the course of the centuries.
Those who gave expression to the dark stirrings of growth in mythic
ideas were refused a hearing; Gioacchino da Fiore, Meister
Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, and many others have remained
obscurantists for the majority. The only ray of light is Pius XI and his
dogma. [3] But people do not even know what I am referring to
when I say this. They do not realize that a myth is dead if it no longer
lives and grows.
Our myth has become mute, and gives no answers. The fault lies
not in it as it is set down in the Scriptures, but solely in us, who have
not developed it further, who, rather, have suppressed any such
attempts. The original version of the myth offers ample points of
departure and possibilities of development. For example, the words
are put into Christ's mouth: "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and
harmless as doves." For what purpose do men need the cunning of
serpents? And what is the link between this cunning and the
innocence of the dove? "Except ye become as little children..." Who
gives thought to what children are like in reality? By what morality
did the Lord justify the taking of the ass which he needed in order to
ride in triumph into Jerusalem? How was it that, shortly afterward,
he put on a display of childish bad temper and cursed the fig tree?
What kind of morality emerges from the parable of the unjust
steward, and what profound insight, of such far-reaching
significance for our own predicament, from the apocryphal logion:
"Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, thou art blessed; but if thou
knowest not, thou art accursed and a transgressor of the law"? [4]
What, final y, does it mean when St. Paul confesses: "The evil which
I would not, that I do"? I wil not discuss the transparent prophecies
of the Book of Revelation, because no one believes in them and the
whole subject is felt to be an embarrassing one.
The old question posed by the Gnostics, "Whence comes evil?"
has been given no answer by the Christian world, and Origen's
cautious suggestion of a possible redemption of the devil was
termed a heresy. Today we are compel ed to meet that question;
but we stand empty-handed, bewildered, and perplexed, and
cannot even get it into our heads that no myth wil come to our
3 See above, Chap. VII, n. , p. 202.
4 Codex Bezae ad Lucam 6, 4.
aid although we have such urgent need of one. As the result of the
political situation and the frightful, not to say diabolic, triumphs of
science, we are shaken by secret shudders and dark forebodings;
but we know no way out, and very few persons indeed draw the
conclusion that this time the issue is the long-since-forgotten soul of
man.
A further development of myth might wel begin with the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, by which they were made into
sons of God, and not only they, but al others who through them and
after them received the filiatio--sonship of God--and thus partook of
the certainty that they were more than autochthonous animalia
sprung from the earth, that as the twice-born they had their roots in
the divinity itself. Their visible, physical life was on this earth; but the
the divinity itself. Their visible, physical life was on this earth; but the
invisible inner man had come from and would return to the
primordial image of wholeness, to the eternal Father, as the
Christian myth of salvation puts it.
Just as the Creator is whole, so His creature, His son, ought to be
whole. Nothing can take away from the concept of divine
wholeness. But unbeknownst to al , a splitting of that wholeness
ensued; there emerged a realm of light and a realm of darkness.
This outcome, even before Christ appeared, was clearly prefigured,
as we may observe inter alia in the experience of Job, or in the
widely disseminated Book of Enoch, which belongs to immediate
pre-Christian times. In Christianity, too, this meta-physical split was
plainly perpetuated: Satan, who in the Old Testament stil belonged
to the intimate entourage of Yahweh, now formed the diametrical
and eternal opposite of the divine world. He could not be uprooted.
It is therefore not surprising that as early as the beginning of the
eleventh century the belief arose that the devil, not God, had
created the world. Thus the keynote was struck for the second half
of the Christian aeon, after the myth of the fal of the angels had
already explained that these fal en angels had taught men a
dangerous knowledge of science and the arts. What would these
old storytel ers have to say about Hiroshima?
The visionary genius of Jacob Boehme recognized the paradoxical
nature of the God-image and thus contributed to the further
development of the myth. The mandala symbol sketched by
Boehme [5] is a representation of the split God, for the inner circle
is divided into two semicircles standing back to back.
Since dogma holds that God is whol y present in each of the three
Persons, He is also whol y present in each part of the out- poured
Holy Spirit; thus every man can partake of the whole of God and
hence of the filiation. The complexio oppositorum of the God-image
thus enters into man, and not as unity, but as conflict, the dark half of
the image coming into opposition with the accepted view that God
is "Light." This very process is taking place in our own times, albeit
scarcely recognized by the official teachers of humanity whose task,
supposedly, is to understand such matters. There is the general
feeling, to be sure, that we have reached a significant turning point
in the ages, but people imagine that the great change has to do
with nuclear fission and fusion, or with space rockets. What is
concurrently taking place in the human psyche is usual y
overlooked.
Insofar as the God-image is, from the psychological point of view, a
manifestation of the ground of the psyche, and insofar as the
cleavage in that image is becoming clear to mankind as a profound
dichotomy which penetrates even into world politics, a
compensation has arisen. This takes the form of circular symbols of
unity which represent a synthesis of the opposites within the
psyche. I refer to the worldwide rumors of Unidentified Flying
Objects, of which we began to hear as early as 1943. These rumors
are founded either upon visions or upon actual phenomena. The
usual story about the UFOs is that they are some kind of spacecraft
coming from other planets or even from the fourth dimension.
More than twenty years earlier (in 1918), in the course of my
investigations of the col ective unconscious, I discovered the
presence of an apparently universal symbol of a similar type the
mandala symbol. To make sure of my case, I spent more than a
decade amassing additional data, before announcing my discovery
for the first time. [6] The mandala is an archetypal image
5 Reproduced in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9, i),
p. 297.
6 In the commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower ( 1931) (CW 13).
whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the
wholeness of the self. This circular image represents the wholeness
of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity
incarnate in man. In contrast to Boehme's mandala, the modern
ones strive for unity; they represent a compensation of the psychic
cleavage, or an anticipation that the cleavage wil be surmounted.
Since this process takes place in the col ective unconscious, it
manifests itself everywhere. The worldwide stories of the UFOs are
evidence of that; they are the symptom of a universal y present
psychic disposition.
Insofar as analytical treatment makes the "shadow" conscious, it
causes a cleavage and a tension of opposites which in their turn
seek compensation in unity. The adjustment is achieved through
symbols. The conflict between the opposites can strain our psyche
to the breaking point, if we take them seriously, or if they take us
seriously. The tertium non datur of logic proves its worth: no solution
can be seen. If al goes wel , the solution, seemingly of its own
accord, appears out of nature. Then and then only is it convincing. It
is felt as "grace" Since the solution proceeds out of the
confrontation and clash of opposites, it is usual y an unfathomable
mixture of conscious and unconscious factors, and therefore a
symbol, a coin split into two halves which fit together precisely. [7] It
represents the result of the joint labors of consciousness and the
unconscious, and attains the likeness of the God-image in the form
of the mandala, which is probably the simplest model of a concept
of wholeness, and one which spontaneously arises in the mind as a
representation of the struggle and reconciliation of opposites. The
clash, which is at first of a purely personal nature, is soon fol owed
by the insight that the subjective conflict is only a single instance of
the universal conflict of opposites. Our psyche is set up in accord
with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the
macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most
subjective reaches of the psyche. For that reason the God-image is
always a projection of the inner experience of a powerful vis-a-vis.
This is symbolized by objects from which
7 One of the meanings of symbolon is the tessera hospitalitatis between
host and guest, the broken coin which is shared between two parting
friends. A. J.
the inner experience has taken its initial impulse, and which from
then on preserve numinous significance, or else it is char- acterized
by its numinosity and the overwhelming force of that numinosity. In
this way the imagination liberates itself from the concretism of the
object and attempts to sketch the image of the invisible as
something which stands behind the phenomenon. I am thinking here
of the simplest basic form of the mandala, the circle, and the
simplest (mental) division of the circle, the quadrant or, as the case
may be, the cross.
Such experiences have a helpful or, it may be, annihilating effect
upon man. He cannot grasp, comprehend, dominate them; nor can
he free himself or escape from them, and therefore feels them as
overpowering. Recognizing that they do not spring from his
conscious personality, he cal s them mana, daimon, or God.
Science employs the term "the unconscious," thus admitting that it
knows nothing about it, for it can know nothing about the substance
of the psyche when the sole means of knowing anything is the
psyche. Therefore the validity of such terms as mana, daimon, or
God can be neither disproved nor affirmed. We can, however,
establish that the sense of strangeness connected with the
experience of something objective, apparently outside the psyche,
is indeed authentic.
We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just
as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an
inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does
happen to us in this manner can be said to emanate from mana,
from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious. The first three terms
have the great merit of including and evoking the emotional quality
of numinosity, whereas the latter the unconscious is banal and
therefore closer to reality. This latter concept includes the empirical
realm that is, the commonplace reality we know so wel . The
unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to give much impetus
to the imagination. The term, after al , was coined for scientific
purposes, and is far better suited to dispassionate observation
which makes no meta-physical claims than are the transcendental
concepts, which are controversial and therefore tend to breed
fanaticism.
Hence I prefer the term "the unconscious," knowing that I might
equal y wel speak of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express
myself in mythic language. When I do use such mythic language, I
am aware that "mana," "daimon," and "God" are synonyms for the
unconscious that is to say, we know just as much or just as little
about them as about the latter. People only believe they know much
more about them and for certain purposes that belief is far more
useful and effective than a scientific concept. The great advantage
of the concepts "daimon" and "God" lies in making possible a
much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely, a personification
of it. Their emotional quality confers life and effectuality upon them.
Hate and love, fear and reverence, enter the scene of the
confrontation and raise it to a drama. What has merely been
"displayed" becomes "acted." [8] The whole man is chal enged and
enters the fray with his total reality. Only then can he become whole
and only then can "God be born," that is, enter into human reality
and associate with man in the form of "man." By this act of
incarnation man that is, his ego is inwardly replaced by "God," and
God becomes outwardly man, in keeping with the saying of Jesus:
"Who sees me, sees the Father."
It is at this point that the shortcomings of mythic terminology
become apparent. The Christian's ordinary conception of God is of
an omnipotent, omniscient, and al -merciful Father and Creator of
the world. If this God wishes to become man, an incredible kenosis
(emptying) [9] is required of Him, in order to reduce His totality to
the infinitesimal human scale. Even then it is hard to see why the
human frame is not shattered by the incarnation. Theological
thinkers have therefore felt it necessary to equip Jesus with
qualities which raise him above ordinary human existence. Above
al he lacks the macula peccati (stain of original sin). For that
reason, if for no other, he is at least a god-man or a demigod. The
Christian God-image cannot become incarnate in empirical man
without contradictions quite apart from the fact that man with al his
external characteristics seems little suited to representing a god.
8 Cf. "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," in Psychology and Religion:
West and East (CW 11), pp. 249-50
9 Philippians 2: 6.
The myth must ultimately take monotheism seriously and put aside
its dualism, which, however much repudiated official y, has
persisted until now and enthroned an eternal dark antagonist
alongside the omnipotent Good. Room must be made within the
system for the philosophical complexio oppositorum of Nicholas of
Cusa and the moral ambivalence of Jacob Boehme; only thus can
the One God be granted the wholeness and the synthesis of
opposites which should be His. It is a fact that symbols, by their very
nature, can so unite the opposites that these no longer diverge or
clash, but mutual y supplement one another and give meaningful
shape to life. Once that has been experienced, the ambivalence in
the image of a nature-god or Creator-god ceases to present
difficulties. On the contrary, the myth of the necessary incarnation of
God the essence of the Christian message can then be understood
as man's creative confrontation with the opposites and their
synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality. The
unavoidable internal contradictions in the image of a Creator-god
can be reconciled in the unity and wholeness of the self as the
coniunctio oppositorum of the alchemists or as a unio mystica. In
the experience of the self it is no longer the opposites "God" and
"man" that are reconciled, as it was before, but rather the opposites
within the God-image itself. That is the meaning of divine service, of
the service which man can render to God, that light may emerge
from the darkness, that the Creator may become conscious of His
creation, and man conscious of himself.
That is the goal, or one goal, which fits man meaningful y into the
scheme of creation, and at the same time confers meaning upon it.
It is an explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in
the course of the decades. It is a goal I can acknowledge and
esteem, and which therefore satisfies me.
By virtue of his reflective faculties, man is raised out of the animal
world, and by his mind he demonstrates that nature has put a high
premium precisely upon the developmerit of consciousness.
Through consciousness he takes possession of nature by
recognizing the existence of the world and thus, as it were,
confirming the Creator. The world becomes the phenomenal world,
for without conscious reflection it would not be. If the Creator were
conscious of Himself, He would not need conscious creatures; nor
is it probable that the extremely indirect methods of creation, which
squander mil ions of years upon the development of countless
species and creatures, are the outcome of purposeful intention.
Natural history tel s us of a haphazard and casual transformation of
species over hundreds of mil ions of years of devouring and being
devoured. The biological and political history of man is an elaborate
repetition of the same thing. But the history of the mind offers a
different picture. Here the miracle of reflecting consciousness
intervenes
the
second
cosmogony.
The
importance
of
consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the
element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within al the
monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the
road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-
blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain found as if
by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed,
felt and groped for out of some dark urge.
I do not imagine that in my reflections on the meaning of man and
his myth I have uttered a final truth, but I think that this is what can be
said at the end of our aeon of the Fishes, and perhaps must be
said in view of the coming aeon of Aquarius (the Water Bearer),
who has a human figure and is next to the sign of the Fishes. This is
a coniunctio oppositorum composed of two fishes in reverse. The
Water Bearer seems to represent the self. With a sovereign
gesture he pours the contents of his jug into the mouth of Piscis
austrinus which symbolizes a son, a stil unconscious content. Out of
this unconscious content wil emerge, after the passage of another
aeon of more than two thousand years, a future whose features are
indicated by the symbol of Capricorn: an aigokeros, the monstrosity
of the Goat-Fish, [11] symbolizing the mountains and the depths of
the sea, a polarity
10 Constellation of the "Southern Fish." Its mouth is formed by Fomalhaut
(Arabic for "mouth of the fish" ) below the constellation of the Water Bearer.
11 The constellation of Capricorn was originally called the "Goat-Fish."
made up of two undifferentiated animal elements which have grown
together. This strange being could easily be the primordial image of
a Creator-god confronting "man," the Anthropos. On this question
there is a silence within me, as there is in the empirical data at my
disposal the products of the unconscious of other people with which
I am acquainted, or historical documents. If insight does not come
by itself, speculation is pointless. It makes sense only when we
have objective data comparable to our material on the aeon of
Aquarius.
We do not know how far the process of coming to consciousness
can extend, or where it wil lead. It is a new element in the story of
creation, and there are no paral els we can look to. We therefore
cannot know what potentialities are inherent in it. Neither can we
know the prospects for the species Homo sapiens. Wil it imitate
the fate of other species, which once flourished on the earth and
now are extinct? Biology can advance no reasons why this should
not be so.
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view
of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human
existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic
wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and
unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits ful ness of life and is
therefore equivalent to il ness. Meaning makes a great many things
endurable perhaps everything. No science wil ever replace myth,
and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that
"God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in
man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word
of God. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of
distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God.
There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered
known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us
spontaneously and places obligations upon us. It is not affected by
the arbitrary operation of our wil . We cannot explain an inspiration.
Our chief feeling about it is that it is not the result of our own
ratiocinations, but that it came to us from elsewhere. And if we
happen to have a precognitive dream, how can we possibly ascribe
it to our own powers? After al , often we do not even know, until
some time afterward, that the dream represented foreknowledge,
or knowledge of something that happened at a distance.
The Word happens to us; we suffer it, for we are victims of a
profound uncertainty: with God as a complexio oppositorum, al
things are possible, in the ful est meaning of the phrase. Truth and
delusion, good and evil, are equal y possible. Myth is or can be
equivocal, like the oracle of Delphi or like a dream. We cannot and
ought not to repudiate reason; but equal y we must cling to the hope
that instinct wil hasten to our aid in which case God is supporting