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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

C.C.JUNG

VOLUME 1 1

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION:
WEST AND EAST

Translated by R. F. C. Hull

C. G. Jung's shorter works on religion and psychology
are collected in this volume. Several, although of
comparative brevity, are of major significance and
take their place with two full-length works Psy-
chology and Alchemy and Aion (in preparation) to
complete Jung's statement on this central theme. The
contents are as follows, with original dates given in
brackets:

Wesfern Religion

Psychology and Religion [1938] "The Terry Lec-
tures/ 1 revised and augmented

A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity
[1942/1948]

Transformation Symbolism in the Mass [ 1 942/1 954]

Forewords to White's God ana* fhe Unconscious and
Werblowsky's Lucifer and Prometheus [1952]

Brother Klaus [1933]
Psychotherapists or the Clergy [ 1 932]
Psychoanalysis and the Cure of Souls [1928]
Answer to Job [1952]

Eastern Religion

Psychological Commentaries on The Tibetan Book of
the Great, Liberation [1939/1954] and The Ti-
betan Book of the Dead [1935/1953]

Yoga and the West [1936]

Foreword to Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism

[1939]

The Psychology of Eastern Meditation [1943]
The Holy Men of India [1 944 ]
Foreword to the / Ching [1950]

An extensive bibliography and index round out this
volume, which is the seventh to appear in this edition
of Jung's collected works.

Jacket design by E. McKnight fCauffer

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THEE COLLECTED WX3RK1S
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G . G . JUNG

E > I T O R S
SIR. JHGERJBERT

3FOROKCADVT, OVt.O., IM. R.C.I*.

Jean Fouquet: The Trinity with the Virgin Mary
From the Book of Hours of Etienne Chevalier (Chantilly)

PSYCHOLOGY
AND RELIGION:
WEST AND EAST

C. G. JUNG

TRANSLATED BY R. F. C. HULL

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Psychology and Religion (The Terry Lectures) copyright 1938 by Yale Uni-
versity Press. Foreword to the / Ching copyright 1950 and "Transformation
Symbolism in the Mass" copyright 1955 by Bollingen Foundation Inc.
Foreword to White's God and the Unconscious copyright 1953 by Henry
Regnery Co.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER! 52-8757
MANUFACTURED IN THE U. S. A. BY H. WOLFF

NEW YORK, N. Y.

EDITORIAL NOTE

The title Psychology and Religion: West and East calls for com-
ment, since no single volume can cover Jung's publications on a
subject that takes so prominent a place in all his later works.
To a full understanding of Jung's thesis on religion a thorough
grasp of his theory of the archetypes is essential, as well as a
knowledge of several other of the volumes of the Collected
Works, of which A ion and Psychology and Alchemy may be
singled out.

It could, therefore, be said that the Editors would have been
better advised to group all these works under the general title
Psychology and Religion, rather than confine this title to a
single volume. It will not be out of place to remember that
Jung's definition of religion is a wide one. Religion, he says, is
"a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto
aptly termed the numinosum" From this standpoint, Jung was
struck by the contrasting methods of observation employed by
religious men of the East and by those of the predominantly
Christian West.

The main part of the title is that of the Terry Lectures for
1937, its general applicability being evident; but the volume
has a particular aim, which the subtitle West and East clarifies.
Thus the division into two parts, " Western Religion" and
"Eastern Religion/' reflecting Jung's idea that the two are
radically different.

In the original "Psychology and Religion," which introduces
Part One, Jung expounds the relation between Christianity and
alchemy. This connection he has worked out in greater detail
in Psychology and Alchemy, where he says that "alchemy seems
like a continuation of Christian mysticism carried on in the
subterranean darkness of the unconscious." There follow in
this volume "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the
Trinity," translated for the first time into English, and "Trans-

EDITORIAL NOTE

formation Symbolism in the Mass," which presents alchemical
and Aztec parallels to the Christian ritual. Part One ends with
the provocative essay "Answer to Job/' These three works, all
original researches of distinctive importance, are especially sig-
nificant because they penetrate to the heart of Christian sym-
bolism and shed new light on its psychological meaning. Part
One also contains two forewords, of particular interest because
the books they introduce both illustrate the relevance of Jung's
work for religious thinking; a short essay on the Swiss saint,
Brother Klaus; and two essays on the relation between psycho-
therapy and religious healing.

It is worthy of note that most of the works on Eastern religion
in Part Two are commentaries or forewords, in contrast with
the authoritative tone of Jung's writings on Christianity and
alchemy. This fact confirms what should be clear from all his
work: that his main interest has been in the psychology of
Western man and so in his religious life and development.

It may be a matter for surprise that the foreword to the
I Ching, which closes the volume, is included here; it is a docu-
ment that would scarcely be termed religious, in the common
usage of that word. If, however, Jung'$ definition cited above
be kept in mind, and if it be remembered that the earlier inter-
pretations of what is now known as synchronicity were essen-
tially religious in Jung's sense and that the I Ching was studied
by the most illustrious of the Eastern sages, the intention of the
Editors will be apparent. Jung's commentary on The Secret of
the Golden Flower might equally well have come into the
second part of this volume, but because of the many analogies
between this Taoist text and alchemy, the Editors have placed
it in Volume 13, Alchemical Studies.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the School of American
Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a quotation from the
Anderson and Dibble translation of Sahagun; to the Clarendon
Press, Oxford, for passages from M. R, James, The Apocryphal
New Testament; the Oxford University Press, for Professor
Jung's commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Great Libera-

TRANSLATOR S NOTE

tion; and the Harvill Press and the Henry Regnery Company
for Professor Jung's foreword to God and the Unconscious.
The frontispiece is from a photograph by Giraudon, Paris,
of an illustration in the Book of Hours of Etienne Chevalier,
Conde Museum, Chantilly.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to the following per-
sons, whose various translations have been consulted to a greater
or less degree during the preparation of this volume; Miss
Monica Curtis, for help derived from her perceptive translation
of extensive portions of "Transformation Symbolism in the
Mass," published as Guild Lecture No. 69 by the Guild of
Pastoral Psychology, London, and of which certain passages are
incorporated here almost verbatim; Father Victor White, O.P.,
for the use of his translation of the foreword to his book God
and the Unconscious; Dr. Horace Gray, for reference to his
translation of "Brother Klaus" in the Journal of Nervous and
Mental Diseases; Mr. W. S. Dell and Mrs. Gary F. Baynes, for
reference to their translation of "Psychotherapists or the
Clergy" in Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Dr. James Kirsch,
for making available to me his private translation of "Answer to
Job/' prepared for members of a seminar he conducted at Los
Angeles, 1952-53, and also for his helpful criticism during per-
sonal discussions; Mrs. Gary F. Baynes, for reference to her
translation of "Yoga and the West" in Prabuddha Bharata and
for the use with only minor alterations of her translation of the
foreword to the I Ching; Miss Constance Rolfe, for reference to
her translation of the foreword to Suzuki's Introduction to Zen
Buddhism; and Mrs. Carol Baumann, for reference to her trans-
lation of "The Psychology of Eastern Meditation" in Art and
Thought. Acknowledgment is also made to Mr. A. S. B. Glover
for his translations of many Latin passages throughout as well
as for the index.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL NOTE V

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE vii

PART ONE: WESTERN RELIGION

Psychology and Religion

Originally published in English: The Terry Lectures of 1937
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, and London:
Oxford University Press, 1938); here revised and augmented
in accordance with the Swiss edition (Zurich: Rascher, 1940).

1. The Autonomy of the Unconscious, 5

2. Dogma and Natural Symbols, 34

3. The History and Psychology of a Natural Symbol, 64

A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity 1 07

Translated from "Versuch zu einer psychologischen Deutung
des Trinitatsdogmas," Symbolik des Geistes (Zurich: Rascher,
1948).

Introduction, 109

i. Pre-Christian Parallels, 112

i. Babylonia, us. n. Egypt, 115. - in. Greece, 117

CONTENTS

2. Father, Son, and Spirit, 129

3. The Symbola, 138

i. The Symbolum Apostolicum, 141. n. The Sym-
bolum of Gregory Thaumaturgus, 142. in. The
Nicaenum^ 143. rv. The Nicaeno-Constantinopoli-
tanum, the Athanasianum, and the Lateranense, 144

4. The Three Persons in the Light of Psychology, 148

i. The Hypothesis of the Archetype, 148. n. Christ
as Archetype, 152. in. The Holy Ghost, 157

5. The Problem of the Fourth, 164

i. The Concept of Quaternity, 164. n. The Psy-
chology of the Quaternity, 180. in. General Re-
marks on Symbolism, 187

6. Conclusion, 193

III

Transformation Symbolism in the Mass

Translated from "Das Wandlungssymbol in der Messe," Von
den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich: Rascher, 1954).

1. Introduction, 203

2. The Sequence of the Transformation Rite, 208

i. Oblation of the Bread, 208. 11. Preparation of
the Chalice, 209. m. Elevation of the Chalice, 212.

iv. Censing of the Substances and the Altar, 212.

v. The Epiclesis, 213. vi. The Consecration, 214.

vn. The Greater Elevation, 216. vm. The Post-
Consecration, 216. ix. End of the Canon, 218.
x. Breaking of the Host ("Fractio"), 218. xi. Con-
signatio, 219. xn. Commixtio, 219. xm. Con-
clusion, 220

3. Parallels to the Transformation Mystery, 222

i. The Aztec "Teoqualo," 222. n. The Vision of
Zosimos, 225

4. The Psychology of the Mass, 247

i. General Remarks on the Sacrifice, 547. n. The
Psychological Meaning of Sacrifice, 252. in. The
Mass and the Individuation Process, 273

CONTENTS

IV
Foreword to White's God and the Unconscious 299

Originally translated from a manuscript and published in
English in the book by Victor White (London: Harvill, 1952;
Chicago: H. Regnery, 1953).

Foreword to Werblowsky's Lucifer and Prometheus 311

Originally translated from a manuscript and published in
English in the book by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).

Brother Klaus 316

Translated from a book review in the Neue Schweizer Rund-
schau (Zurich), new series, I (1933).

Psychotherapists or the Clergy 327

Translated from Die Beziehungen der Psychotherapie zur
Seelsorge (Zurich: Rascher, 1932) .

Psychoanalysis and the Cure of Souls 348

Translated from "Psychoanalyse und Seelsorge," Ethik:
Sexual- und Gesellschafts-Ethik (Halle), V (1928).

Answer to Job 355

Translated from Antwort auf Hiob (Zurich: Rascher, 1952).

Prefatory Note, 357
Lectori Benevolo, 359
Answer to Job, 365

CONTENTS

PART TWO: EASTERN RELIGION

VII

Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of

the Great Liberation 475

Originally published in English in the book (London and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

1. The Difference between Eastern and Western Think-

ing, 475

2. Comments on the Text, 494

Psychological Commentary on The Tibetan Book of

the Dead 509

Translated from "Psychologischer Kommentar zum Bardo
Thodol," in Das Tibetanische Totenbuch, 5th edition (Zu-
rich: Rascher, 1953).

VIII

Yoga and the West 529

Originally translated from a manuscript and published in
English in Prabuddha Bharata (Calcutta), February 1936.

Foreword to Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism 538

Translated from the foreword to D. T. Suzuki, Die Grosse
Befreiung: Einfuhrung in den Zen-Buddhismus (Leipzig:
Curt Weller, 1939) .

The Psychology of Eastern Meditation 558

Translated from "Zur Psychologic ostlicher Meditation,"
Symbolik des Geistes (Zurich: Rascher, 1948).

xii

CONTENTS

The Holy Men of India 576

Translated from the introduction to Heinrich Zimmer, Der
Weg zum Selbst (Zurich: Rascher, 1944).

IX
Foreword to the / Ching 589

Originally translated from a manuscript and published in
English in The I Ching, or Book of Changes, translated by
Gary F. Baynes from the German translation of Richard Wil-
helm (New York: Pantheon Books [Bollingen Series XIX]
and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950) . This is the
Baynes translation of the Foreword with minor revisions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 609

INDEX 641

Xlll

PART ONE

WESTERN RELIGION

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

[Originally written in English and delivered in 1937, at Yale University, New
Haven, Connecticut, as the fifteenth series of "Lectures on Religion in the Light
of Science and Philosophy" under the auspices of the Dwight Harrington Terry
Foundation. The lectures were published for the Terry Foundation by the Yale
University Press (and by Oxford University Press, London) in 1938. They were
then translated into German by Felicia Froboese, and the translation, revised by
Toni Wolff and augmented by Professor Jung, was published at Zurich, 1940, as
Psychologic und Religion. The present version is based on both the original
English and the German versions and contains the revisions and additions of the
latter. EDITORS.]

i. THE AUTONOMY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

As it seems to be the intention of the founder of the Terry
Lectures to enable representatives of science, as well as of phi-
losophy and other spheres of human knowledge, to contribute
to the discussion of the eternal problem of religion, and since
Yale University has bestowed upon me the great honour of de-
livering the Terry Lectures for 1937, 1 assume that it will be my
task to show what psychology, or rather that special branch of
medical psychology which I represent, has to do with or to say
about religion. Since religion is incontestably one of the earliest
and most universal expressions of the human mind, it is obvious
that any psychology which touches upon the psychological struc-
ture of human personality cannot avoid taking note of the fact
that religion is not only a sociological and historical phenome-
non, but also something of considerable personal concern to a
great number of individuals.

Although I have often been called a philosopher, I am an
empiricist and adhere as such to the phenomenological stand-
point. I trust that it does not conflict with the principles of scien-
tific empiricism if one occasionally makes certain reflections
which go beyond a mere accumulation and classification of ex-
perience. As a matter of fact I believe that experience is not
even possible without reflection, because "experience" is a
process of assimilation without which there could be no under-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

standing. As this statement indicates, I approach psychological
matters from a scientific and not from a philosophical stand-
point. Inasmuch as religion has a very important psychological
aspect, I deal with it from a purely empirical point of view, that
is, I restrict myself to the observation of phenomena and I
eschew any metaphysical or philosophical considerations. I do
not deny the validity of these other considerations, but I cannot
claim to be competent to apply them correctly.

I am aware that most people believe they know all there is
to be known about psychology, because they think that psychol-
ogy is nothing but what they know of themselves. But I am
afraid psychology is a good deal more than that. While having
little to do with philosophy, it has much to do with empirical
facts, many of which are not easily accessible to the experience
of the average man. It is my intention to give you a few glimpses
of the way in which practical psychology comes up against the
problem of religion. It is self-evident that the vastness of the
problem requires far more than three lectures, as the necessary
elaboration of concrete detail takes a great deal of time and
explanation. My first lecture will be a sort of introduction to
the problem of practical psychology and religion. The second is
concerned with facts which demonstrate the existence of an
authentic religious function in the unconscious. The third deals
with the religious symbolism of unconscious processes.
[ Since I am going to present a rather unusual argument, I
cannot assume that my audience will be fully acquainted with
the methodological standpoint of the branch of psychology I
represent. This standpoint is exclusively phenomenological, that
is, it is concerned with occurrences, events, experiences in a
word, with facts. Its truth is a fact and not a judgment. When
psychology speaks, for instance, of the motif of the virgin birth,
it is only concerned with the fact that there is such an idea, but
it is not concerned with the question whether such an idea is
true or false in any other sense. The idea is psychologically true
inasmuch as it exists. Psychological existence is subjective in
so far as an idea occurs in only one individual. But it is objec-
tive in so far as that idea is shared by a society by a consensus
gentium.

This point of view is the same as that of natural science.
Psychology deals with ideas and other mental contents as zool-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

ogy, for instance, deals with the different species of animals. An
elephant is "true" because it exists. The elephant is neither an
inference nor a statement nor the subjective judgment of a cre-
ator. It is a phenomenon. But we are so used to the idea that
psychic events are wilful and arbitrary products, or even the
inventions of a human creator, that we can hardly rid ourselves
of the prejudiced view that the psyche and its contents are noth-
ing but our own arbitrary invention or the more or less illusory
product of supposition and judgment. The fact is that certain
ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and can even
spontaneously create themselves quite independently of migra-
tion and tradition. They are not made by the individual, they
just happen to him they even force themselves on his conscious-
ness. This is not Platonic philosophy but empirical psychology.

In speaking of religion I must make clear from the start what
I mean by that term. Religion, as the Latin word denotes, is a
careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto l
aptly termed the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect
not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes
and controls the human subject, who is always rather its victim
than its creator. The numinosum whatever its cause may be
is an experience of the subject independent of his will. At all
events, religious teaching as well as the consensus gentium al-
ways and everywhere explain this experience as being due to a
cause external to the individual. The numinosum is either a
quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an in-
visible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of conscious-
ness. This is, at any rate, the general rule.

There are, however, certain exceptions when it comes to the
question of religious practice or ritual. A great many ritualistic
performances are carried out for the sole purpose of producing
at will the effect of the numinosum by means of certain devices
of a magical nature, such as invocation, incantation, sacrifice,
meditation and other yoga practices, self-inflicted tortures of
various descriptions, and so forth. But a religious belief in an
external and objective divine cause is always prior to any such
performance. The Catholic Church, for instance, administers
the sacraments for the purpose of bestowing their spiritual bless-
ings upon the believer; but since this act would amount to

1 The Idea of the Holy.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

enforcing the presence of divine grace by an indubitably mag-
ical procedure, it is logically argued that nobody can compel
divine grace to be present in the sacramental act, but that it is
nevertheless inevitably present since the sacrament is a divine
institution which God would not have caused to be if he had
not intended to lend it his support. 2

Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude of mind
which could be formulated in accordance with the original use
of the word religio, which means a careful consideration and
observation of certain dynamic factors that are conceived as
"powers": spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals, or whatever
name man has given to such factors in his world as he has found
powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into careful
consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to
be devoutly worshipped and loved. In colloquial speech one
often says of somebody who is enthusiastically interested in a
certain pursuit that he is almost "religiously devoted" to his
cause; William James, for instance, remarks that a scientist often
has no creed, but his "temper is devout." 3

I want to make clear that by the term "religion" 4 I do not
mean a creed. It is, however, true that every creed is originally
based on the one hand upon the experience of the numinosum
and on the other hand upon irkms, that is to say, trust or loyalty,
faith and confidence in a certain experience of a numinous na-
ture and in the change of consciousness that ensues. The con-
version of Paul is a striking example of this. We might say, then,
that the term "religion" designates the attitude peculiar to a
consciousness which has been changed by experience of the
numinosum.

2 Gratia adiuvans and gratia sanctificans are the effects of the sacramentum ex
opere operate. The sacrament owes its undoubted efficacy to the fact that it is
directly instituted by Christ himself. The Church is powerless to connect the rite
with grace in such a way that the sacramental act would produce the presence
and effect of grace. Consequently the rite performed by the priest is not a causa
instrumentalis, but merely a causa ministerialis.

3 "But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself
almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout." Pragmatism, p. 14.

4 "Religion is that which gives reverence and worship to some higher nature
[which is called divine]." Cicero, De inventione rhetorica, II, 53, 161. For "testi-
mony given under the sanction of religion on the faith of an oath" cf. Cicero,
Pro Coelio, 55.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

Creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of original re-
ligious experience. 5 The contents of the experience have be-
come sanctified and are usually congealed in a rigid, often
elaborate, structure of ideas. The practice and repetition of the
original experience have become a ritual and an unchangeable
institution. This does not necessarily mean lifeless petrifaction.
On the contrary, it may prove to be a valid form of religious
experience for millions of people for thousands of years, without
there arising any vital necessity to alter it. Although the Catholic
Church has often been accused of particular rigidity, she never-
theless admits that dogma is a living thing and that its formula-
tion is therefore capable of change and development. Even the
number of dogmas is not limited and can be multiplied in the
course of time. The same holds true of the ritual. Yet all changes
and developments are determined within the framework of the
facts as originally experienced, and this sets up a special kind of
dogmatic content and emotional value. Even Protestantism,
which has abandoned itself apparently to an almost unlimited
emancipation from dogmatic tradition and codified ritual and
has thus split into more than four hundred denominations-
even Protestantism is bound at least to be Christian and to ex-
press itself within the framework of the belief that God revealed
himself in Christ, who suffered for mankind. This is a definite
framework with definite contents which cannot be combined
with or supplemented by Buddhist or Islamic ideas and feelings.
Yet it is unquestionably true that not only Buddha and Moham-
med, Confucius and Zarathustra, represent religious phenom-
ena, but also Mithras, Attis, Cybele, Mani, Hermes, and the dei-
ties of many other exotic cults. The psychologist, if he takes up a
scientific attitude, has to disregard the claim of every creed to
be the unique and eternal truth. He must keep his eye on the
human side of the religious problem, since he is concerned with
the original religious experience quite apart from what the
creeds have made of it.

As I am a doctor and a specialist in nervous and mental dis-
eases, my point of departure is not a creed but the psychology
of the homo religiosuSj the man who takes into account and care-
fully observes certain factors which influence him and, through

5 Heinrich Scholz (Die Religionsphilosophie des Als-Ob) insists on a similar stand-
point. Cf. also Pearcy, A Vindication of Paul

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

him, his general condition. It is easy to denominate and define
these factors in accordance with historical tradition or ethnolog-
ical knowledge, but to do the same thing from the standpoint
of psychology is an uncommonly difficult task. What I can con-
tribute to the question of religion is derived entirely from my
practical experience, both with my patients and with so-called
normal persons. As our experience with people depends to a
large extent upon what we do with them, I can see no other way
of proceeding than to give you at least a general idea of the line
I take in my professional work.

Since every neurosis is connected with man's most intimate
life, there will always be some hesitation when a patient has to
give a complete account of all the circumstances and complica-
tions which originally led him into a morbid condition. But
why shouldn't he be able to talk freely? Why should he be afraid
or shy or prudish? The reason is that he is "carefully observing"
certain external factors which together constitute what one calls
public opinion or respectability or reputation. And even if he
trusts his doctor and is no longer shy of him, he will be reluctant
or even afraid to admit certain things to himself, as if it were
dangerous to become conscious of himself. One is usually afraid
of things that seem to be overpowering. But is there anything
in man that is stronger than himself? We should not forget that
every neurosis entails a corresponding amount of demoraliza-
tion. If a man is neurotic, he has lost confidence in himself. A
neurosis is a humiliating defeat and is felt as such by people who
are not entirely unconscious of their own psychology. And one
is defeated by something "unreal." Doctors may have assured the
patient, long ago, that there is nothing the matter with him,
that he does not suffer from a real heart-disease or from a real
cancer. His symptoms are quite imaginary. The more he believes
that he is a malade imaginaire, the more a feeling of inferiority
permeates his whole personality. "If my symptoms are imagi-
nary," he will say, "where have I picked up this confounded
imagination and why should I put up with such a perfect nui-
sance?" It is indeed pathetic to have an intelligent man almost
imploringly assure you that he is suffering from an intestinal
cancer and declare at the same time in a despondent voice that
of course he knows his cancer is a purely imaginary affair.

Our usual materialistic conception of the psyche is, I am

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

afraid, not particularly helpful in cases of neurosis. If only the
soul were endowed with a subtle body, then one could at least
say that this breath- or vapour-body was suffering from a real
though somewhat ethereal cancer, in the same way as the gross
material body can succumb to a cancerous disease. That, at least,
would be something real. Medicine therefore feels a strong aver-
sion for anything of a psychic natureeither the body is ill or
there is nothing the matter. And if you cannot prove that the
body is really ill, that is only because our present techniques do
not enable the doctor to discover the true nature of the un-
doubtedly organic trouble.

H But what, actually, is the psyche? Materialistic prejudice ex-
plains it as a mere epiphenomenal by-product of organic proc-
esses in the brain. Any psychic disturbance must therefore be
an organic or physical disorder which is undiscoverable only
because of the inadequacy of our present methods of diagnosis.
The undeniable connection between psyche and brain gives this
point of view a certain weight, but not enough to make it an
unshakable truth. We do not know whether there is a real dis-
turbance of the organic processes in the brain in a case of neuro-
sis, and if there are disorders of an endocrine nature it is
impossible to say whether they might not be effects rather than
causes.

15 On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the real causes
of neurosis are psychological. Not so long ago it was very diffi-
cult to imagine how an organic or physical disorder could be
relieved by quite simple psychological means, yet in recent years
medical science has recognized a whole class of diseases, the
psychosomatic disorders, in which the patient's psychology plays
the essential part. Since my readers may not be familiar with
these medical facts I may instance a case of hysterical fever, with
a temperature of 1 02 , which was cured in a few minutes through
confession of the psychological cause. A patient with psoriasis
extending over practically the whole body was told that I did
not feel competent to treat his skin trouble, but that I should
concentrate on his psychological conflicts, which were numerous.
After six weeks of intense analysis and discussion of his purely
psychological difficulties, there came about as an unexpected
by-product the almost complete disappearance of the skin dis-
ease. In another case, the patient had recently undergone an

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

operation for distention of the colon. Forty centimetres of it had
been removed, but this was followed by another extraordinary
distention. The patient was desperate and refused to permit a
second operation, though the surgeon thought it vital. As soon
as certain intimate psychological facts were discovered, the colon
began to function normally again.

16 Such experiences make it exceedingly difficult to believe that
the psyche is nothing, or that an imaginary fact is unreal. Only,
it is not there where a near-sighted mind seeks it. It exists, but
not in physical form. It is an almost absurd prejudice to suppose
that existence can only be physical. As a matter of fact, the only
form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is
psychic. We might well say, on the contrary, that physical exist-
ence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far
as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses.

*7 We are surely making a great mistake when we forget this
simple yet fundamental truth. Even if a neurosis had no cause at
all other than imagination, it would, none the less, be a very
real thing. If a man imagined that I was his arch-enemy and
killed me, I should be dead on account of mere imagination.
Imaginary conditions do exist and they may be just as real and
just as harmful or dangerous as physical conditions. I even be-
lieve that psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epi-
demics or earthquakes. Not even the medieval epidemics of
bubonic plague or smallpox killed as many people as certain
differences of opinion in 1914 or certain political * 'ideals" in
Russia.

18 Although the mind cannot apprehend its own form of exist-
ence, owing to the lack of an Archimedean point outside, it
nevertheless exists. Not only does the psyche exist, it is existence
itself.

*9 What, then, shall we say to our patient with the imaginary
cancer? I would tell him: "Yes, my friend, you are really suffer-
ing from a cancer-like thing, you really do harbour in yourself
a deadly evil. However, it will not kill your body, because it is
imaginary. But it will eventually kill your soul. It has already
spoilt and even poisoned your human relations and your personal
happiness and it will go on growing until it has swallowed your
whole psychic existence. So that in the end you will not be a
human being any more, but an evil destructive tumour."

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

It is obvious to our patient that he is not the author of his
morbid imagination, although his theoretical turn of mind will
certainly suggest that he is the owner and maker of his own
imaginings. If a man is suffering from a real cancer, he never
believes himself to be responsible for such an evil, despite the
fact that the cancer is in his own body. But when it comes to the
psyche we instantly feel a kind of responsibility, as if we were
the makers of our psychic conditions. This prejudice is of rela-
tively recent date. Not so very long ago even highly civilized
people believed that psychic agencies could influence our minds
and feelings. There were ghosts, wizards, and witches, daemons
and angels, and even gods, who could produce certain psycho-
logical changes in human beings. In former times the man with
the idea that he had cancer might have felt quite differently
about his idea. He would probably have assumed that somebody
had worked witchcraft against him or that he was possessed. He
never would have thought of himself as the originator of such a
fantasy.

As a matter of fact, I take his cancer to be a spontaneous
growth, which originated in the part of the psyche that is
not identical with consciousness. It appears as an autonomous
formation intruding upon consciousness. Of consciousness one
might say that it is our own psychic existence, but the cancer has
its own psychic existence, independent of ourselves. This state-
ment seems to formulate the observable facts completely. If we
submit such a case to an association experiment, 6 we soon dis-
cover that man is not master in his own house. His reactions will
be delayed, altered, suppressed, or replaced by autonomous
intruders. There will be a number of stimulus-words which can-
not be answered by his conscious intention. They will be an-
swered by certain autonomous contents, which are very often
unconscious even to himself. In our case we shall certainly dis-
cover answers that come from the psychic complex at the root
of the cancer idea. Whenever a stimulus-word touches some-
thing connected with the hidden complex, the reaction of the
conscious ego will be disturbed, or even replaced, by an answer
coming from the complex. It is just as if the complex were an
autonomous being capable of interfering with the intentions of

6 Cf. my "Studies in. Word Association."

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

the ego. Complexes do indeed behave like secondary or partial
personalities possessing a mental life of their own.

22 Many complexes are split off from consciousness because the
latter preferred to get rid of them by repression. But there are
others that have never been in consciousness before and there-
fore could never have been arbitrarily repressed. They grow out
of the unconscious and invade the conscious mind with their
weird and unassailable convictions and impulses. Our patient
belonged to the latter category. Despite his culture and intelli-
gence, he was a helpless victim of something that obsessed and
possessed him. He was unable to help himself in any way against
the demonic power of his morbid idea. It proliferated in him
like a carcinoma. One day the idea appeared and from then on
it remained unshakable; there were only short intervals when
he was free from it.

2 3 The existence of such cases does something to explain why
people are afraid of becoming conscious of themselves. There
might really be something behind the screen one never knows
and so people prefer "to consider and observe carefully" the
factors external to their consciousness. In most people there is a
sort of primitive dacndawovla with regard to the possible contents
of the unconscious. Beneath all natural shyness, shame, and tact,
there is a secret fear of the unknown "perils of the soul." Of
course one is reluctant to admit such a ridiculous fear. But one
should realize that this fear is by no means unjustified; on the
contrary, it is only too well founded. We can never be sure that
a new idea will not seize either upon ourselves or upon our
neighbours. We know from modern as well as from ancient
history that such ideas are often so strange, indeed so bizarre,
that they fly in the face of reason. The fascination which is al-
most invariably connected with ideas of this sort produces a
fanatical obsession, with the result that all dissenters, no matter
how well meaning or reasonable they are, get burnt alive or
have their heads cut off or are disposed of in masses by the more
modern machine-gun. We cannot even console ourselves with
the thought that such things belong to the remote past. Unfor-
tunately they seem to belong not only to the present, but, quite
particularly, to the future. "Homo homini lupus" is a sad yet
eternal truism. There is indeed reason enough for man to be
afraid of the impersonal forces lurking in his unconscious. We

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

are blissfully unconscious of these forces because they never, or
almost never, appear in our personal relations or under ordinary
circumstances. But if people crowd together and form a mob,
then the dynamisms of the collective man are let loose beasts
or demons that lie dormant in every person until he is part of
a mob. Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral
and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below
the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it
is activated by the formation of a mass.

24 It is, to my mind, a fatal mistake to regard the human psyche
as a purely personal affair and to explain it exclusively from a
personal point of view. Such a mode of explanation is only
applicable to the individual in his ordinary everyday occupa-
tions and relationships. If, however, some slight trouble occurs,
perhaps in the form of an unforeseen and somewhat unusual
event, instantly instinctual forces are called up, forces which
appear to be wholly unexpected, new, and strange. They can
no longer be explained in terms of personal motives, being
comparable rather to certain primitive occurrences like panics
at solar eclipses and the like. To explain the murderous out-
break of Bolshevism, for instance, as a personal father-complex
appears to me singularly inadequate.

25 The change of character brought about by the uprush of
collective forces is amazing. A gentle and reasonable being can
be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is always
inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing
could explode in us if it had not been there. As a matter of
fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there
is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a pos-
sible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach. It is
certainly a good thing to preach reason and common sense, but
what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a crowd
in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between
them because the madman and the mob are both moved by im-
personal, overwhelming forces.

26 As a matter of fact, it only needs a neurosis to conjure up a
force that cannot be dealt with by rational means. Our cancer
case shows clearly how impotent man's reason and intellect are
against the most palpable nonsense. I always advise my patients
to take such obvious but invincible nonsense as the manifesta-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

tion of a power and a meaning they have not yet understood.
Experience has taught me that it is much more effective to take
these things seriously and then look for a suitable explanation.
But an explanation is suitable only when it produces a hy-
pothesis equal to the morbid effect. Our patient is confronted
with a power of will and suggestion more than equal to anything
his consciousness can put against it. In this precarious situation
it would be bad strategy to convince him that in some incom-
prehensible way he is at the back of his own symptom, secretly
inventing and supporting it. Such a suggestion would instantly
paralyse his fighting spirit, and he would get demoralized. It is
far better for him to understand that his complex is an autono-
mous power directed against his conscious personality. More-
over, such an explanation fits the actual facts much better than
a reduction to personal motives. An apparently personal motiva-
tion does exist, but it is not made by his will, it just happens to
him.

27 When in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh's arrogance and
hybris defy the gods, they create a man equal in strength to
Gilgamesh in order to check the hero's unlawful ambition. The
very same thing has happened to our patient: he is a thinker
who has settled, or is always going to settle, the world by the
power of his intellect and reason. His ambition has at least suc-
ceeded in forging his own personal fate. He has forced every-
thing under the inexorable law of his reason, but somewhere
nature escaped and came back with a vengeance in the form of
an unassailable bit of nonsense, the cancer idea. This was the
clever device of the unconscious to keep him on a merciless and
cruel leash. It was the worst blow that could be dealt to all his
rational ideals and especially to his belief in the all-powerful
human will. Such an obsession can only occur in a person who
makes habitual misuse of reason and intellect for egotistical
power purposes.

* 8 Gilgamesh, however, escaped the vengeance of the gods. He
had warning dreams to which he paid attention. They showed
him how he could overcome his enemy. Our patient, living in
an age when the gods have become extinct and have fallen into
bad repute, also had such dreams, but he did not listen to them.
How could an intelligent man be so superstitious as to take
dreams seriouslyl The very common prejudice against dreams is

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

but one symptom of a far more serious undervaluation of the
human psyche in general. The marvellous development of sci-
ence and technics is counterbalanced by an appalling lack of
wisdom and introspection. It is true that our religion speaks of
an immortal soul; but it has very few kind words to say for the
human psyche as such, which would go straight to eternal
damnation were it not for a special act of Divine Grace. These
two important factors are largely responsible for the general
undervaluation of the psyche, but not entirely so. Older by far
than these relatively recent developments are the primitive fear
of and aversion to everything that borders on the unconscious.

29 Consciousness must have been a very precarious thing in its
beginnings. In relatively primitive societies we can still observe
how easily consciousness gets lost. One of the "perils of the
soul/' T for instance, is the loss of a soul. This is what happens
when part of the psyche becomes unconscious again. Another ex-
ample is "running amok," 8 the equivalent of "going berserk" in
Germanic saga. 9 This is a more or less complete trance-state, often
accompanied by devastating social effects. Even a quite ordinary
emotion can cause considerable loss of consciousness. Primitives
therefore cultivate elaborate forms of politeness, speaking in a
hushed voice, laying down their weapons, crawling on all fours,
bowing the head, showing the palms. Even our own forms of
politeness still exhibit a "religious" consideration of possible
psychic dangers. We propitiate fate by magically wishing one
another a good day. It is not good form to keep the left hand in
your pocket or behind your back when shaking hands. If you
want to be particularly ingratiating you use both hands. Before
people of great authority we bow with uncovered head, i.e., we
offer our head unprotected in order to propitiate the powerful
one, who might quite easily fall sudden prey to a fit of uncon-
trollable violence. In war-dances primitives can become so
excited that they may even shed blood.

3 The life of the primitive is filled with constant regard for the
ever-lurking possibility of psychic danger, and the procedures
employed to diminish the risks are very numerous. The setting
up of tabooed areas is an outward expression of this fact. The

T Frazer, Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, pp. goff.; CraWley, The Idea of the
Soul, pp. 82ff.; L6vy-Bruhl, Primitive Mentality. SFenn, Running Amok.

9 Ninck, Wodan und germanischer Schicksalsglaube*

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

innumerable taboos are delimited psychic areas which are
meticulously and fearfully observed. I once made a terrific mis-
take when I was with a tribe on the southern slopes of Mount
Elgon, in East Africa. I wanted to inquire about the ghost-
houses I frequently found in the woods, and during a palaver I
mentioned the word selelteni, meaning 'ghost' Instantly every-
body was silent and painfully embarrassed. They all looked
away from me because I had spoken aloud a carefully hushed-up
word, and had thus invited most dangerous consequences. I had
to change the subject in order to be able to continue the meet-
ing. The same men assured me that they never had dreams; they
were the prerogative of the chief and of the medicine man. The
medicine man then confessed to me that he no longer had any
dreams either, they had the District Commissioner instead.
"Since the English are in the country we have no dreams any
more," he said. "The District Commissioner knows everything
about war and diseases, and about where we have got to live."
This strange statement is based on the fact that dreams were
formerly the supreme political guide, the voice of Mungu, 'God/
Therefore it would have been unwise for an ordinary man to
suggest that he had dreams.

3 1 Dreams are the voice of the Unknown, ever threatening new
schemes, new dangers, sacrifices, warfare, and other troublesome
things. An African Negro once dreamt that his enemies had
taken him prisoner and burnt him alive. The next day he called
his relatives together and implored them to burn him. They
consented so far as to bind his feet together and put them in the
fire. He was of course badly crippled but had escaped his foes. 10

32 There are any amount of magical rites that exist for the sole
purpose of erecting a defence against the unexpected, dangerous
tendencies of the unconscious. The peculiar fact that the dream
is a divine voice and messenger and yet an unending source of
trouble does not disturb the primitive mind in the least. We
find obvious remnants of this primitive thinking in the psychol-
ogy of the Hebrew prophets. 11 Often enough they hesitate to
listen to the voice. And it was, we must admit, rather hard on a
pious man like Hosea to marry a harlot in order to obey the

10 Lvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, and Primitive Mentality, ch. 3, "Dreams,"
PP-97ff-

11 Haeussermann, Wortempfang und Symbol in der alttestamentlichen Prophetic.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

Lord's command. Since the dawn of humanity there has been a
marked tendency to limit this unruly and arbitrary "super-
natural" influence by means of definite forms and laws. And
this process has continued throughout history in the form of
a multiplication of rites, institutions, and beliefs. During the
last two thousand years we find the institution of the Christian
Church taking over a mediating and protective function be-
tween these influences and man. It is not denied in medieval
ecclesiastical writings that a divine influx may occur in dreams,
but this view is not exactly encouraged, and the Church reserves
the right to decide whether a revelation is to be considered
authentic or not. 12 In spite of the Church's recognition that

12 In his excellent treatise on dreams and their functions, Benedictus Pererius, S.J.
(De Magia; De Observatione Somniorum et de Divinatione Astrologica libri tres,
1598) says: "For God is not constrained by such laws of time, nor does he await
opportune moments for his operation; for he inspires dreams where he will, when
he will, and in whomsoever he will" (p. 147). The following passage throws an
interesting light on the relation of the Church to the problem of dreams: "For
we read in Cassian's 22nd Collation, that the old governors and directors of the
monks were well versed in seeking out and testing the causes of certain dreams"
(p. 142). Pererius classifies dreams as follows: "Many [dreams] are natural, some
are of human origin, and some are even divine" (p. 145). There are four causes
of dreams: (i) An affection of the body. (2) An affect or vehement commotion of
the mind caused by love, hope, fear, or hatred (pp. 1266.). (3) The power and
cunning of the demon, i.e. of a heathen god or the Christian devil. ("For the devil
is able to know natural effects which will needs come about at some future time
from fixed causes; he can know those things which he himself is going to bring
about at a later time; he can know things, both present and past, which are
hidden from men, and make them known to men in dreams" [p. 129]. Concern-
ing the diagnosis of demonic dreams, the author says: "It can be surmised that
dreams are sent by the devil, firstly if dreams often occur which signify future or
hidden events, knowledge whereof is advantageous not to any useful end whether
for oneself or for others, but only for the vain display of curious information, or
even for the doing of some evil act . . ." [p. 130].) (4) Dreams sent by God. Con-
cerning the signs indicating the divine nature of a dream, the author says:
". . . from the importance of the matters made known by the dream, especially
if, in the dream, those things are made known to a man of which certain knowl-
edge can come to him only by God's leave and bounty. Of such sort are those
things which in the schools of the theologians are called contingent future events;
further, the secrets of the heart which are wholly hidden from all men's under-
standing; and lastly, those highest mysteries of our faith which are known to no
man unless he be taught them by God [!] That this [is divine] is especially
declared by a certain enlightenment and moving of the spirits, whereby God so
illumines t'he mind, so acts upon the will, and so assures the dreamer of the

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

certain dreams are sent by God, she is disinclined, and even
averse, to any serious concern with dreams, while admitting that
some might conceivably contain an immediate revelation. Thus
the change of mental attitude that has taken place in recent
centuries is, from this point of view at least, not wholly unwel-
come to the Church, because it effectively discouraged the
earlier introspective attitude which favoured a serious considera-
tion of dreams and inner experiences.

credibility and authority of his dream that he so clearly recognizes and so cer-
tainly judges God to be its author that he not only desires to believe it, but must
believe it without any doubt whatsoever" (pp. 13 iff.). Since the demon, as stated
above, is also capable of producing dreams accurately predicting future events,
the author adds a quotation from Gregory the Great (Dialogorum Libri IV, cap.
48, in Migne, P.L.> vol. 77, col. 412): "Holy men discern between illusions and
revelations, the very words and images of visions, by a certain inward sensibility,
so that they know what they receive from the good spirit and what they endure
froin the deceiver. For if a man's mind were not careful in this regard, it would
plunge itself into many vanities through the deceiving spirit, who is sometimes
wont to foretell many true things, in order that he may entirely prevail to en-
snare the soul by some one single falsity" (p. 132). It seemed to be a welcome
safeguard against this uncertainty if dreams were concerned with the "highest
mysteries of our faith." Athanasius, in his biography of St. Anthony, gives us
some idea of how clever the devils are in foretelling future events. (Cf. Budge,
The Book of Paradise, I, pp. 37ff.) The same author says they sometimes appear
even in the shape of monks, singing psalms, reading the Bible aloud, and making
disturbing remarks about the moral conduct of the brethren (pp. ggff. and 47).
Pererius, however, seems to trust his own criterion, for he continues: "As there*
fore the natural light of our minds enables us clearly to discern the truth of first
principles, so that they are embraced by our assent immediately and without any
argument; so in dreams sent by God the divine light shining upon our minds
brings it about that we Understand and believe with certainty that those dreams
are true and of God/' He does not touch on the delicate question of whether
every unshakable conviction derived from a dream necessarily proves the divine
origin of the dream. He merely takes it for granted that a dream of this sort
would naturally exhibit a character consistent with the "highest mysteries of our
faith," and not perchance with those of another one. The humanist Kaspar
Peucer (in his Comrhentarius de praecipuis generibus divinationum, 1560) is fat
more definite and restrictive in this respect. He says (p. 270): "Those dreams are
of God which the sacred scriptures affirm to be sent from on high, not to every
one promiscuously, nor to those who strive after and expect revelations of their
own opinion, but to the Holy Patriarchs and Prophets by the will and judgment
of God. [Such dreams are concerned] not with light matters, or with trifles and
ephemeral things, but with Christ, the governance of the Church, with empires
and their well ordering, and other remarkable events; and to these God always
adds sure testimonies, such as the gift of interpretation and other things, by

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

33 Protestantism, having pulled down so many walls carefully
erected by the Church, immediately began to experience the
disintegrating and schismatic effect of individual revelation, As
soon as the dogmatic fence was broken down and the ritual lost
its authority, man had to face his inner experience without the
protection and guidance of dogma and ritual, which are the
very quintessence of Christian as well as of pagan religious ex-
perience. Protestantism has, in the main, lost all the finer shades
of traditional Christianity: the mass, confession, the greater part
of the liturgy, and the vicarious function of priesthood.

34 I must emphasize that this statement is not a value-judgment
and is not intended to be one. I merely state the facts. Protestant-
ism has, however, intensified the authority of the Bible as a
substitute for the lost authority of the Church. But as history
has shown, one can interpret certain biblical texts in many ways,
Nor has scientific criticism of the New Testament been very
helpful in enhancing belief in the divine character of the holy
scriptures. It is also a fact that under the influence of a so-called

which it is clear that they are not rashly to be objected to, nor are they of
natural origin, but are divinely inspired," His crypto-Calvinism is palpably mani-
fest in his words, particularly when one compares them with the natural theology
of his Catholic contemporaries. It is probable that Peucer's hint about "revela-
tions" refers to certain heretical innovations. At any rate, in the next paragraph,
where he deals with dreams of diabolical origin, he says these are the dreams
"which the devil shows nowadays to Anabaptists, and at all times to Enthusiasts
and suchlike fanatics." Pererius with more perspicacity and human understand-
ing devotes one chapter to the question "Whether it be lawful for a Christian
man to observe dreams?" (pp. i4ff.) and another to the question "To what kind
of man does it belong to interpret dreams aright?" (pp. 2452.). In the Erst he
reaches the conclusion that important dreams should be considered. I quote his
words: "Finally, to consider whether the dreams which ofttimes disturb us and
move us to evil courses are put before us by the devil, as likewise on the other
hand to ponder whether those by which we are aroused and incited to good, as
for example to celibacy, almsgiving, and entering the religious life, are sent us
by God, is the part not of a superstitious mind, but of one that is religious,
prudent, and careful and solicitous for its salvation." Only stupid people would
observe all the other futile dreams. In the second chapter, he answers that nobody
should or could interpret dreams "unless he be divinely inspired and instructed.'^
"Even so," he adds, "the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God"
(I Cor. 2:11). This statement, eminently true in itself, reserves the art of inter-
pretation to such persons as are endowed by their office with the gift of the Holy
Spirit. It is obvious, however, that a Jesuit author could not envisage a descent of
the Holy Spirit outside the Church.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

scientific enlightenment great masses of educated people have
either left the Church or become profoundly indifferent to it.
If they were all dull rationalists or neurotic intellectuals the loss
would not be regrettable. But many of them are religious
people, only incapable of agreeing with the existing forms of
belief. Otherwise, one could hardly explain the remarkable
effect of the Buchman movement on the more-or-less educated
Protestant classes. The Catholic who has turned his back on
the Church usually develops a secret or manifest leaning towards
atheism, whereas the Protestant follows, if possible, a sectarian
movement. The absolutism of the Catholic Church seems to de-
mand an equally absolute negation, whereas Protestant rela-
tivism permits of variations.

35 It may perhaps be thought that I have gone a bit too far into
the history of Christianity, and for no other purpose than to
explain the prejudice against dreams and inner experiences.
But what I have just said might have been part of my conversa-
tion with our cancer patient. I told him that it would be better
to take his obsession seriously instead of reviling it as patholog-
ical nonsense. But to take it seriously would mean acknowledg-
ing it as a sort of diagnostic statement of the fact that, in a psyche
which really existed, trouble had arisen in the form of a cancer-
like growth. "But," he will certainly ask, "what could that
growth be?" And I shall answer: "I do not know," as indeed I
do not. Although, as I mentioned before, it is surely a compensa-
tory or complementary unconscious formation, nothing is yet
known about its specific nature or about its content. It is a spon-
taneous manifestation of the unconscious, based on contents
which are not to be found in consciousness.

36 My patient is now very curious how I shall set about getting
at the contents that form the root of the obsession. I then in-
form him, at the risk of shocking him severely, that his dreams
will provide us with all the necessary information. We will take
them as if they issued from an intelligent, purposive, and, as it
were, personal source. This is of course a bold hypothesis and
at the same time an adventure, because we are going to give
extraordinary credit to a discredited entity the psychewhose
very existence is still denied by not a few contemporary psychol-
ogists as well as by philosophers. A famous anthropologist, when
I showed him my way of proceeding, made the typical remark;

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

"That's all very interesting indeed, but dangerous." Yes, I ad-
mit it is dangerous, just as dangerous as a neurosis. If you want
to cure a neurosis you have to risk something. To do something
without taking a risk is merely ineffectual, as we know only too
well. A surgical operation for cancer is a risk too, and yet it has
to be done. For the sake of better understanding I have often
felt tempted to advise my patients to think of the psyche as a
subtle body in which subtle tumours can grow. The prejudiced
belief that the psyche is unimaginable and consequently less
than air, or that it is a more or less intellectual system of logical
concepts, is so great that when people are not conscious of cer-
tain contents they assume these do not exist. They have no con-
fidence and no belief in a reliable psychic functioning outside
consciousness, and dreams are thought to be only ridiculous.
Under such conditions my proposal arouses the worst suspicions.
And indeed I have heard every argument under the sun used
against the vague spectres of dreams.

37 Yet in dreams we find, without any profound analysis, the
same conflicts and complexes whose existence can also be demon-
strated by the association test. Moreover, these complexes form
an integral part of the existing neurosis. We have, therefore,
reason to believe that dreams can give us at least as much in-
formation as the association test can about the content of a neu-
rosis. As a matter of fact, they give very much more. The symp-
tom is like the shoot above ground, yet the main plant is an
extended rhizome underground. The rhizome represents the
content of a neurosis; it is the matrix of complexes, of symptoms,
and of dreams. We have every reason to believe that dreams
mirror exactly the underground processes of the psyche. And if
we get there, we literally get at the "roots" of the disease.

3 8 As it is not my intention to go any further into the psycho-
pathology of neuroses, I propose to choose another case as an
example of how dreams reveal the unknown inner facts of the
psyche and of what these facts consist. The dreamer was another
intellectual, of remarkable intelligence and learning. He was
neurotic and was seeking my help because he felt that his neu-
rosis had become overpowering and was slowly but surely under-
mining his morale. Fortunately his intellectual integrity had not
yet suffered and he had the free use of his fine intelligence. For
this reason I set him the task of observing and recording his

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

dreams himself. The dreams were not analysed or explained to
him and it was only very much later that we began their analysis.
Thus the dreams I am going to relate have not been tampered
with at all. They represent an entirely uninfluenced natural
sequence of events. The patient had never read any psychology,
much less any analytical psychology.

39 Since the series consists of over four hundred dreams, I could
not possibly convey an impression of the whole material; but I
have published elsewhere a selection of Seventy-four dreams con-
taining motifs of special religious interest. 13 The dreamer, it
should be said, was a Catholic by education, but no longer a
practising one, nor was he interested in religious problems. He
was one of those scientifically minded intellectuals who would
be simply amazed if anybody should saddle them with religious
views of any kind. If one holds that the unconscious has a psychic
existence independent of consciousness, a case such as that of
our dreamer might be of particular interest, provided we are
not mistaken in our conception of the religious character of
certain dreams. And if one lays stress on the conscious mind
alone and does not credit the unconscious with an independent
existence, it will be interesting to find out whether or not the
dreams really derive their material from conscious contents.
Should the facts favour the hypothesis of the unconscious, one
could then use dreams as possible sources of information about
the religious tendencies of the unconscious.

4 One cannot expect dreams to speak of religion as we know it.
There are, however, two dreams among the four hundred that
obviously deal with religion. I will now give the text which the
dreatner himself had taken down:

All the houses have something theatrical about them> with
stage scenery and decorations. The name of Bernard Shaw is
mentioned. The play is supposed to take place in the distant
future. There is a notice in English and German on one of
the sets:

is "Dream Symbols of the Individuation Process." [Orig. in Eranos-Jahrbuch
A revised and expanded version of this appears in Psychology and Alchemy, as
Part IL~EDITORS,] Although the dreams cited here are mentioned in the above
publication, they are examined there from a different standpoint. Since dreams
have many aspects they can be studied from various angles.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

This is the universal Catholic Church.

It is the Church of the Lord.

All those who feel that they are the instruments of the Lord

enter.

Under this is printed in smaller letters: "The Church was
founded by Jesus and Paul" like a firm advertising its long
standing.

I say to my friend, "Come on, let's have a look at this." He
replies, "I do not see why a lot of people have to get together
when they're feeling religious/' I answer, "As a Protestant you
will never understand." A woman nods emphatic approval.
Then I see a sort of proclamation on the wall of the church.
It runs:

Soldiers!

When you feel you are under the power of the Lord, do not ad-
dress him directly. The Lord cannot be reached by words. We also
strongly advise you not to indulge in any discussions among your-
selves concerning the attributes of the Lord. It is futile., for every-
thing valuable and important is ineffable.

(Signed) Pope . . . (Name illegible)

Now we go in. The interior resembles a mosque, more par-
ticularly the Hagia Sophia: no seats wonderful effect of space;
no images^ only framed texts decorating the walls (like the
Koran texts in the Hagia Sophia). One of the texts reads "Do
not flatter your benefactor." The woman who had nodded ap-
proval bursts into tears and cries, "Then there's nothing left!"
I reply ? "I find it quite right!" but she vanishes. At first I stand
with a pillar in front of me and can see nothing. Then I change
my position and see a crowd of people. I do not belong to them
and stand alone. But they are quite clear,, so that I can see their
faces. They all say in unison, "We confess that we are under the
power of the Lord. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us." They
repeat this three times with great solemnity. Then the organ
starts to play and they sing a Bach fugue with chorale. But the
original text is omitted; sometimes there is only a sort of colora-
tura singing, then the words are repeated: "Everything else is
paper" (meaning that it does not make a living impression on

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

me). When the chorale has faded away the gemiitlich part of the
ceremony begins; it is almost like a students' party. The people
are all cheerful and equable. We move about, converse^ and
greet one another, and wine (from an episcopal seminary) is
served with other refreshments. The health of the Church is
drunk and, as if to express everybody's pleasure at the increase
in membership, a loudspeaker blares a ragtime melody with the
refrain, "Charles is also with us now." A priest explains to me:
"These somewhat trivial amusements are officially approved
and permitted. We must adapt a little to American methods.
With a large crowd such as we have here this is inevitable. But
we differ in principle from the American churches by our de-
cidedly anti-ascetic tendency." Thereupon I awake with a feel-
ing of great relief.

4 1 There are, as you know, numerous works on the phenome-
nology of dreams, but very few that deal with their psychology.
This for the obvious reason that a psychological interpretation
of dreams is an exceedingly ticklish and risky business. Freud
has made a courageous attempt to elucidate the intricacies of
dream psychology with the help of views which he gathered in
the field of psychopathology. 14 Much as I admire the boldness
of his attempt, I cannot agree either with his method or with its
results. He explains the dream as a mere facade behind which
something has been carefully hidden. There is no doubt that
neurotics hide disagreeable things, probably just as much as
normal people do. But it is a serious question whether this
category can be applied to such a normal and world-wide phe-
nomenon as the dream. I doubt whether we can assume that a
dream is something other than it appears to be. I am rather in-
clined to quote another Jewish authority, the Talmud, which
says: "The dream is its own interpretation." In other words
/ take the dream for what it is. The dream is such a difficult
and complicated thing that I do not dare to make any assump-

14 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Silberer (Der Traum, 1919) presents a
more cautious and more balanced point of view. As to the difference between
Freud's and my own views, I would refer the reader to my little essay on this
subject, "Freud and Jung: Contrasts." Further material in Two Essays on Analy-
tical Psychology, pp. i8ff.; Kranefeldt, Secret Ways of the Mind; Gerhard Adler,
Entdeckung der Seele; and Toni Wolff, "Emfiihrung in die Grundlagen der
komplexen Psychologic," in Die kulturelle Bedeutung der komplexen Psychologie.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

tions about its possible cunning or its tendency to deceive. The
dream is a natural occurrence, and there is no earthly reason
why we should assume that it is a crafty device to lead us astray.
It occurs when consciousness and will are to a large extent ex-
tinguished. It seems to be a natural product which is also found
in people who are not neurotic. Moreover, we know so little
about the psychology of the dream process that we must be more
than careful when we introduce into its explanation elements
that are foreign to the dream itself.

4% For all these reasons I hold that our dream really is speaking
of religion and that it intends to do so. Since the dream has a
coherent and well-designed structure, it suggests a certain logic
and a certain intention, that is, it has a meaningful motivation
which finds direct expression in the dream-content.

43 The first part of the dream is a serious statement in favour
of the Catholic Church. A certain Protestant point of view-
that religion is just an individual experience is discouraged by
the dreamer. The second, more grotesque part is the Church's
adaptation to a decidedly worldly standpoint, and the end is a
statement in favour of an anti-ascetic tendency which would
not and could not be backed up by the real Church. Neverthe-
less the dreamer's anti-ascetic priest makes it a matter of prin-
ciple. Spiritualization and sublimation are essentially Christian
principles, and any insistence upon the contrary would amount
to blasphemous paganism. Christianity has never been worldly
nor has it ever looked with favour on good food and wine, and
it is more than doubtful whether the introduction of jazz into
the cult would be a particular asset. The "cheerful and equable"
people who peripatetically converse with each other in more or
less Epicurean style remind one much more of an ancient philo-
sophical ideal which is rather distasteful to the contemporary
Christian. In the first and second part the importance of masses
or crowds of people is emphasized.

44 Thus the Catholic Church, though highly recommended,
appears coupled with a strange pagan point of view which is ir-
reconcilable with a fundamentally Christian attitude. The actual
irreconcilability does not appear in the dream. It is hushed up
as it were by a cosy ("gemutlich") atmosphere in which dangerous
contrasts are blurred and blended. The Protestant conception of
an individual relationship to God is swamped by mass organiza-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

tion and a correspondingly collective religious feeling. The in-
sistence on crowds and the insinuation of a pagan ideal are
remarkable parallels to things that are actually happening in
Europe today, Everybody was astonished at the pagan tendencies
of modern Germany because nobody knew how to interpret
Nietzsche's Dionysian experience. Nietzsche was but one of the
thousands and millions of Germans yet unborn in whose uncon-
scious the Teutonic cousin of Dionysus Wotan came to birth
during the Great War. 15 In the dreams of the Germans whom I
treated then I could clearly see the Wotanistic revolution com-
ing on, and in 1918 I published an article in which I pointed out
the peculiar kind of new development to be expected in Ger-
many. 16 Those Germans were by no means people who had
studied Thus Spake Zarathustra, and certainly the young people
who resurrected the pagan sacrifices of sheep knew nothing of
Nietzsche's experience. 17 That is why they called their god
Wotan and not Dionysus. In Nietzsche's biography you will find
irrefutable proof that the god he originally meant was really
Wotan, but, being a philologist and living in the seventies and
eighties of the nineteenth century, he called him Dionysus.
Looked at from a comparative point of view, the two gods have
much in common.

45 There is apparently no opposition to collective feeling, mass
religion, and paganism anywhere in the dream of my patient,
except for the Protestant friend who is soon reduced to silence.
One curious incident merits our attention, and that is the un-
known woman who at first backs up the eulogy of Catholicism
and then suddenly bursts into tears, saying: "Then there's noth-
ing left," and vanishes without returning.

15 Cf, the relation of Odin as the god of poets, seers, and raving enthusiasts, and of
Mimir, the Wise One, to Dionysus and Silenus. The word Odin has a root-connec-
tion with Gall, ouarcts, Ir. faith,, L. vales, similar to vavTLs and jucuj>ojuai. Ninck,
Wodan und germanischer Schicksalsglaube, pp. goff.

16 "The Role of the Unconscious."

17 Cf. my "Wotan" (Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1936; an abbreviated version in
the Saturday Review of Literature, Oct. 16, 1937; subsequently published in
Essays on Contemporary Events, 1947). The Wotan parallels in Nietzsche's work
are to be found In the poem "To the Unknown God" (Werke, ed. Baeumler, V, p.
457); Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans, by Thomas Common, pp. sggff., 150, and
iS^t; and the Wotan dream of 1859 in Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, Der werdende
Nietzsche, pp. 84ff.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

46 Who is this woman? To the dreamer she is a vague and un-
known person, but when he had that dream he was already well
acquainted with her as the "unknown woman" who had fre-
quently appeared in previous dreams.

47 As this figure plays a great role in men's dreams, it bears the
technical name of the "anima," 18 with reference to the fact that,
from time immemorial, man in his myths has expressed the idea
of a male and female coexisting in the same body. Such psycho-
logical intuitions were usually projected in the form of the
divine syzygy, the divine pair, or in the idea of the hermaphro-
ditic nature of the creator. 19 Edward Maitland, the biographet
of Anna Kingsford, relates in our own day an inner experience
of the bisexual nature of the Deity. 20 Then there is Hermetic
philosophy with its hermaphrodite and its androgynous inner
man, 21 the homo Adamicus^ who, "although he appears in

18 Cf. My Two Essays, Part II, ch. 2; Psychological Types, Defs. 48, 49; "Archetypes
of the Collective Unconscious'*; and "Concerning the Archetypes."

19 Cf. my "Concerning the Archetypes."

20 Maitland, Anna Kingsford, I, pp. isgff.

21 The statement about the hermaphroditic nature of the Deity in Corpus
Hermeticum, Lib. I (ed. Scott, Hermetica, I, p. 118): "For the first Mind was
bisexual/' is probably taken from Plato, Symposium, XIV. It is questionable
whether the later medieval representations of the hermaphrodite stem from
"Poimanclres" (Hermetica, I), since the hermaphrodite figure was practically un-
known in the West before the Poimander was printed by Marsilio Ficino in 1471.
It is possible, however, that one of the few scholars of those days who Understood
Greek got the idea from one of the Greek codices then extant, as for instance the
Codex Laurentianus 71, 33, the Codex Parisinus Graecus 1220, or the Codices
Vaticanus Graecus 237 and 951, all from the i4th century. There are no older
codices. The first Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino had a sensational effect.
But before that date we have the hermaphroditic symbols from the Codex
Germanicus Monacensis 598, dated 1417. It seems to me more probable that the
hermaphrodite symbol derives from Arabic or Syriac MSS. translated in the
nth or i2th century. In the old Latin "Tractatulus Avicennae," which is strongly
influenced by Arabic tradition, we find: "[The elixir] is a voluptuous serpent
impregnating itself" (Artis auriferae, I, 1593, p. 406). Although the author was a
Pseudo-Avicenna and not the authentic Ibn Sina (970-1037), he is one of the
Arabic-Latin sources for medieval Hermetic literature. We find the same passage
in "Rosinus ad Sarratantam" (Artis aurif., I, p. 309). "Rosinus" is an Arabic-Latin
corruption of "Zosimos," a Greek neo-Platonic philosopher of the 3rd century.
His treatise "Ad Sarratantam" belongs to the same class of literature, and since
the history of these texts is still shrouded in darkness, nobody can say who copied
from whom. The Turba philosophorum, Sermo LXV, a Latin text of Arabic

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

masculine form, always carries about with him Eve, or his wife,
hidden in his body/' as a medieval commentator on the Her-
metis Tractatus aureus says. 22

48 The anima is presumably a psychic representation of the
minority of female genes in a man's body. This is all the more
probable since the same figure is not to be found in the imagery
of a woman's unconscious. There is a corresponding figure, how-
ever, that plays an equivalent role, yet it is not a woman's image
but a man's. This masculine figure in a woman's psychology has
been termed the "animus." 23 One of the most typical manifesta-
tions of both figures is what has long been called "animosity."
The anima causes illogical moods, and the animus produces
irritating platitudes and unreasonable opinions. Both are fre-
quent dream-figures. As a rule they personify the unconscious
and give it its peculiarly disagreeable or irritating character.
The unconscious in itself has no such negative qualities. They
appear only when it is personified by these figures and when
they begin to influence consciousness. Being only partial per-
sonalities, they have the character either of an inferior woman
or of an inferior man hence their irritating effect. A man
experiencing this influence will be subject to unaccountable

origin, makes the same allusion: "The composite brings itself forth." (Ruska,
Turba philosophcrum, 1931, p. 165.) So far as I can judge, the first text that
definitely mentions the hermaphrodite is the "Liber de arte chymica" of the i6th
century (Artis aurif., I, pp. 5758:.). On p. 610 it says: "For that Mercurius is all
metals, male and female, and an hermaphroditic monster even in the marriage of
soul and body." Of the later literature I mention only Hieronymus Reusner,
Pandora (1588); "Splendor Solis" (Aureum vellus, 1598); Michael Maier, Symbola
aureae mensae (1617) and Atalanta fugiens (1618); J. D. Mylius, Philosophia
reformata (1622).

22 The "Tractatus aureus Hermetis" is of Arabic origin and does not belong to
the Corpus Hermeticum. Its history is unknown (first printed in Ars chemica,
1566). Dominicus Gnosius wrote a commentary on the text in his Hermetis
Trismegisti Tractatus vere Aureus de Lapide philosophici secreto (1610). On p.
101 he says: "As a shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the
sun ... so our Adamic hermaphrodite, though he appears in masculine form,
nevertheless always carries about with him Eve, or his feminine part, hidden in
his body." This commentary, together with the text, is reproduced in Manget,
Bibliotheca chemica curiosa f I (1702), pp. 40iff.

23 There is a description of both these figures in Two Essays, Part II, pp. i86ff.
See also Psychological Types, Def. 48, and Emma Jung, "Ein Beitrag zum Problem
des Animus."

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

moods, and a woman will be argumentative and produce opin-
ions that are beside the mark. 24

49 The negative reaction of the anima to the church dream indi-
cates that the dreamer's feminine side, his unconscious, disagrees
with his conscious attitude. The disagreement started with the
text on the wall: "Do not flatter your benefactor/' which the
dreamer agreed with. The meaning of the text seems sound
enough, so that one does not understand why the woman should
feel so desperate about it. Without delving further into this
mystery, we must content ourselves for the time being with the
statement that there is a contradiction in the dream and that a
very important minority has left the stage under vivid protest
and pays no more attention to the proceedings.

5 We gather, then, from the dream that the unconscious func-
tioning of the dreamer's mind has produced a pretty flat com-
promise between Catholicism and pagan joie de vivre. The
product of the unconscious is manifestly not expressing a fixed
point of view or a definite opinion, rather it is a dramatic exposi-
tion of an act of reflection. It could be formulated perhaps as
follows: "Now what about this religious business? You are a
Catholic, are you not? Is that not good enough? But asceticism-
well, well, even the church has to adapt a little movies, radio,
spiritual five o'clock tea and all that why not some ecclesiastical
wine and gay acquaintances?" But for some secret reason this
awkward mystery woman, well known from many former
dreams, seems to be deeply disappointed and quits.

5 1 I must confess that I find myself in sympathy with the anima.
Obviously the compromise is too cheap and too superficial, but
it is characteristic of the dreamer as well as of many other people
to whom religion does not matter very much. Religion was of
no concern to my patient and he certainly never expected that
it would concern him in any way. But he had come to me be-
cause of a very alarming experience. Being highly rationalistic
and intellectual he had found that his attitude of mind and his
philosophy forsook him completely in the face of his neurosis
and its demoralizing forces. He found nothing in his whole

24 Anima and animus do not only occur in negative form. They may sometimes
appear as a source of enlightenment, as messengers ( 776X01 )> an( i as mystagogues.
[Cf. Jung, Aion, par. 33 (Swiss edn., p. 34); "Psychology of the Transference," p.
293. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Weltanschauung that would help him to gain sufficient control
of himself. He was therefore very much in the situation of a
man deserted by his hitherto cherished convictions and ideals.
It is by no means extraordinary that under such conditions a
man should return to the religion of his childhood in the hope
of finding something helpful there. It was, however, not a con-
scious attempt or decision to revivify his earlier religious beliefs.
He merely dreamed it; that is, his unconscious produced a pe-
culiar statement about his religion. It is just as if the spirit and
the flesh, the eternal enemies in a Christian consciousness, had
made peace with each other in the form of a curious mitigation
of their contradictory nature. Spirituality and world liness come
together in unexpected amity. The effect is slightly grotesque
and comical. The inexorable severity of the spirit seems to be
undermined by an almost antique gaiety perfumed with wine
and roses. At all events the dream describes a spiritual and
worldly atmosphere that dulls the sharpness of a inoial conflict
and swallows up in oblivion all mental pain and distress.

52 If this was a wish-fulfilment it was surely a conscious one,
for it was precisely what the patient had already done to excess.
And he was not unconscious of this either, since wine was one
of his most dangerous enemies. The dream, on the other hand,
is an impartial statement of the patient's spiritual condition. It
gives a picture of a degenerate religion corrupted by worldliness
and mob instincts. There is religious sentimentality instead of
the numinosum of divine experience. This is the well-known
characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery. It is
readily understandable that such a religion is incapable of giv-
ing help or of having any other moral effect.

53 The over-all aspect of the dream is definitely unfavourable,
although certain other aspects of a more positive nature are
dimly visible. It rarely happens that dreams are either exclu-
sively positive or exclusively negative. As a rule one finds both
aspects, but usually one is stronger than the other. It is obvious
that such a dream provides the psychologist with enough ma-
terial to raise the problem of a religious attitude. If our dream
were the only one we possess we could hardly hope to unlock
its innermost meaning, but we have quite a number of dreams
in our series which point to a remarkable religious problem. I
never, if I can help it, interpret one dream by itself. As a rule a

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

dream belongs in a series. Since there is a continuity of con-
sciousness despite the fact that it is regularly interrupted by
sleep, there is probably also a continuity of unconscious proc-
essesperhaps even more than with the events of consciousness.
In any case my experience is in favour of the probability that
dreams are the visible links in a chain of unconscious events.
If we want to shed any light on the deeper reasons for the dream,
we must go back to the series and find out where it is located in
the long chain of four hundred dreams.

54 We find our dream wedged in between two important
dreams of an uncanny quality. The dream before reports that
there is a gathering of many people and that a peculiar ceremony
is taking place, apparently of magical character, for the purpose
of "reconstructing the gibbon." The dream after is concerned
with a similar theme the magical transformation of animals
into human beings. 23

55 Both dreams are intensely disagreeable and very alarming
to the patient. Whereas the church dream manifestly moves on
the surface and expresses opinions which in other circumstatices
could just as well have been thought consciously, these two
dreams are strange and remote in character and their emotional
effect is such that the dreamer would avoid them if possible. As
a matter of fact, the text of the second dream says: "If one runs
away, all is lost." Curiously enough, this remark coincides with
that of the unknown woman: "Then there's nothing left." The
inference to be drawn from these remarks is that the church
dream was an attempt to escape from other dream ideas of a
much deeper significance. These ideas appear in the dreams
occurring immediately before and after it.

25 [Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 1646., 1838:. EDITORS.]

2. DOGMA AND NATURAL SYMBOLS

5 6 The first of these dreams the one preceding the church
dream speaks of a ceremony whereby an ape is to be recon-
structed. To explain this point sufficiently would require too
many details. I must, therefore, restrict myself to the mere
statement that the "ape" refers to the dreamer's instinctual per-
sonality, 1 which he had completely neglected in favour of an
exclusively intellectual attitude. The result had been that his
instincts got the better of him and attacked him at times in the
form of uncontrollable outbursts. The * 'reconstruction" of the
ape means the rebuilding of the instinctual personality within
the framework of the hierarchy of consciousness. Such a recon-
struction is only possible if accompanied by important changes
in the conscious attitude. The patient was naturally afraid of
the tendencies of the unconscious, because hitherto they had
revealed themselves to him in their most unfavourable form.
The church dream that followed represents an attempt to seek
refuge from this fear in the shelter of a church religion. The
third dream, in speaking of the "transformation of animals into
human beings," obviously continues the theme of the first one;
that is, the ape is reconstructed solely for the purpose of being
transformed later into a human being. In other words, the pa-

1 [Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, par. 175 .EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

tient has to undergo an Important change through the reintegra-
tion of his hitherto split-off instinctuality, and is thus to be
made over into a new man. The modern mind has forgotten
those old truths that speak of the death of the old man and the
making of a new one, of spiritual rebirth and such-like old-
fashioned "mystical absurdities." My patient, being a scientist
of today, was more than once seized by panic when he realized
how much he was gripped by such thoughts. He was afraid he
was going mad, whereas the man of two thousand years ago
would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of
a magical rebirth and renewal of life. But our modern attitude
looks back arrogantly upon the mists of superstition and of
medieval or primitive credulity, entirely forgetting that we
carry the whole living past in the lower storeys of the skyscraper
of rational consciousness. Without the lower storeys our mind
is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous. The true
history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes but in
the living psychic organism of every individual.

57 I must admit, however, that the idea of renewal took on
shapes that could easily shock a modern mind. It is indeed diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to connect "rebirth/* as we understand
it, with the way it is depicted in the dreams. But before we
discuss the strange and unexpected transformation there hinted
at, we should turn our attention to the other manifestly religious
dream to which I alluded before.

5 8 While the church dream comes relatively early in the long
series, the following dream belongs to the later stages of the
process. 2 This is the literal text:

I come to a strange, solemn house the "House of the Gather-
ing." Many candles are burning in the background, arranged in
a peculiar pattern with four points running upward. Outside,
at the door of the house, an old man is posted. People are going
in. They say nothing and stand motionless in order to collect
themselves inwardly. The man at the door says of the visitors
to the house, "When they come out again they are cleansed"

1 go into the house myself and find I can concentrate perfectly.
Then a voice says: "What you are doing is dangerous. Religion is
not a tax to be paid so that you can rid yourself of the woman's

2 [Cf. ibid., par. 293. EBITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Cj for this image cannot be got rid of. Woe unto them who
use religion as a substitute for the other side of the soul's life;
they are in error and will be accursed. Religion is no substitute;
it is to be added to the other activities of the soul as the ultimate
completion. Out of the fulness of life shall you bring forth your
religion; only then shall you be blessed!" While the last sentence
is btfing spoken in ringing tones I hear distant music, simple
chords on an organ. Something about it reminds me of Wagner's
Fire Music. As I leave the house I see a burning mountain and
I feel: "The fire that is not put out is a holy fire" (Shaw, Saint
Joan).

59 The patient was deeply impressed by this dream. It was a
solemn and powerful experience for him, one of several which
produced a far-reaching change in his attitude to life and
humanity.

60 It is not difficult to see that this dream forms a parallel to
the church dream. Only this time the church has become a
house of solemnity and self-collection. There are no indications
of ceremonies or of any other known attributes of the Catholic
Church, with the sole exception of the burning candles, which
are arranged in a symbolic form probably derived from the
Catholic cult. 3 They form four pyramids or points, which per-
haps anticipate the final vision of the flaming mountain. The
appearance of the number four is, however, a regular feature in
the patient's dreams and plays a very important role. The holy
fire refers to Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan., as the dreaitier himself
observes. The unquenchable fire, on the other hand, is a well-
known attribute of the Deity, not only in the Old Testament,
but also as an allegoria Christi iti an uncanonical logion cited
in Origen's Homilies: 4 "Ait ipse salvator: qui iuxta me est,
iuxta ignem est, qui longe est a me, longe est a regno" (the
Saviour himself says: Whoever is tiear to me is near to the fire;
whoever is far from me is far from the kingdom). Since the time
of Heraclitus life has been conceived as a irvp &d fwp, an ever-

3 A bishop is allowed four candles for a private mass. Some of the more solemn
forms of the Mass, such as the Missa cantata, also have four. Still higher forms
have six or seven.

4 Origin, In Jererhium homiliae, XX, 3, in Migtie, P.G.j vol. 13, col, 532. Also in
James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 35.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

living fire; and as Christ calls himself 'The Life," the un-
canonical saying is quite understandable. The fire signifying
"life" fits into the frame of the dream, for it emphasizes that
"fulness of life" is the only legitimate source of religion. Thus
the four fiery points function almost as an icon denoting the
presence of the Deity or an equivalent being. In the system of
Barbelo-Gnosis, four lights surround the Autogenes (the Self-
Born, or Uncreated). 5 This strange figure may correspond to
the Monogenes of Coptic Gnosis, mentioned in the Codex
Brucianus. There too the Monogenes is characterized as a qua-
ternity symbol.

61 As I said before, the number four plays an important role
in these dreams, always alluding to an idea akin to the Pytha-
gorean tetraktys. 6

62 The quaternarium or quaternity has a long history. It ap-
pears not only in Christian iconology and mystical speculation 7
but plays perhaps a still greater role in Gnostic philosophy 8

5 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, trans, by Keble, p. 81.

6 Cf. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, where all the sources are collected,
"Four is the origin and root of eternal nature" (I, p. 291). Plato derives the human
body from the four. According to the Neoplatonists, Pythagoras himself called
the soul a square (Zeller, III, n, p. 120).

7 The "four" in Christian iconography appears chiefly in the form of the four
evangelists and their symbols, arranged in a rose, circle, or melothesia, or as a
tetramorph, as for instance in the Hortus delidarum of Herrad of Landsberg and
in works of mystical speculation. Of these I mention only: (i) Jakob Bohme, XL
Questions concerning the Soule (1647). (2) Hildegard of Bingen, Codex Luccensis,
fol. 372, and Codex Heidelbergensis, "Scivias," representations of the mystic uni-
verse; cf . Singer, Studies in the History and Method of Science. (3) The remarkable
drawings of Opicinus de Canistris in the Codex Palatinus Latinus 1993, Vatican;
cf. Salomon, Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines avignonesischen Klerikers des 14.
Jahrhunderts. (4) Heinrich Khunrath,Fom hylealischen, das ist, pri-materialischen
catholischen, oder algemeinen naturlichen Chaos (1597), pp. 204 and 281, where
he says the "Monas catholica" arises from the rotation of the "Quaternarium"
and interprets it as an image and allegory of Christ (further material in Khun-
rath, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, 1604). (5) The speculations about the
cross: "It is said . . . that the cross was made of four kinds of wood," St. Bernard,
Vitis mystica, cap. XLVI, in Migne, PJL., vol. 184, col. 752; cf. W. Meyer, Die
Qeschichte des Kreuzholzes vor Christus, p. 7. For the quaternity see also Dunbar,
Symbolism in Mediaeval Thought and Its Consummation in the Divine Comedy.

8 Cf. the systems of Isidorus, Valentinus, Marcus, and Secundus. A most instruc-
tive example is the symbolism of the Monogenes in the Codex Brucianus
(Bodleian library, Oxford, MS. Bruce 96), trans, by C. A. Baynes, A Coptic
Gnostic Treatise, pp. 59ff,, 70$.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

and from then on down through the Middle Ages until well
into the eighteenth century. 9

63 In the dream under discussion, the quaternity appears as
the most significant exponent of the religious cult created by
the unconscious. 10 The dreamer enters the "House of the Gath-
ering" alone, instead of with a friend as in the church dream.
Here he meets an old man, who had already appeared in an
earlier dream as the sage who had pointed to a particular
spot on the earth where the dreamer belonged. The old man
explains the character of the cult as a purification ritual. It is
not clear from the dream-text what kind of purification is meant,
or from what it should purify. The only ritual that actually takes
place seems to be a concentration or meditation, leading up to
the ecstatic phenomenon of the voice. The voice is a frequent
occurrence in this dream-series. It always utters an authoritative
declaration or command, either of astonishing common sense
or of profound philosophic import. It is nearly always a final
statement, usually coming toward the end of a dream, and it is,
as a rule, so clear and convincing that the dreamer finds no
argument against it. It has, indeed, so much the character of
indisputable truth that it can hardly be understood as anything
except a final and trenchant summing up of a long process of
unconscious deliberation and weighing of arguments. Fre-

9 I am thinking of the mystical speculations about the four "roots" (the rhizomata
of Empedocles), i.e., the four elements or four qualities (wet, dry, warm, cold),
peculiar to Hermetic or alchemical philosophy. Descriptions in Petrus Bonus,
Pretiosa margarita novella (1546); Joannes Pantheus, Ars transmutationis metal-
licae (1519), p. 5, based on a quaternatio; Raymund Lull, "Theorica et practica"
(Theatrum chemicum, IV, 1613, p. 174), a quaternatio elementorum and of chem-
ical processes; Michael Maier, Scrutinium chymicum (1687), symbols of the four
elements. The last-named author wrote an interesting treatise called De circulo
physico quadrato (1616). There is much the same symbolism in Mylius, Philoso-
phia reformata (1622). Pictures of the Hermetic redemption in the form of a
tetrad with symbols of the four evangelists (from Reusner's Pandora and the
Codex Germanicus Monacensis 598) are reproduced in Psychology and Alchemy,
figs. 231 and 232; quaternity symbolism, ibid., pp. 2o8ff. Further material in
Kuekelhaus, Urzahl und Gebarde. Eastern parallels in Zimmer, Kunstform und
Yoga im indischen Kultbild; Wilhelm and Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower.
The literature on the symbolism of the cross is also relevant here.

10 This sentence may sound presumptuous, for I seem to be forgetting that we
are concerned here with a single and unique dream from which no far-reaching
conclusions can be drawn. My conclusions, however, are based not on this dream
alone but on many similar experiences to which I have alluded elsewhere.

3 8

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

quently the voice issues from an authoritative figure, such as a
military commander, or the captain o a ship, or an old physi-
cian. Sometimes, as in this case, there is simply a voice coining
apparently from nowhere. It was interesting to see how this
very intellectual and sceptical man accepted the voice; often it
did not suit him at all, yet he accepted it unquestioningly, even
humbly. Thus the voice revealed itself, in the course of several
hundred carefully recorded dreams, as an important and even
decisive spokesman of the unconscious. Since this patient is by
no means the only one I have observed who exhibited the phe-
nomenon of the voice in dreams and in other peculiar states of
consciousness, I am forced to admit that the unconscious is capa-
ble at times of manifesting an intelligence and purposiveness
superior to the actual conscious insight. There can be no doubt
that this is a basic religious phenomenon, observed here in a
person whose conscious mental attitude certainly seemed most
unlikely to produce religious phenomena. I have not infre-
quently made similar observations in other cases and I must
confess that I am unable to formulate the facts in any other way.
I have often met with the objection that the thoughts which the
voice represents are no more than the thoughts of the individual
himself. That may be; but I would call a thought my own only
when / have thought it, just as I would call money my own only
when I have earned or acquired it in a conscious and legitimate
manner. If somebody gives me the money as a present, then I
shall certainly not say to my benefactor, "Thank you for my
money," although to a third person I might say afterwards:
"This is my own money." With the voice I am in a similar situa-
tion. The voice gives me certain contents, exactly as if a friend
were informing me of his ideas. It would be neither decent nor
truthful to suggest that what he says are my own ideas.
64 This is the reason why I differentiate between what I have
produced or acquired by my own conscious effort and what is
clearly and unmistakably a product of the unconscious. Someone
may object that the so-called unconscious mind is merely my
own mind and that, therefore, such a differentiation is super-
fluous. But I am not at all convinced that the unconscious mind
is merely my mind, because the term "unconscious" means that
I am not even conscious of it. As a matter of fact, the concept of
the unconscious is an assumption for the sake of convenience.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

In reality I am totally unconscious of or, in other words, I
do not know at all where the voice comes from. Not only am I
incapable of producing the phenomenon at will, I am unable to
anticipate what the voice will say. Under such conditions it
would be presumptuous to refer to the factor that produces the
voice as my unconscious or my mind. This would not be ac-
curate, to say the least. The fact that you perceive the voice in
your dream proves nothing at all, for you can also hear the
noises in the street, which you would never think of calling
your own.

6 5 There is only one condition under which you might legiti-
mately call the voice your own, and that is when you assume
your conscious personality to be a part of a whole or to be a
smaller circle contained in a bigger one. A little bank-clerk,
showing a friend around town, who points to the bank building
with the words, "And this is my bank/' is making use of the
same privilege.

66 We may suppose that human personality consists of two
things: first, consciousness and whatever this covers, and second,
an indefinitely large hinterland of unconscious psyche. So far as
the former is concerned, it can be more or less clearly defined
and delimited; but as for the sum total of human personality,
one has to admit the impossibility of a complete description or
definition. In other words, there is bound to be an illimitable
and indefinable addition to every personality, because the latter
consists of a conscious and observable part which does not con-
tain certain factors whose existence, however, we are forced to
assutne in order to explain certain observable facts. The un-
known factors form what we call the unconscious part of the
personality.

6 7 Of what those factors consist we have no idea, since we can
observe only their effects. We may assume that they are of a
psychic nature comparable to that of conscious contents, yet
there is no certainty about this. But if we suppose such a likeness
we can hardly refrain from going further. Since psychic con-
tents are conscious and perceivable only when they are asso-
ciated with an ego, the phenomenon of the voice, having a
Strongly personal character, may also issue from a centre but a
centre which is not identical with the conscious ego. Such Reason-
ing is permissible if we conceive of the ego as being subordi-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

nated to, or contained in, a supraordinate self as centre of the
total, illimitable, and indefinable psychic personality.

68 I do not enjoy philosophical arguments that amuse by their
own complications. Although rny argument may seem abstruse,
it is at least an honest attempt to formulate the observed facts.
To put it simply one could say: Since we do not know every-
thing, practically every experience, fact, or object contains
something unknown. Hence, if we speak of the totality of an
experience, the word "totality" can refer only to the conscious
part of it. As we cannot assume that our experience covers the
totality of the object, it is clear that its absolute totality must
necessarily contain the part that has not been experienced. The
same holds true, as I have mentioned, of every experience and
also of the psyche, whose absolute totality covers a greater area
than consciousness. In other words, the psyche is no exception to
the general rule that the universe can be established only so far
as our psychic organism permits.

69 My psychological experience has shown time and again that
certain contents issue from a psyche that is more complete than
consciousness. They often contain a superior analysis or insight
or knowledge which consciousness has not been able to produce.
We have a suitable word for such occurrences intuition. In
uttering this word most people have an agreeable feeling, as if
something had been settled. But they never consider that you
do not make an intuition. On the contrary, it always comes to
you; you have a hunch, it has come of itself, and you only catch
it if you are clever or quick enough.

7 Consequently, I explain the voice, in the dream of the sacred
house, as a product of the more complete personality of which
the dreamer's conscious self is a part, and I hold that this is the
reason why the voice shows an intelligence and a clarity superior
to the dreamer's actual consciousness. This superiority is the
reason for the absolute authority of the voice.

7 1 The message of the voice contains a strange criticism of the
dreamer's attitude. In the church dream, he made an attempt
to reconcile the two sides of life by a kind of cheap compromise.
As we know, the unknown woman, the anima, disagreed and left
the scene. In the present dream the voice seems to have taken
the place of the anima, making not a merely emotional protest
but a masterful statement on two kinds of religion. According

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION t WEST

to this statement, the dreamer is inclined to use religion as
a substitute for the "woman's image," as the text says. The
"woman" refers to the anima. This is borne out by the next
sentence, which speaks of religion being used as a substitute for
"the other side of the soul's life." The anima is the "other side,"
as I explained before. She is the representative of the female
minority hidden below the threshold of consciousness, that is to
say, in the unconscious. The criticism, therefore, would read as
follows: "You try religion in order to escape from your uncon-
scious. You use it as a substitute for a part of your soul's life.
But religion is the fruit and culmination of the completeness of
life, that is, of a life which contains both sides."

72 Careful comparison with other dreams of the same series
shows unmistakably what the "other side" is. The patient always
tried to evade his emotional needs. As a matter of fact he was
afraid they might get him into trouble, for instance into mar-
riage, and into other responsibilities such as love, devotion,
loyalty, trust, emotional dependence, and general submission to
the soul's needs. All this had nothing to do with science or an
academic career; moreover, the word "soul" was nothing but
an intellectual obscenity, not fit to be touched with a barge pole.

73 The "mystery" of the anima is the mysterious allusion to
religion. This was a great puzzle to my patient, who naturally
enough knew nothing of religion except as a creed. He also
knew that religion can be a substitute for certain awkward emo-
tional demands which one might circumvent by going to church.
The prejudices of our age are visibly reflected in the dreamer's
apprehensions. The voice, on the other hand, is unorthodox,
indeed shockingly unconventional: it takes religion seriously,
puts it on the very apex of life, a life containing "both sides,"
and thus upsets his most cherished intellectual and rationalistic
prejudices. This was such a revolution that my patient wa$ often
afraid he would go crazy. Well, I should say that weknowing
the average intellectual of today and yesterday can easily sym-
pathize with his predicament. To take the "woman's image"
in other words, the unconscious seriously into account, what a
blow to enlightened common sense! n

11 Cf. the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). This book is supposed to have been
written by a monk of the i5th century. It is an excellent example of an anima-
romance. [Fierz-David's study The Dream of Poliphilo treats it as such. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

74 I began his personal treatment only after he had observed
the first series of about three hundred and fifty dreams. Then I
got the whole backwash of his upsetting experiences. No won-
der he wanted to run away from his adventure! But, fortunately,
the man had religio, that is, he "carefully took account of" his
experience and he had enough mo-ris, or loyalty to his experi-
ence, to enable him to hang on to it and continue it. He had the
great advantage of being neurotic and so, whenever he tried to
be disloyal to his experience or to deny the voice, the neurotic
condition instantly came back. He simply could not "quench
the fire" and finally he had to admit the incomprehensibly
numinous character of his experience. He had to confess that the
unquenchable fire was "holy." This was the sine qua non of
his cure.

75 One might, perhaps, consider this case an exception inasmuch
as fairly complete human beings are exceptions. It is true that
an overwhelming majority of educated people are fragmentary
personalities and have a lot of substitutes instead of the genuine
goods. But being like that meant a neurosis for this man, and it
means the same for a great many other people too. What is ordi-
narily called "religion" is a substitute to such an amazing degree
that I ask myself seriously whether this kind of "religion,"
which I prefer to call a creed, may not after all have an impor-
tant function in human society. The substitute has the obvious
purpose of replacing immediate experience by a choice of suit-
able symbols tricked out with an organized dogma and ritual.
The Catholic Church maintains them by her indisputable
authority, the Protestant "church" (if this term is still applica-
ble) by insistence on belief in the evangelical message. So long
as these two principles work, people are effectively protected
against immediate religious experience. 12 Even if something of
the sort should happen to them, they can refer to the Church,
for she would know whether the experience came from God
or from the devil, and whether it is to be accepted or rejected.

76 In my profession I have encountered many people who have
had immediate experience and who would not and could not
submit to the authority of ecclesiastical decision. I had to go

12 Ecclesiastical vestments are not for adornment only, they also serve to protect
the officiating priest. "Fear of God" is no groundless metaphor, for at the back of
it there is a very real phenomenology. Cf. Exodus 20: i8f.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

with them through the crises of passionate conflicts, through the
panics of madness, through desperate confusions and depressions
which were grotesque and terrible at the same time, so that I
am fully aware of the extraordinary importance of dogma and
ritual, at least as methods of mental hygiene. If the patient is a
practising Catholic, I invariably advise him to confess and to
receive communion in order to protect himself from immediate
experience, which might easily prove too much for him, With
Protestants it is usually not so easy, because dogma and ritual
have become so pale and faint that they have lost their efficacy to
a very great extent. There is also, as a rule, no confession, and
the clergy share the common dislike of psychological problems
and also, unfortunately, the common ignorance of psychology.
The Catholic "director of conscience" often has infinitely more
psychological skill and insight. Protestant parsons, moreover,
have gone through a scientific training at a theological faculty
which, with its critical spirit, undermines naivete of faith,
whereas the powerful historical tradition in a Catholic priest's
training is apt to strengthen the authority of the institution.

77 As a doctor I might, of course, espouse a so-called "scientific"
creed, holding that the contents of a neurosis are nothing but
repressed infantile sexuality or will to power. By thus depreci-
ating these contents, it would be possible, up to a point, to
shield a number of patients from, the risk of immediate experi-
ence. But I know that this theory is only partially true, which
means that it formulates only certain aspects of the neurotic
psyche. And I cannot tell my patients what I myself do not fully
believe.

78 Now people may ask me: "But if you tell your practising
Catholic to go to the priest and confess, you are telling him
something you do not believe" that is, assuming that I am a
Protestant.

79 In order to answer this critical question I must first of all
explain that, if I can help it, I never preach my belief. If askeci
I shall certainly stand by my convictions, but these do not go
beyond what I consider to be my actual knowledge. I believe
only what I know. Everything else is hypothesis and beyond that
I can leave a lot of things to the Unknown. They do not bother
me. But they would begip. to bother me, I am sure, if I felt that
I ought to know about them, If, therefore, a patient is convinced,

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

of the exclusively sexual origin of his neurosis, I would not dis-
turb him in his opinion because I know that such a conviction,
particularly if it is deeply rooted, is an excellent defence against
an onslaught of immediate experience with its terrible am-
biguity. So long as such a defence works I shall not break it
down, since I know that there must be cogent reasons why the
patient has to think in such a narrow circle. But if his dreams
should begin to destroy the protective theory, I have to support
the wider personality, as I have done in the case of the dream
described. In the same way and for the same reason I support
the hypothesis of the practising Catholic while it works for him.
In either case, I reinforce a means of defence against a grave
risk, without asking the academic question whether the defence
is an ultimate truth. I am glad when it works and so long as
it works.

80 With our patient, the Catholic defence had broken down
long before I ever touched the case. He would have laughed at
me if I had advised him to confess or anything of that sort, just
as he laughed at the sexual theory, which he had no use for
either. But I always let him see that I was entirely on the side of
the voice, which I recognized as part of his future greater per-
sonality, destined to relieve him of his one-sidedness.

81 For a certain type of intellectual mediocrity characterized by
enlightened rationalism, a scientific theory that simplifies mat-
ters is a very good means of defence because of the tremendous
faith modern man has in anything which bears the label "scien-
tific." Such a label sets your mind at rest immediately, almost
as well as Roma locuta causa finita: "Rome has spoken, the
matter is settled." In itself any scientific theory, no matter how
subtle, has, I think, less value from the standpoint of psycho-
logical truth than religious dogma, for the simple reason that a
theory is necessarily highly abstract and exclusively rational,
whereas dogma expresses an irrational whole by means of im-
agery. This guarantees a far better rendering of an irrational
fact like the psyche. Moreover, dogma owes its continued exist-
ence and its form on the one hand to so-called "revealed" or
immediate experiences of the "Gnosis" 13 for instance, the God-
man, the Cross, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception,

13 Gnosis, as a special kind of knowledge, should not be confused with. "Gnosti-
cism."

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the ceaseless
collaboration of many minds over many centuries. It may not
be quite clear why I call certain dogmas "immediate experi-
ences/' since in itself a dogma is the very thing that precludes
immediate experience. Yet the Christian images I have men-
tioned are not peculiar to Christianity alone (although in Chris-
tianity they have undergone a development and intensification
of meaning not to be found in any other religion). They occur
just as often in pagan religions, and besides that they can reap-
pear spontaneously in all sorts of variations as psychic phenom-
ena, just as in the remote past they originated in visions, dreams,
or trances. Ideas like these are never invented. They came into
being before man had learned to use his mind purposively. Be-
fore man learned to produce thoughts, thoughts came to him.
He did not think he perceived his mind functioning. Dogma
is like a dream, reflecting the spontaneous and autonomous ac-
tivity of the objective psyche, the unconscious. Such an expres-
sion of the unconscious is a much more efficient means of defence
against further immediate experiences than any scientific theory.
The theoi~y has to disregard the emotional values of the experi-
ence. The dogma, on the other hand, is extremely eloquent in
just this respect. One scientific theory is soon superseded by
another. Dogma lasts for untold centuries. The suffering God-
Man may be at least five thousand years old and the Trinity is
probably even older.

Dogma expresses the soul more completely than a scientific
theory, for the latter gives expression to and formulates the
conscious mind alone. Furthermore, a theory can do nothing
except formulate a living thing in abstract terms. Dogma, on the
contrary, aptly expresses the living process of the unconscious
in the form of the drama of repentance, sacrifice, and redemp-
tion. It is rather astonishing, from this point of view, that the
Protestant schism could not have been avoided. But since
Protestantism became the creed of the adventurous Germanic
tribes with their characteristic curiosity, acquisitiveness, and
recklessness, it seems possible that their peculiar nature was un-
able to endure the peace of the Church, at least not for any
length o time. It looks as if they were not yet advanced enough
to suffer a process of salvation and to submit to a deity who
was made visible in the magnificent structure of the Church.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

There was, perhaps, too much of the Imperium Romanum or
of the Pax Romana in the Church too much, at least, for their
energies, which were and still are insufficiently domesticated.
It is quite likely that they needed an unmitigated and less con-
trolled experience of God, as often happens to adventurous and
restless people who are too youthful for any form of conserva-
tism or domestication. They therefore did away with the inter-
cession of the Church between God and man, some more and
some less. With the demolition of protective walls, the Protes-
tant lost the sacred images that expressed important unconscious
factors, together with the ritual which, from time immemorial,
has been a safe way of dealing with the unpredictable forces of
the unconscious. A vast amount of energy was thus liberated and
instantly went into the old channels of curiosity and acquisitive-
ness. In this way Europe became the mother of dragons that
devoured the greater part of the earth.

83 Since those days Protestantism has become a hotbed of
schisms and, at the same time, of rapid advances in science and
technics which cast such a spell over man's conscious mind that
it forgot the unpredictable forces of the unconscious. The catas-
trophe of the first World War and the extraordinary manifesta-
tions of profound spiritual malaise that came afterwards were
needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the
white man's mind. Before the war broke out in 1914 we were
all quite certain that the world could be righted by rational
means. Now we behold the amazing spectacle of states taking
over the age-old totalitarian claims of theocracy, which are in-
evitably accompanied by suppression of free opinion. Once more
we see people cutting each other's throats in support of childish
theories of how to create paradise on earth. It is not very diffi-
cult to see that the powers of the underworld not to say of hell
which in former times were more or less successfully chained up
in a gigantic spiritual edifice where they could be of some use,
are now creating, or trying to create, a State slavery and a State
prison devoid of any mental or spiritual charm. There are not a
few people nowadays who are convinced that mere human rea-
son is not entirely up to the enormous task of putting a lid on
the volcano.

84 This whole development is fate. I would not lay the blame
either on Protestantism or on the Renaissance. But one thing is

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

certainthat modem man, Protestant or otherwise, has lost the
protection of the ecclesiastical walls erected and reinforced so
carefully since Roman days, and because of this loss has ap-
proached the zone of world-destroying and world-creating fire.
Life has become quickened and intensified. Our world is shot
through with waves of uneasiness and fear.

8 5 Protestantism was, and still is, a great risk and at the same
time a great opportunity. If it goes on disintegrating as a church,
it must have the effect of stripping man of all his spiritual safe-
guards and means of defence against immediate experience of
the forces waiting for liberation in the unconscious. Look at all
the incredible savagery going on in our so-called civilized world:
it all comes from human beings and the spiritual condition they
are in! Look at the devilish engines of destruction! They are
invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable, re-
spectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when
the whole thing blows up and an indescribable hell of destruc-
tion is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply hap-
pens, and yet it is all man-made. But since everybody is blindly
convinced that he is nothing more than his own extremely un-
assuming and insignificant conscious self, which performs its
duties decently and earns a moderate living, nobody is aware
that this whole rationalistically organized conglomeration we
call a state or a nation is driven on by a seemingly impersonal,
invisible but terrifying power which nobody and nothing can
check. This ghastly power is mostly explained as fear of the
neighbouring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a
malevolent fiend. Since nobody is capable of recognizing just
where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious,
he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbour, and
thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the
most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that he is quite right. All
one's neighbours are in the grip of some uncontrolled and un-
controllable fear, just like oneself. In lunatic asylums it is a well-
known fact that patients are far more dangerous when suffering
from fear than when moved by rage or hatred.

86 The Protestant is left to God alone. For him there is no con^
fession, no absolution, no possibility of an expiatory opus
divinum of any kind. He has to digest his sins by himself; and,
because the absence of a suitable ritual has put it beyond bis

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

reach, he is none too sure of divine grace. Hence the present
alertness of the Protestant conscience and this bad conscience
has all the disagreeable characteristics of a lingering illness
which makes people chronically uncomfortable. But, for this
very reason, the Protestant has a unique chance to make himself
conscious of sin to a degree that is hardly possible for a Catholic
mentality, as confession and absolution are always at hand to
ease excess of tension. The Protestant, however, is left to his
tensions, which can go on sharpening his conscience. Con-
science, and particularly a bad conscience, can be a gift from
heaven, a veritable grace if used in the interests of the higher
self-criticism. And self-criticism, in the sense of an introspective,
discriminating activity, is indispensable in any attempt to under-
stand your own psychology. If you have done something that
puzzles you and you ask yourself what could have prompted you
to such an action, you need the sting of a bad conscience and its
discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of
your behaviour. It is only then that you can see what motives are
governing your actions. The sting of a bad conscience even
spurs you on to discover things that were unconscious before,
and in this way you may be able to cross the threshold of the
unconscious and take cognizance of those impersonal forces
which make you an unconscious instrument of the wholesale
murderer in man. If a Protestant survives the complete loss of
his church and still remains a Protestant, that is to say a man
who is defenceless against God and no longer shielded by walls
or communities, he has a unique spiritual opportunity for
immediate religious experience.

87 I do not know whether I have succeeded in conveying what
the experience of the unconscious meant to my patient. There
is, however, no objective criterion by which such an experience
can be valued. We have to take it for what it is worth to the per-
son who has the experience. Thus you may be impressed by the
fact that the apparent futility of certain dreams should mean
something to an intelligent person. But if you cannot accept
what he says, or if you cannot put yourself in his place, you
should not judge his case. The genius religiosus is a wind that
bloweth where it listeth. There is no Archimedean point from
which to judge, since the psyche is indistinguishable from its
manifestations. The psyche is the object of psychology, and

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

fatally enough also its subject. There is no getting away from
this fact.

The few dreams I have chosen as examples of what I call
"immediate experience" certainly look very insignificant to the
unpractised eye. They are not spectacular, and are only modest
witnesses to an individual experience. They would cut a better
figure if I could present them in their sequence, together with
the wealth of symbolic material that was brought up in the
course of the entire process. But even the sum total of the dreams
in the series could not compare in beauty and expressiveness
with any part of a traditional religion. A dogma is always the
result and fruit of many minds and many centuries, purified of
all the oddities, shortcomings, and flaws of individual experi-
ence. But for all that, the individual experience, by its very pov-
erty, is immediate life, the warm red blood pulsating today. It is
more convincing to a seeker after truth than the best tradition.
Immediate life is always individual since the carrier of life is
the individual, and whatever emanates from the individual is in
a way unique, and hence transitory and imperfect, particularly
when it comes to spontaneous psychic products such as dreams
and the like. No one else will have the same dreams, although
many have the same problem. But just as no individual is differ-
entiated to the point of absolute uniqueness, so there are no in-
dividual products of absolutely unique quality. Even dreams are
made of collective material to a very high degree, just as, in the
mythology and folklore of different peoples, certain motifs re-
peat themselves in almost identical form. I have called these
motifs "archetypes," 14 and by this I mean forms or images of a
collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as
constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous,
individual products of unconscious origin. The archetypal mo-
tifs presumably derive from patterns of the human mind that
are transmitted not only by tradition and migration but also by
heredity. The latter hypothesis is indispensable, since even
complicated archetypal images can be reproduced spontane-
ously without there being any possibility of direct tradition.

The theory of preconscious primordial ideas is by no means
my own invention, as the term "archetype," which stems from

14 Cf. Psychological Types, Def. 26. [Also "On the Nature of the Psyche" (1954/55
edn., pp. 4236:.). EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

the first centuries of our era, proves. 15 With special reference to
psychology we find this theory in the works of Adolf Bastian 16
and then again in Nietzsche. 17 In French literature Hubert and
Mauss, 18 and also Levy-Bruhl, 19 mention similar ideas. I only
gave an empirical foundation to the theory of what were for-
merly called primordial or elementary ideas, "categories" or
"habitudes directrices de la conscience/' "representations col-
lectives," etc., by setting out to investigate certain details.
9 In the second of the dreams discussed above, we met with an
archetype which I have not yet considered. This is the peculiar
arrangement of the burning candles in four pyramid-like points.
The arrangement emphasizes the symbolic importance of the
number four by putting it in place of the altar or iconostasis
where one would expect to find the sacred images. Since the
temple is called the "House of the Gathering," we may assume
that this character is expressed if the image or symbol appears

15 The term "archetypus" is used by Cicero, Pliny, and others. It appears in the
Corpus Hermeticum, Lib. I (Scott, Hermetica, I, p. 116, 8a) as a definitely philo-
sophical concept: "Thou knowest in thy mind the archetypal form [ro fapxtrvKov
eldos], the beginning before the beginning, the unbounded."

16 Das Bestandige in den Menschenrassen, p. 75; Die Vorstellungen von der
Seele, p. 306; Der Volkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen;
Ethnische Elementargedanken in der Lehre vom Menschen.

I? "In sleep and in dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier human-
ity. ... I mean, as a man now reasons in dreams, so humanity also reasoned
for many thousands of years when awake: the first cause which occurred to the
mind as an explanation of anything that required explanation was sufficient and
passed for truth. . . . This atavistic element in man's nature continues to mani-
fest itself in our dreams, for it is the foundation upon which the higher reason
has developed and still develops in every individual. Dreams carry us back to
remote conditions of human culture and afford us a ready means of understand-
ing it better." Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human, I, pp. 24-25, trans, by
Zimmern and Cohn, modified.

18 Hubert and Mauss, Melanges d'Histoire des Religions, p. xxix: "Constantly
set before us in language, though not necessarily explicit in it, ... the cate-
gories . . . generally exist rather under the form of habits that guide conscious-
ness, themselves remaining unconscious. The notion of mana is one of these
principles; it is a datum of language; it is implied in a whole series of judgments
and reasonings concerned with attributes that are those of mana. We have de-
scribed mana as a category, but it is a category not confined to primitive thought;
and today, in a weakened degree, it is still the primal form that certain other
categories which always function in our minds have covered over: those of sub-
stance, cause . . ." etc.

19 Lvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

in the place of worship. The tetraktys to use the Pythagorean
termdoes indeed refer to an "inner gathering," as our
patient's dream clearly demonstrates. The symbol appears in
other dreams, usually in the form of a circle divided into four
or containing four main parts. In other dreams of the same series
it takes the form of an undivided circle, a flower, a square place
or room, a quadrangle, a globe, a clock, a symmetrical garden
with a fountain in the centre, four people in a boat, in an aero-
plane, or at a table, four chairs round a table, four colours, a
wheel with eight spokes, an eight-rayed star or sun, a round hat
divided into eight parts, a bear with four eyes, a square prison
cell, the four seasons, a bowl containing four nuts, the world
clock with a disc divided into 4X8 = 32 partitions, and so on. 20
9 1 These quaternity symbols occur no less than seventy-one
times in a series of four hundred dreams. 21 My case is no excep-
tion in this respect. I have observed many cases where the num-
ber four occurred and it always had an unconscious origin, that
is, the dreamer got it first from a dream and had no idea of its
meaning, nor had he ever heard of the symbolic importance of
the number four. It would of course be a different thing with the
number three, since the Trinity represents a symbolic number
known to everybody. But for us, and particularly for a modern
scientist, four conveys no more than any other number. Number
symbolism and its venerable history is a field of knowledge com-
pletely outside our dreamer's intellectual interests. If under
such conditions dreams insist upon the importance of four, we
have every right to call its origin an unconscious one. The
numinous character of the quaternity is obvious in the second
dream. From this we must conclude that it points to a meaning
which we have to call "sacred." Since the dreamer was unable to
trace this peculiar character to any conscious source, I apply a
comparative method in order to elucidate the meaning of the
symbolism. It is of course impossible to give a complete account
of this procedure here, so I must restrict myself to the barest
hints.

20 For the psychology of the tetraktys, see The Secret of the Golden Flower, pp.
96-105; Two Essays, Part II, pp. 225$.; and Hauer, "Symbole und Erfahrung des
Selbstes in der Indo-Arischen Mystik."

21 [A selection of these dreams is to be found in Psychology and Alchemy, pp.
47ff. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

92 Since many unconscious contents seem to be remnants of
historical states of mind, we need only go back a few hundred
years in order to reach the conscious level that forms the paral-
lel to our dreams. In our case we step back not quite three hun-
dred years and find ourselves among scientists and natural phi-
losophers who were seriously discussing the enigma of squaring
the circle. 22 This abstruse problem was itself a psychological pro-
jection of something much older and completely unconscious.
But they knew in those days that the circle signified the Deity:
"God is an intellectual figure whose centre is everywhere and
the circumference nowhere," 23 as one of these philosophers said,
repeating St. Augustine. A man as introverted and introspective
as Emerson 24 could hardly fail to touch on the same idea and
likewise quote St. Augustine. The image of the circleregarded
as the most perfect form since Plato's Timaeus, the prime au-
thority for Hermetic philosophywas assigned to the most per-
fect substance, to the gold, also to the anima mundi or anima
media natum, and to the first created light. And because the
macrocosm, the Great World, was made by the creator "in a
form round and globose," 25 the smallest part of the whole, the
point, also possesses this perfect nature. As the philosopher says :
"Of all shapes the simplest and most perfect is the sphere, which
rests in a point." 26 This image of the Deity dormant and

22 There is an excellent presentation of the problem, in Maier, De circulo (1616),

23 [On the source of this saying, see par, 229, n. 6, below. EDITORS.]

24 Cf. his essay "Circles" (Essays, Everyman edn., p. 167).

25 Plato, Timaeus, 7; Steeb, Coelum Sephiroticum Hebraeorum (1679), p. 15.

26 Steeb, p. 19. Maier (De circulo, p. 27) says: "The circle is a symbol of eternity
or an indivisible point." Concerning the "round element," see Turba philoso-
phorum, Sermo XLI (ed, Ruska, p. 148), where the "rotundum which turns
copper into four" is mentioned. Ruska says there is no similar symbol in the
Greek sources. This is not quite correct, since we find a o-rotxelov a-rpoyytiKov
(round element) in the -rrept opyavuv of Zosimos (Berthelot, Alch. grecs, III, xlix,
i). The same symbolism may also occur in his -rofyjua (Berthelot, III, v bis), in
the form of the irepiyKoviffukvov, which Berthelot translates as "objet circulaire."
(The correctness of this translation, however, is doubtful.) A better parallel might
be Zosimos' "omega element." He himself describes it as "round" (Berthelot, III,
xlix, i).

The idea of the creative point in matter is mentioned in Sendivogius, "Novum
lumen" (Musaeum hermeticum, 1678, p. 559; cf. The Hermetic Museum Restored
and Enlarged, trans, by A. E. Waite, II, p. 89: "For there is in -every body a.
centre, the seeding-place or spermatic point." This point is a "point born of
God" (p. 59). Here we encounter the doctrine of the "panspermia" (all-embracing

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

concealed in matter was what the alchemists called the original
chaos, or the earth of paradise, or the round fish in the sea, 27 or
the egg, or simply the rotundum. That round thing was in pos-
session of the magical key which unlocked the closed doors of
matter. As is said in the Timaeus, only the demiurge, the perfect
being, is capable of dissolving the tetraktys, the embrace of the
four elements. 28 One of the great authorities since the thirteenth
century, the Turba philosophorum,, says that the rotundum can
dissolve copper into four. 29 Thus the much-sought-for aurum
philosophicum was round. 30 Opinions were divided as to the
procedure for procuring the dormant demiurge. Some hoped to
lay hold of him in the form of a prima materia containing a
particular concentration or a particularly suitable variety of this
substance. Others endeavoured to produce the round substance
by a sort of synthesis, called the coniunctio; the anonymous
author of the Rosarium philosophorum says: "Make a round
circle of man and woman, extract therefrom a quadrangle and
from it a triangle. Make the circle round, and you will have the
Philosophers' Stone." 31

seed-bed), about which Athanasius Kircher, S.J, (Mundus subterraneus, 1678, II,
p. 347) says: "Thus from the holy words of Moses ... it appears that God, the
creator of all things, in the beginning created from nothing a certain Matter,
which we not unfittingly call Chaotic . . . within which something . . . confused lay
hidden as if in a kind of panspermia ... as though he brought forth afterward
from the underlying material all things which had already been fecundated and
incubated by the divine Spirit. . . . But he did not forthwith destroy the
Chaotic Matter, but willed it to endure until the consummation of the world,
as at the first beginning of things so to this very day, a panspermia replete with
all things. . . ." These ideas lead us back to the "descent" or "fall of the deity"
in the Gnostic systems. Cf. Bussell, Religious Thought and Heresy in the Middle
Ages, pp. 55gff.; Reitzenstein, Poimandres, p. 50; Mead, Pistis Sophia, pp. $6ff.,
and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 470.

27 "There is in the sea a round fish, lacking bones and sinews, and it hath in it-
self a fatness" (the humidum radicalethe anima mundi imprisoned in matter).
From "Allegoriae super Turbam," Art. aurif., I (1593), p. 141.

28 Timaeus 7. 29 See above, n. 22.

so "For as the heaven which is visible is round in form and motion ... so is the
Gold" (Maier, De circulo, p. 39).

31 Rosarium philosophorum (Art. aurif., II, p. 261). This treatise is ascribed to
Petrus Toletanus, who lived in Toledo about the middle of the 13th century. He
is said to have been either an older contemporary or a brother of Arnold of Villa-
nova, the famous physician and philosopher. The present form of the Rosarium,
based on the first printing of 1550, is a compilation and probably does not date

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

93 This marvellous stone was symbolized as a perfect living be-
ing of hermaphroditic nature corresponding to the Empedoclean
cr^cupos, the euSaijuo^oraros Ot6$ and all-round bisexual being in
Plato. 32 As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, the
lapis was compared by Petrus Bonus to Christ, as an allegoria
Christi. 3B In the Aurea horn, a Pseudo-Thomist tract from the
thirteenth century, the mystery of the stone is rated even higher
than the mysteries of the Christian religion. 34 I mention these
facts merely to show that the circle or globe containing the four
was an allegory of the Deity for not a few of our learned fore-
fathers.

94 From the Latin treatises it is also evident that the latent
demiurge, dormant and concealed in matter, is identical with
the so-called homo philosophicus, the second Adam. 35 He is the
spiritual man, Adam Kadmon, often identified with Christ.
Whereas the original Adam was mortal, because he was made of
the corruptible four elements, the second Adam is immortal,
because he consists of one pure and incorruptible essence. Thus
Pseudo-Thomas says: "The Second Adam passed from the pure
elements into eternity. Therefore, since he consists of a simple
and pure essence, he endures forever." 36 The same treatise quotes
a Latinized Arabic author called Senior, a famous authority

back further than the i5th century, though certain parts may have originated
early in the igth century. 32 Symposium XIV.

33 Petrus Bonus in Janus Lacinius, Pretiosa margarita novella (1546). For the
allegoria Christi, see Psychology and Alchemy, "The Lapis-Christus Parallel."
S^Beati Thomae de Aquino Aurora sive Aurea hora. Complete text in the rare
printing of 1625: Harmoniae Inperscrutabilis Chymico-philosophicae sive
Philosophorum Antiquorum Consentientium Decas I (Francofurti apud Conrad
Eifridum. Anno MDCXXV). (British Museum 1033 d.u.) The interesting part of
this treatise is the first part, "Tractatus parabolarum," which was omitted on
account of its "blasphemous" character from the printings of Artis auriferae in
1572 and 1593. In the so-called Codex Rhenovacensis (Zurich Central Library),
about four chapters of the "Parabolarum" are missing. The Codex Parisinus
Fond. Lat. 14006 (Bibliotheque nationale) contains a complete text.

35 A good example is the commentary of Gnosius on the "Tractatus aureus
Hermetis," reproduced in Theatr. chern., IV, pp. Sysff., and in Manget, Bibl
chem. f I, pp. 40off.

36 In Aurea hora (see n. 34). Zosimos (Berthelot, Alch. grecs, III, xlix, 4-5), quot-
ing from a Hermetic writing, says that 6 0eou vlos TravTajevofievos was Adam or
Thoth, who was made of the four elements and the four cardinal points. Cf.
Psychology and Alchemy f pp. 3485.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

throughout the Middle Ages, as saying: "There is one substance
which never dies, because it abides in continued increase," and
Interprets this substance as the second Adam. 37

95 It is clear from these quotations that the round substance
searched for by the philosophers was a projection very similar
to our own dream symbolism. We have historical documents
which prove that dreams, visions, and even hallucinations were
often mixed up with the great philosophic opus. 38 Our fore-
fathers, being even more naively constituted than ourselves, pro-
jected their unconscious contents directly into matter. Matter,
however, could easily take up such projections, because at that
time it was a practically unknown and incomprehensible entity.
And whenever man encounters something mysterious he pro-
jects his own assumptions into it without the slightest self-
criticism. But since chemical matter nowadays is something we
know fairly well, we can no longer project as freely as our ances-
tors. We have, at last, to admit that the tetraktys is something
psychic; and we do not yet know whether, in a more or less dis-
tant future, this too may not prove to be a projection. For the
time being we must be satisfied with the fact that an idea of God
which is entirely absent from the conscious mind of modern man
returns in a form known consciously three hundred or four hun-
dred years ago.

9 6 I do not need to emphasize that this piece of history was com-
pletely unknown to my dreamer. One could say with the classical
poet: "Naturam expelles furca tamen usque recurret" (Drive
out nature with a pitchfork and she always turns up again). 39

97 The idea of those old philosophers was that God manifested
himself first in the creation of the four elements. They were sym-
bolized by the four partitions of the circle. Thus we read in a
Coptic treatise of the Codex Brucianus 40 concerning the Only-
Begotten (Monogenes or Anthropos):

This same is he who dwelleth in the Monad, which is in the
Setheus [creator], and which came from the place of which none can
say where it is. ... From Him it is the Monad came, in the manner
of a ship, laden with all good things, and in the manner of a field,
filled or planted with every kind of tree, and in the manner of a city,

37 In Aurea hora. For the full Latin title, see n. 34 above.

38 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pp. j>35ff. 39 Horace, Epistles, I, x, 24.
40 Baynes, ed., A Coptic Gnostic Treatise, pp. 22, 89, 94.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

filled with all races of mankind . . . And to its veil which surround-
eth it in the manner of a defence there are twelve Gates . . . This,
same is the Mother-City (^rpoxoXts) of the Only-Begotten.

In another place the Anthropos himself is the city and his mem-
bers are the four gates. The Monad is a spark of light (<rmv&ip) f
an atom of the Deity. The Monogenes is thought of as standing
upon a rerpaTefa, a platform supported by four pillars, corre-
sponding to the Christian quaternarium of the Evangelists, or
to the Tetramorph, the symbolic steed of the Church, composed
of the symbols of the four evangelists: the angel, eagle, ox or
calf, and lion. The analogy with the New Jerusalem of the Apoc-
alypse is obvious.

98 The division into four, the synthesis of the four, the miracu-
lous appearance of the four colours, and the four stages of the
work nigredo, dealbatio, rubefactio, and citrinitasare con-
stant preoccupations of the old philosophers. 41 Four symbolizes
the parts, qualities, and aspects of the One. But why should my
patient recapitulate these old speculations?

99 I do not know why he should. I only know that this is not an
isolated case; many others under my observation or under that
of my colleagues have spontaneously produced the same sym-
bolism. I naturally do not think that it originated three or four
hundred years ago. That was simply another epoch when this
same archetypal idea was very much in the foreground. As a
matter of fact, it is much older than the Middle Ages, as the
Timaeus proves. Nor is it a classical or an Egyptian heritage,
since it is to be found practically everywhere and in all ages.
One has only to remember, for instance, how great an impor-
tance was attributed to the quaternity by the American In-
dians. 42

10 Although the quaternity is an age-old and presumably
prehistoric symbol, 43 always associated with the idea of a
world-creating deity, it is curiously enough rarely under-
stood as such by those moderns in whom it occurs. I have always
been particularly interested to see how people, if left to their

41 The Rosarium philosophorum is one of the first attempts at a synopsis and
gives a fairly comprehensive account of the medieval quaternity.

42 Cf v for instance, the 5th and 8th Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion, Bureau of Ethnology, Washington (1887 and 1892).

43 Cf. the paleolithic (?) "sun wheels" of Rhodesia.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

own devices and not informed about the history of the symbol,
would interpret it to themselves. I was careful, therefore, not
to disturb them with my own opinions, and as a rule I discov-
ered that they took it to symbolize themselves or rather some-
thing in themselves. They felt it belonged intimately to them-
selves as a sort of creative background, a life-producing sun in
the depths of the unconscious. Though it was easy to see that
certain mandala-dra wings were almost an exact replica of Ezek-
iel's vision, it very seldom happened that people recognized the
analogy even when they knew the vision which knowledge, by
the way, is pretty rare nowadays. What one could almost call a
systematic blindness is simply the effect of the prejudice that
God is outside man. Although this prejudice is not exclusively
Christian, there are certain religions which do not share it at all.
On the contrary they insist, as do certain Christian mystics,
on the essential identity of God and man, either in the form of
an a priori identity or of a goal to be attained by certain prac-
tices or initiations, as known to us, for instance, from the meta-
morphoses of Apuleius, not to speak of certain yoga methods.

The use of the comparative method shows without a doubt
that the quaternity is a more or less direct representation of the
God who is manifest in his creation. We might, therefore, con-
clude that the symbol spontaneously produced in the dreams of
modern people means something similar the God within. Al-
though the majority of the persons concerned do not recognize
this analogy, the interpretation might nevertheless be correct.
If we consider the fact that the idea of God is an "unscientific"
hypothesis, we can easily explain why people have forgotten to
think along such lines. And even if they do cherish a certain be-
lief in God they would be deterred from the idea of a God within
by their religious education, which has always depreciated this
idea as "mystical." Yet it is precisely this "mystical" idea which
is forced upon the conscious mind by dreams and visions. I my-
self, as well as my colleagues, have seen so many cases developing
the same kind of symbolism that we cannot doubt its existence
any longer. My observations, moreover, date back to 1914, and
I waited fourteen years before alluding to them publicly. 44

It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should take my

44 [in his commentary to The Secret of the Golden Flower, first pub. (in Ger-
man) in 1929. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

observations as a kind of proof of the existence of God. They
prove only the existence of an archetypal God-image, which to
my mind is the most we can assert about God psychologically.
But as it is a very important and influential archetype, its rela-
tively frequent occurrence seems to be a noteworthy fact for any
theologia naturalis. And since experience of this archetype has
the quality of numinosity, often in very high degree, it comes
into the category of religious experiences.

103 I cannot refrain from calling attention to the interesting fact
that whereas the central Christian symbolism is a Trinity, the
formula presented by the unconscious is a quaternity. In reality
the orthodox Christian formula is not quite complete, because
the dogmatic aspect of the evil principle is absent from the
Trinity and leads a more or less awkward existence on its own as
the devil. Nevertheless it seems that the Church does not exclude
an inner relationship between the devil and the Trinity. A Cath-
olic authority expresses himself on this question as follows: "The
existence of Satan, however, can only be understood in relation
to the Trinity." "Any theological treatment of the devil that is
not related to God's trinitarian consciousness is a falsification of
the actual position." 45 According to this view, the devil pos-
sesses personality -and absolute freedom. That is why he can be
the true, personal "counterpart of Christ." "Herein is revealed a
new freedom in God's being: he freely allows the devil to sub-
sist beside him and permits his kingdom to endure for ever."
"The idea of a mighty devil is incompatible with the conception
of Yahweh, but not with the conception of the Trinity. The
mystery of one God in Three Persons opens out a new freedom
in the depths of God's being, and this even makes possible the
thought of a personal devil existing alongside God and in op-
position to him." 46 The devil, accordingly, possesses an autono-
mous personality, freedom, and eternality, and he has these
metaphysical qualities so much in common with God that he
can actually subsist in opposition to him. Hence the relation-
ship or even the (negative) affinity of the devil with the Trinity
can no longer be denied as a Catholic idea.

*4 The inclusion of the devil in the quaternity is by no means
a modern speculation or a monstrous fabrication of the uncon-
scious. We find in the writings of the sixteenth-century natural

45 Koepgen, Die Gnosis des Christentums, pp. 189, 190. 46 Ibid., pp. 185^.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

philosopher and physician, Gerard Dorn, a detailed discussion
of the symbols o the Trinity and the quaternity, the latter
being attributed to the devil. Dorn breaks with the whole al-
chemical tradition inasmuch as he adopts the rigidly Christian
standpoint that Three is One but Four is not, because Four
attains to unity in the quinta essentia. According to this author
the quaternity is in truth a "diabolical fraud" or "deception of
the devil/' and he holds that at the fall of the angels the devil
"fell into the realm of quaternity and the elements" (in quater-
nariam et elementariam regionem decidif). He also gives an
elaborate description of the symbolic operation whereby the
devil produced the "double serpent" (the number 2) "with the
four horns" (the number 4). Indeed, the number 2 is the devil
himself, the quadricornutus binarius.^

10 5 Since a God identical with the individual man is an exceed-
ingly complex assumption bordering on heresy, 48 the "God

47 Dorn thinks that God created the binarius on the second day of Creation,
when he separated the upper waters from the lower, and that this was the reason
why he omitted to say on the evening of the second day what he said on all
the others, namely that "it was good." The emancipation of the binarius, Dorn
holds, was the cause of "confusion, division, and strife." From the binarius issued
"its quaternary offspring (sua proles quaternaria). Since the number 2 is femi-
nine, it also signified Eve, whereas the number 3 was equated with Adam. There-
fore the devil tempted Eve first: "For [the devil] knew, being full of all guile,
that Adam was marked with the unarius, and for this cause he did not at first
attack him, for he greatly doubted whether he could do anything against him.
Moreover, he was not ignorant that Eve was divided from her husband as a
natural binary from the unity of its ternary [tanquam naturalem binarium ab
unario sui ternarii]. Accordingly, armed with a certain likeness of binary to
binary, he made his attack on the woman. For all even numbers are feminine, of
which two, Eve's proper and original number, is the first." (Dorn, "De tenebris
contra nattiram et vita brevi," Theatr. chem., 1602, I, p. 527. In this treatise
and the one that follows it, "De Duello Animi cum Corpore," pp. 535^., the
reader will find everything I have mentioned here.) The reader will have noticed
how Dorn, with great cunning, discovers in the binarius a secret affinity between
the devil and woman. He was the first to point out the discord between threeness
and fourness, between God as Spirit and Empedoclean nature, thus albeit un-
consciouslycutting the thread of alchemical projection. Accordingly, he speaks
of the quaternarius as "fundamental to the medicine of the infidels." We must
leave it an open question whether by "infidels" he meant the Arabs or the pagans
of antiquity. At any rate Dorn suspected that there was something ungodly in
the quaternity, which was intimately associated with the nature of woman. Cf.
my remarks concerning the "virgo terrae" in the next section.
48 1 am not referring here to the dogma of the human nature of Christ.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

within" also presents a dogmatic difficulty. But the quaternity
as produced by the modern psyche points directly not only to
the God within, but to the identity of God and man. Contrary
to the dogma, there are not three, but four aspects. It could easily
be inferred that the fourth represents the devil. Though we have
the logion "I and the Father are one: who seeth me seeth the
Father," it would be considered blasphemy or madness to stress
Christ's dogmatic humanity to such a degree that man could
identify himself with Christ and his homoousia. 49 But this is
precisely what seems to be meant by the natural symbol. From
an orthodox standpoint, therefore, the natural quaternity could
be declared a diabolica fraus, and the chief proof of this would
be its assimilation of the fourth aspect which represents the
reprehensible part of the Christian cosmos. The Church, it
seems to me, probably has to repudiate any attempt to take such
conclusions seriously. She may even have to condemn any ap-
proach to these experiences, since she cannot admit that Nature
unites what she herself has divided. The voice of Nature is
clearly audible in all experiences of the quaternity, and this
arouses all the old mistrust of anything even remotely con-
nected with the unconscious. Scientific investigation of dreams
is simply the old oneiromancy in new guise and therefore just as
objectionable as any other of the "occult" arts. Close parallels
to the symbolism of dreams can be found in the old alchemical
treatises, and these are quite as heretical as dreams. 50 Here, it
would seem, was reason enough for secrecy and protective meta-
phors. 51 The symbolic statements of the old alchemists issue
from the same unconscious as modern dreams and are just as
much the voice of nature.

If we were still living in a medieval setting where there was
not much doubt about the ultimate things and where every his-
tory of the world began with Genesis, we could easily brush

49 This identification has nothing to do with the Catholic conception of the
assimilation of the individual's life to the life of Christ and his absorption into
the corpus mysticum of the Church. It is rather the opposite of this view.

50 I ana thinking chiefly of works that contain alchemical legends and didactic
tales. A good example would be Maier's Symbola aureae mensae (1617), with its
symbolic peregrinatio (pp. 5696:.).

51 So far as I know, there are no complaints in alchemical literature of persecu-
tion by the Church. The authors allude usually to the tremendous secret of the
magistery as a reason for secrecy.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

aside dreams and the like. Unfortunately we live in a modern
setting where all the ultimate things are doubtful, where there
is a prehistory of enormous extension, and where people are
fully aware that if there is any numinous experience at all, it is
the experience of the psyche. We can no longer imagine an
empyrean world revolving round the throne of God, and we
would not dream of seeking for him somewhere behind the
galactic systems. Yet the human soul seems to harbour mysteries,
since to an empiricist all religious experience boils down to a
peculiar psychic condition. If we want to know anything of what
religious experience means to those who have it, we have every
chance nowadays of studying it in every imaginable form. And if
it means anything, it means everything to those who have it.
This is at any rate the inevitable conclusion one reaches by a
careful study of the evidence. One could even define religious
experience as that kind of experience which is accorded the
highest value, no matter what its contents may be. The modern
mind, so far as it stands under the verdict "extra ecclesiam nulla
salus," will turn to the psyche as the last hope. Where else could
one obtain experience? And the answer will be more or less of
the kind which I have described. The voice of nature will answer
and all those concerned with the spiritual problem of man will
be confronted with new and baffling problems. Because of the
spiritual need of my patients I have been forced to make a seri-
ous attempt to understand some of the symbols produced by the
unconscious. As it would lead much too far to embark on a dis-
cussion of the intellectual and ethical consequences, I shall have
to content myself with a mere sketch.

The main symbolic figures of a religion are always expressive
of the particular moral and mental attitude involved. I would
mention, for instance, the cross and its various religious mean-
ings. Another main symbol is the Trinity. It is of exclusively
masculine character. The unconscious, however, transforms it
into a quaternity, which is at the same time a unity, just as the
three persons of the Trinity are one and the same God. The nat-
ural philosophers of antiquity represented the Trinity, so far as
it was imaginata in natura, as the three acrco/mra or ' 'spirits," also
called "volatilia," namely water, air, and fire. The fourth con-
stituent, on the other hand, was TO cr&narov, the earth or the body.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

They symbolized the latter by the Virgin. 52 In this way they
added the feminine element to their physical Trinity, thereby
producing the quaternity or circulus quadratus, whose symbol
was the hermaphroditic rebis^ the filius sapientiae. The natural
philosophers of the Middle Ages undoubtedly meant earth and
woman by the fourth element. The principle of evil was not
openly mentioned, but it appears in the poisonous quality of the
prima materia and in other allusions. The quaternity in modern
dreams is a creation of the unconscious. As I explained in the
first chapter, the unconscious is often personified by the anima,
a feminine figure. Apparently the symbol of the quaternity is-
sues from her. She would be the matrix of the quaternity, a
Georo/cos or Mater Dei, just as the earth was understood to be the
Mother of God. But since woman, as well as evil, is excluded
from the Deity in the dogma of the Trinity, the element of evil
would form part of the religious symbol if the latter should be
a quaternity. It needs no particular effort of imagination to
guess the far-reaching spiritual consequences of such a develop-
ment.

52 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 232, showing the glorification of the body in
the form of the Assumption of the Virgin (from Reusner, Pandora , 1588). St.
Augustine used the earth to symbolize the Virgin: "Truth is arisen from the
earth, for Christ is born of a virgin" (Sermones, 189, II, in Migne, P.L., vol. 38,
col. 1006). Likewise Tertullian: "That virgin earth, not yet watered by the rains
nor fertilized by the showers" (Adversus Judaeos, 13, in Migne, P.L., vol. 2,
col. 655).

53 The rebis ('made of two') is the philosophers' stone, for in it the masculine
and the feminine nature are united. [Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, p. 232 and
fig. 125. EDITORS.]

THE HISTORY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF A

NATURAL SYMBOL

108 Although I have no wish to discourage philosophical curi-
osity, I would rather not lose myself in a discussion of the ethical
and intellectual aspects of the problem raised by the quaternity
symbol. Its psychological importance is far-reaching and plays a
considerable role in practical treatment. While we are not con-
cerned here with psychotherapy, but with the religious aspect of
certain psychic phenomena, I have been forced through my
studies in psychopathology to dig out these historical symbols
and figures from the dust of their graves. 1 When I was a young
alienist I should never have suspected myself of doing such a
thing. I shall not mind, therefore, if this long discussion of the
quaternity symbol, the circulus quadratus, and the heretical
attempts to improve on the dogma of the Trinity seem to be
somewhat far-fetched and exaggerated. But, in point of fact, my
whole discourse on the quaternity is no more than a regrettably
short and inadequate introduction to the final and crowning
example which illustrates my case.

109 Already at the very beginning of our dream-series the circle
appears. It takes the form, for instance, of a serpent, which
describes a circle 2 round the dreamer. It appears in later dreams

1 Cf. Symbols of Transformation.

% A recurrence of the ancient symbol of the uroboros, 'tail-eater '

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

as a clock, a circle with a central point, a round target for shoot-
ing practice, a clock that is a perpetuum mobile 3 a ball, a globe,
a round table, a basin, and so on. The square appears also, about
the same time, in the form of a city square or a garden with a
fountain in the centre. Somewhat later it appears in connection
with a circular movement: 3 people walking round in a square;
a magic ceremony (the transformation of animals into human
beings) that takes place in a square room, in the corners of which
are four snakes, with people again circulating round the four
corners; the dreamer driving round a square in a taxi; a square
prison cell; an empty square which is itself rotating; and so on.
In other dreams the circle is represented by rotation for in-
stance, four children carry a "dark ring" and walk in a circle.
Again, the circle appears combined with the quaternity, as a
silver bowl with four nuts at the four cardinal points, or as a
table with four chairs. The centre seems to be particularly em-
phasized. It is symbolized by an egg in the middle of a ring; by
a star consisting of a body of soldiers; by a star rotating in a
circle, the cardinal points of which represent the four seasons;
by the pole; by a precious stone, and so on.

All these dreams lead up to one image which came to the
patient in the form of a sudden visual impression. He had had
such glimpses or visualizations on several occasions before, but
this time it was a most impressive experience. As he himself
says: "It was an impression of the most sublime harmony/ 5 In
such a case it does not matter at all what our impression is or
what we think about it. It only matters how the patient feels
about it. It is his experience, and if it has a deeply transforming
influence upon his condition there is no point in arguing against
it. The psychologist can only take note of the fact and, if he feels
equal to the task, he might also make an attempt to under-
stand why such a vision had such an effect upon such a person.
The vision was a turning point in the patient's psychological
development. It was what one would call in the language of
religion a conversion.
L This is the literal text of the vision:

3 An Eastern parallel is the "circulation of the light" mentioned in the Chinese
alchemical treatise, The Secret of the Golden Flower, edited by R. Wilhelm and
myself.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

There is a vertical and a horizontal circle, having a common
centre. This is the world clock. It is supported by the black
bird*

The vertical circle is a blue disc with a white border divided
into 4 X 8 = 32, partitions. A pointer rotates upon it.

The horizontal circle consists of four colours. On it stand four
little men with pendulums, and round about it is laid the ring
that was once dark and is now golden (formerly carried by four
children).

The world clock has three rhythms or pulses:
/. The small pulse: the pointer on the blue vertical disc

advances by 1/32.

2. The middle pulse: one complete rotation of the pointer.

At the same time the horizontal circle
advances by 1/32.

3. The great pulse: 32 middle pulses are equal to one com-

plete rotation of the golden ring.

The vision sums up all the allusions in the previous dreams.
It seems to be an attempt to make a meaningful whole of the
formerly fragmentary symbols, then characterized as circle,
globe, square, rotation, clock, star, cross, quaternity, time, and
so on.

It is of course difficult to understand why a feeling of "most
sublime harmony" should be produced by this abstract struc-
ture. But if we think of the two circles in Plato's Timaeus, and
of the harmonious all-roundness of his anima mundi,, we might
find an avenue to understanding. Again, the term "world clock"
suggests the antique conception of the musical harmony of the
spheres. It would thus be a sort of cosmological system. If it
were a vision of the firmament and its silent rotation, or of the
steady movement of the solar system, we could readily under-
stand and appreciate the perfect harmony of the picture. We
might also assume that the platonic vision of the cosmos was
faintly glimmering through the mist of a dreamlike conscious-
ness. But there is something in the vision that does not quite
accord with the harmonious perfection of the platonic picture.
The two circles are each of a different nature. Not only is their

4 This refers to a previous vision, where a black eagle carried away a golden ring.
[For this entire clock vision, cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 3076:. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

movement different, but their colour too. The vertical circle is
blue and the horizontal one containing four colours is golden.
The blue circle might easily symbolize the blue hemisphere of
the sky, while the horizontal circle would represent the horizon
with its four cardinal points, personified by the four little men
and characterized by the four colours. (In a former dream, the
four points were represented once by four children and another
time by the four seasons.) This picture immediately calls to
mind the medieval representations of the world in the form of
a circle or in the shape of the rex gloriae with the four evan-
gelists, or the melothesia? where the horizon is formed by the
zodiac. The representation of the triumphant Christ seems to be
derived from similar pictures of Horus and his four sons. 6 There
are also Eastern analogies: the Buddhist mandalas or circles,
usually of Tibetan origin. These consist as a rule of a circular
padma or lotus which contains a square sacred building with
four gates, indicating the four cardinal points and the seasons.
The centre contains a Buddha, or more often the conjunction
of Shiva and his Shakti, or an equivalent dorje (thunderbolt)
symbol. 7 They are yantras or ritualistic instruments for the pur-
pose of contemplation, concentration, and the final transforma-
tion of the yogi's consciousness into the divine all-consciousness. 8
However striking these analogies may be, they are not en-
tirely satisfactory, because they all emphasize the centre to such
an extent that they seem to have been made in order to express
the importance of the central figure. In our case, however, the
centre is empty. It consists only of a mathematical point. The
parallels I have mentioned depict the world-creating or world-
ruling deity, or else man in his dependence upon the celestial
constellations. Our symbol is a clock, symbolizing time. The

5 The "blood-letting manikins" are melothesiae. [These are the little figures
which medieval physicians used to draw inside a circle or mandala on the part
of the body affected, when bleeding or "cupping" a patient. Melothesia is the
"assignment of parts of the body to the tutelage of signs or planets" (Liddell and
Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, p. 1099). Woodcuts of melothesiae are reproduced
in Jacobi, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings, figs. 56 and 45. EDITORS.]

6 Budge, Osiris and the 'Egyptian Resurrection, I, 3; The Egyptian Book of the
Dead (facsimile), pi. 5. In a manuscript from the 7th century (Gellone), the evan-
gelists are represented with the heads of their symbolic animals instead of human
heads. 7 There is an example in The Secret of the Golden Flower,

8 Shnchakrasambhdra Tantra, ed. by Avalon.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

only analogy I can think of to such a symbol is the design of the
horoscope. It too has four cardinal points and an empty centre.
And there is another remarkable correspondence: rotation is
often mentioned in the previous dreams, and this is usually
reported as moving to the left. The horoscope has twelve houses
that progress numerically to the left, that is, counter-clockwise.

U 5 But the horoscope consists of one circle only and moreover
contains no contrast between two obviously different systems.
So the horoscope too is an unsatisfactory analogy, though it sheds
some light on the time aspect of our symbol. We would be
forced to give up our attempt to find psychological parallels
were it not for the treasure-house of medieval symbolism. By a
lucky chance I came across a little-known medieval author of
the early fourteenth century, Guillaume de Digulleville, prior
of a monastery at Chalis, a Norman poet who wrote three
"Pelerinages" between 1330 and 1355- 9 They are called Les
Pelerinages de la vie humaine, de I'dme., and de Jesus Christ. In
the last canto of the Pelerinage de Yame we find a vision of
paradise.

116 Paradise consists of forty-nine rotating spheres. They are
called "siecles," centuries, being the prototypes or archetypes of
the earthly centuries. But, as the angel who serves as a guide to
Guillaume explains, the ecclesiastical expression "in saecula
saeculoram" means eternity and not ordinary time. A golden
heaven surrounds all the spheres. When Guillaume looked up to
the golden heaven he suddenly became aware of a small circle,
only three feet wide and of the colour of sapphire. He says of this
circle: "It came out of the golden heaven at one point and re-
entered it at another, and it made the whole tour of the golden
heaven." Evidently the blue circle was rolling like a disc upon a
great circle which intersected the golden sphere of heaven.

U 7 Here, then, we have two different systems, the one golden,
the other blue, and the one cutting through the other. What is
the blue circle? The angel again explains to the wondering
Guillaume:

Abbe" Joseph Delacotte, Guillaume de Digulleville, Trois romans-poemes du
XlVe siecle. [A i5th-cent. verse translation of the "Pilgrimage" by John Lydgate
was published by the Early English Text Society (1899-1904). For other early
English translations, published in recent times, see the Oxford History of English
Literature, II, part i, p. 308. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

Ce cercle que tu vois est le calendrier,
Qui en faisant son tour entier,
Montre des Saints les journees
Quand elles doivent tre fetees.
Chacun en fait le cercle un tour,
Chacune etoile y est pour jour,
Chacun soleil pour Fespace
De jours trente ou zodiaque.

(This circle is the calendar

Which spinning round the course entire

Shows the feast day of each saint

And when it should be celebrate.

Each saint goes once round all the way,

Each star you see stands for a day,

And every sun denotes a spell

Of thirty days zodiacal.)

The blue circle is the ecclesiastical calendar. So here we have
another parallel the element of time. It will be remembered
that time, in our vision, is characterized or measured by three
pulses. Guillaume's calendar circle is three feet in diameter.
Moreover, while Guillaume is gazing at the blue circle, three
spirits clad in purple suddenly appear. The angel explains that
this is the feast-day of the three saints, and he goes on to dis-
course about the whole zodiac. When he comes to the sign of the
Fishes he mentions the feast of the twelve fishermen which pre-
cedes that of the Holy Trinity. Whereupon Guillaume tells the
angel that he has never quite understood the symbol of the
Trinity. He asks him to be good enough to explain this mystery.
Whereupon the angel answers: "Well, there are three principal
colours: green, red, and golden." One can see them united in
the peacock's tail. And he goes on: "The almighty King who
puts three colours in one, cannot he also make one substance to
be three?" The golden colour, he says, belongs to the Father, the
red to the Son, and the green to the Holy Ghost. 10 Then the
angel warns the poet not to ask any more questions and dis-
appears.

We know, happily enough, from the angel's teaching, that
three has to do with the Trinity. So we also know that our

10 The Holy Ghost is the cause of the viriditas (greenness). Cf. below, pp. 91-92.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

former digression into the field of mystical speculation on the
Trinity was not far off the mark. At the same time we meet with
the motif of the colours, but unfortunately our patient has four,
whereas Guillaume, or rather the angel, speaks only of three-
gold, red, and green. Here we might quote the opening words
of the Timaeus: 'Three there are, but where is the fourth?" Or
we could quote the very same words fiom Goethe's Faust, from
the famous Cabiri scene in Part II, where the Cabiri bring the
vision of that mysterious "streng Geblide," the "severe image,"
from the sea.

!so The four little men of our vision are dwarfs or Cabiri. They
represent the four cardinal points and the four seasons, as well
as the four colours and the four elements. In the Timaeus, as
also in Faust and the Pelerinage, something seems to be wrong
with the number four. The missing fourth colour is obviously
blue. It is the one that belongs to the series yellow, red, and
green. Why is blue missing? What is wrong with the calendar?
or with time? or with the colour blue? n

121 Poor old Guillaume has evidently been stumped by the same
problem. Three there are, but where is the fourth? He was
eager to learn something about the Trinity which, as he says,
he had never quite understood. And it is slightly suspicious that
the angel is in such a hurry to get away before Guillaume can
ask any more awkward questions.

122 Well, I suppose Guillaume was unconscious when he went to
heaven, otherwise he surely would have drawn certain conclu-
sions from what he saw. Now what did he actually see? First
he saw the spheres or "sicles" inhabited by those who had at-

11 Gerhard Dorn had a similar conception of circular figures intersecting and dis-
turbing one another: on the one hand the circular system of the Trinity and on
the other the devil's attempt to construct a system of his own. He says: "It is to be
noted, moreover, that the centre is unary, and its circle is ternary, but whatever
is inserted between the centre [and the circumference], and enters the enclosed
realm, is to be taken as binary, be it another circle ... or any other figure what-
ever." So the devil fabricated a circle of sorts for himself and tried to devise a
circular system with it, but for various reasons the attempt failed. In the end all
he produced was the "figure of a twofold serpent lifting up four horns, and
therefore is the kingdom of the monomachy [rnonomachiae regnum] divided
against itself." Being the binarius in person, the devil could hardly have produced
anything else. ("De Duello," Theatrum chemicum, 1602, I, p. 547.) Already in the
alchemy of Zosimos the devil appears as fortjjufjLcs, the imitator, ape of God.
(Berthelot, Alch. grecs, III, xlix, 9. Cf. also Mead, Pistis Sophia f passim,)

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

tained eternal bliss. Then he beheld the heaven of gold, the
"del d'or," and there was the King of Heaven sitting upon a
golden throne and, beside him, the Queen of Heaven sitting
upon a round throne of brown crystal. This latter detail refers
to the fact that Mary is supposed to have been taken up to
heaven with her body, as the only mortal being permitted to
unite with the body before the resurrection of the dead. The
king is usually represented as the triumphant Christ in conjunc-
tion with his bride, the Church. But the all-important point is
that the king, being Christ, is at the same time the Trinity, and
that the introduction of a fourth person, the Queen, makes it a
quaternity. The royal pair represents in ideal form the unity of
the Two under the rule of the One"binarius sub monarchia
unarii," as Dorn would say. Moreover, in the brown crystal, the
"realm of quaternity and the elements" into which the "four-
horned binarius" was cast has been exalted to the throne of the
supreme intercessor, Mary. Consequently the quaternity of
the natural elements appears not only in close conjunction with
the corpus mysticum of the bridal Church or Queen of Heaven
often it is difficult to distinguish between the two but in im-
mediate relationship to the Trinity. 12

123 Blue is the colour of Mary's celestial cloak; she is the earth
covered by the blue tent of the sky. 13 But why should the Mother
of God not be mentioned? According to the dogma she is only
beata } not divine. Moreover, she represents the earth, which is
also the body and its darkness. That is the reason why she, the
all-merciful, has the power of attorney to plead for all sinners,
but also why, despite her privileged position (it is not possible
for the angels to sin), she has a relationship with the Trinity
which is rationally not comprehensible, since it is so close and
yet so distant. As the matrix, the vessel, the earth, she can be
interpreted allegorically as the rotundum, which is character-
ized by the four cardinal points, and hence as the globe with
the four quarters, God's footstool, or as the "four-square"
Heavenly City, or the "flower of the sea, in which Christ lies

12 A peculiar coincidence of three and four is to be found in Wernher vom
Niederrhein's allegory of Mary, where, besides the three men in the burning fiery
furnace, a fourth appears who is interpreted as Christ. Cf. Salzer, Die Sinnbilder
und Beiworte Mariens, p. 21.

13 Eisler, Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, I, pp. 852.

7 1

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

hidden" 14 in a word, as a mandala. This, according to the
Tantric idea of the lotus, is feminine, and for readily under-
standable reasons. The lotus is the eternal birthplace of the
gods. It corresponds to the Western rose in which the King of
Glory sits, often supported by the four evangelists, who corre-
spond to the four quarters.

124 From this precious piece of medieval psychology we gain
some insight into the meaning of our patient's mandala. It
unites the four and they function together harmoniously. My
patient had been brought up a Catholic and thus, unwittingly,
he was confronted with the same problem which caused not a
little worry to old Guillaume. It was, indeed, a great problem
to the Middle Ages, this problem of the Trinity and the exclu-
sion, or the very qualified recognition, of the feminine element,
of the earth, the body, and matter in general, which were yet, in
the form of Mary's womb, the sacred abode of the Deity and
the indispensable instrument for the divine work of redemp-
tion. My patient's vision is a symbolic answer to this age-old
question. That is probably the deeper reason why the image of
the world clock produced the impression of "most sublime
harmony." It was the first intimation of a possible solution of
the devastating conflict between matter and spirit, between the
desires of the flesh and the love of God. The miserable and
ineffectual compromise of the church dream is completely over-
come in this mandala vision, where all opposites are reconciled.
If we hark back to the old Pythagorean idea that the soul is a
square, 15 then the mandala would express the Deity through its
threefold rhythm and the soul through its static quaternity, the
circle divided into four colours. And thus its innermost mean-
ing would simply be the union of the soul with God.

125 As the world clock also represents the quadratures circuit and
the perpetuum mobile, both these preoccupations of the medi-
eval mind find adequate expression in our mandala. The golden
circle and its contents represent the quaternity in the form of
the four Cabiri and the four colours, and the blue circle repre-
sents the Trinity and the movement of time, according to
Guillaume. In our case, the hand of the blue circle has the

14 Salzer, p. 66.

15 Zeller, Die Philosophic der Grtechen, III, ii, p. 120. According to Archytas, the
soul is a circle or sphere.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

fastest movement, while the golden circle moves slowly. Whereas
the blue circle seems to be somewhat incongruous in Guil-
laume's golden heaven, the circles in our case are harmoniously
combined. The Trinity is now the life, the "pulse" of the whole
system, with a threefold rhythm based, however, on thirty-two,
a multiple of four. This agrees with the view I expressed before,
that the quaternity is the sine qua non of divine birth and, con-
sequently, of the inner life of the Trinity. Thus circle and
quaternity on one side and the threefold rhythm on the other
interpenetrate so that each is contained in the other. In Guil-
laume's version the Trinity is obvious enough, but the quater-
nity is concealed in the duality of the King and Queen of
Heaven. What is more, the blue colour does not belong to the
queen but to the calendar, which represents time and is char-
acterized by trinitarian attributes. There seems to be a mutual
interpenetration of symbols, just as in our case.
126 Interpenetrations of qualities and contents are typical not
only of symbols in general, but also of the essential similarity of
the contents symbolized. Without this similarity no interpene-
tration would be possible at all. We therefore find interpenetra-
tion also in the Christian conception of the Trinity, where the
Father appears in the Son, the Son in the Father, the Holy
Ghost in Father and Son, or both these in the Holy Ghost as
the Paraclete. The progression from Father to Son and the
Son's appearance on earth at a particular moment would repre-
sent the time element, while the spatial element would be per-
sonified by the Mater Dei. (The mother quality was originally
an attribute of the Holy Ghost, and the latter was known as
Sophia-Sapientia by certain early Christians. 16 This feminine
quality could not be completely eradicated; it still adheres to
the symbol of the Holy Ghost, the columba spiritus sancti). But
the quaternity is entirely absent from the dogma, though it ap-
pears in early ecclesiastical symbolism. I refer to the cross with
equal arms enclosed in the circle, the triumphant Christ with
the four evangelists, the tetramorph, and so on. In later ecclesi-
astical symbolism the rosa mystica, the vas devotionis, the fons

16 Cf. the invocation in the Acts of Thomas (Mead, Fragments of a Faith For-
gotten, pp. 422ff.)- Also the "seat of wisdom" in the Litany of Loreto, and the
readings from Proverbs on Mary's feast-days, e.g., the Immaculate Conception
(Prov. 8:22-35).

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

signatus, and the hortus conclusus appear as attributes of the
Mater Dei and o the spiritualized earth. 17

127 It would hardly be worth while to look at all these relation-
ships in a psychological light if the conceptions of the Trinity
were nothing more than the ingenuities of human reason. I
have always taken the view that they belong to the type of revela-
tion to which Koepgen has recently given the name of "Gnosis"
(not to be confused with Gnosticism). Revelation is an "unveil-
ing" of the depths of the human soul first and foremost, a "lay-
ing bare"; hence it is an essentially psychological event, though
this does not, of course, tell us what else it might be. That lies
outside the province of science. My view comes very close to
Koepgen's lapidary formula, which moreover bears the ecclesi-
astical imprimatur: "The Trinity is a revelation not only of
God but at the same time of man." 18

128 Our mandala is an abstract, almost mathematical represen-
tation of some of the main problems discussed in medieval
Christian philosophy. The abstraction goes so far, indeed, that
if it had not been for the help of Guillaume's vision we might
have overlooked its widespread system of roots in human his-
tory. The patient did not possess any real knowledge of the
historical material. He knew only what anybody who had re-
ceived a smattering of religious instruction in early childhood
would know. He himself saw no connection between his world
clock and any religious symbolism. One can readily understand
this, since the vision contains nothing at first sight that would
remind anyone of religion. Yet the vision itself came shortly
after the dream of the "House of the Gathering." And that
dream was the answer to the problem of three and four repre-
sented in a still earlier dream. There it was a matter of a rec-
tangular space, on the four sides of which were four goblets
filled with coloured water. One was yellow, another red, the
third green, and the fourth colourless. Obviously blue was
missing, yet it had been connected with the three other colours
in a previous vision, where a bear appeared in the depths of a
cavern. The bear had four eyes emitting red, yellow, green, and

17 For the Gnostics the quaternity was decidedly feminine. Cf. Irenaeus, Against
Heresies, I, ch. xi (Keble trans., p. 36).
13 Die Gnosis des Christentums f p. 194.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

blue light. Astonishingly enough, in the later dream the blue
colour had disappeared. At the same time the customary square
was transformed into an oblong, which had never appeared
before. The cause of this manifest disturbance was the dreamer's
resistance to the feminine element represented by the anima. In
the dream of the "House of the Gathering" the voice confirms
this fact. It says: "What you are doing is dangerous. Religion
is not the tax you pay in order to get rid of the woman's image,
for this image cannot be got rid of." The "woman's image" is
exactly what we would call the "anima." 19

129 It is normal for a man to resist his anima, because she repre-
sents, as I said before, the unconscious and all those tendencies
and contents hitherto excluded from conscious life. They were
excluded for a number of reasons, both real and apparent. Some
are suppressed and some are repressed. As a rule those tendencies
that represent the antisocial elements in man's psychic struc-
turewhat I call the "statistical criminal" in everybody are
suppressed, that is, they are consciously and deliberately dis-
posed of. But tendencies that are merely repressed are usually
of a somewhat doubtful character. They are not so much anti-
social as unconventional and socially awkward. The reason why
we repress them is equally doubtful. Some people repress them
from sheer cowardice, others from conventional morality, and
others again for reasons of respectability. Repression is a sort of
half-conscious and half-hearted letting go of things, a dropping
of hot cakes or a reviling of grapes which hang too high, or a
looking the other way in order not to become conscious of one's
desires. Freud discovered that repression is one of the main
mechanisms in the making of a neurosis. Suppression amounts
to a conscious moral choice, but repression is a rather immoral
"penchant" for getting rid of disagreeable decisions. Suppres-
sion may cause worry, conflict and suffering, but it never
causes a neurosis. Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate
suffering.

130 If one discounts the "statistical criminal," there still remains
the vast domain of inferior qualities and primitive tendencies
which belong to the psychic structure of the man who is less

i See Psychological Types, Defs. 48 and 49. [Also Aion, par. 19 (Swiss edn., pp.
25!.) EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

ideal and more primitive than we should like to be. 20 We have
certain ideas as to how a civilized or educated or moral being
should live, and we occasionally do our best to fulfil these am-
bitious expectations. But since nature has not bestowed the
same blessings upon each of her children, some are more and
others less gifted. Thus there are people who can just afford to
live properly and respectably; that is to say, no manifest flaw is
discoverable. They either commit minor sins, if they sin at all,
or their sins are concealed from them by a thick layer of un-
consciousness. One is rather inclined to be lenient with sinners
who are unconscious of their sins. But nature is not at all lenient
with unconscious sinners. She punishes them just as severely as
if they had committed a conscious offence. Thus we find, as the
pious Henry Drummond 21 once observed, that it is highly
moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particu-
larly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their
relatives. The odour of sanctity may be far reaching, but to live
with a saint might well cause an inferiority complex or even a
wild outburst of immorality in individuals less morally gifted.
Morality seems to be a gift like intelligence. You cannot pump
it into a system to which it is not indigenous.

131 Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the
whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Every-
one carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the indi-
vidual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an
inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it.
Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so
that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is
repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets cor-
rected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of
unawareness. At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, block-
ing the most well-meant attempts.

132 We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior
man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enor-
mous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If
it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a consid-

20 A special instance is the "inferior function." See Psychological Types, Def. 40.
[And Aion, pars. igff. (Swiss edn., pp. 2 2 ff.). EDITORS.]

21 Widely known because of his book Natural Law in the Spiritual World. The
quotation conies from The Greatest Thing in the World.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

erably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be
cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious per-
sonality and his shadow can live together.

133 This is a very serious problem for all those who are them-
selves in such a predicament or have to help sick people back
to normal life. Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a
remedy as beheading would be for headache. To destroy a man's
morality does not help either, because it would kill his better
self, without which even the shadow makes no sense. The recon-
ciliation of these opposites is a major problem, and even in
antiquity it bothered certain minds. Thus we know of an other-
wise legendary personality of the second century, Carpocrates, 22
a Neoplatonist philosopher whose school, according to Irenaeus,
taught that good and evil are merely human opinions and that
the soul, before its departure from the body, must pass through
the whole gamut of human experience to the very end if it is not
to fall back into the prison of the body. It is as if the soul could
only ransom itself from imprisonment in the somatic world of
the demiurge by complete fulfilment of all life's demands. The
bodily existence in which we find ourselves is a kind of hostile
brother whose conditions must first be known. It was in this
sense that the Carpocratians interpreted Matthew 5:25^ (also
Luke 12 : 58f.): "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou
art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver
thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and
thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by
no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost
farthing/' Remembering the other Gnostic doctrine that no
man can be redeemed from a sin he has not committed, we are
here confronted with a problem of the very greatest importance,
obscured though it is by the Christian abhorrence of anything
Gnostic. Inasmuch as the somatic man, the "adversary," is none
other than "the other in me," it is plain that the Carpocratian
mode of thought would lead to the following interpretation of
Matthew 5 : zzL: "But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry
with himself without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment:
and whosoever shall say to himself, Raca, shall be in danger of
the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in
danger of hell fire. Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar,

22 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, XXV (Keble trans., p. 75).

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

and there rememberest that thou hast aught against thy self >
leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be
reconciled to thyself, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree
with thyself quickly, whiles thou art in the way with thyself;
lest at any time thou deliverest thyself to the judge." From here
it is but a step to the uncanonical saying: "Man, if indeed thou
knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest
not, thou art cursed, and a transgressor of the law/' 23 But the
problem comes very close indeed in the parable of the unjust
steward, which is a stumbling-block in more senses than one.
"And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had
done wisely" (Luke 16:8). In the Vulgate the word for 'wisely'
is prudenter, and in the Greek text it is <j>povinw (prudently,
sensibly, intelligently). There's no denying that practical intelli-
gence functions here as a court of ethical decision. Perhaps,
despite Irenaeus, we may credit the Carpocratians with this
much insight, and allow that they too, like the unjust steward,
were commendably aware of how to save face. It is natural that
the more robust mentality of the Church Fathers could not
appreciate the delicacy and the merit of this subtle and, from a
modern point of view, immensely practical argument. It was
also dangerous, and it is still the most vital and yet the most
ticklish ethical problem of a civilization that has forgotten why
man's life should be sacrificial, that is, offered up to an idea
greater than himself. Man can live the most amazing things if
they make sense to him. But the difficulty is to create that sense.
It must be a conviction, naturally; but you find that the most
convincing things man can invent are cheap and ready-made, and
are never able to convince him against his personal desires and
fears.

If the repressed tendencies, the shadow as I call them, were
obviously evil, there would be no problem whatever. But the
shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and
awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive
qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human
existence, but it is "not done." The educated public, the flower
of our present civilization, has detached itself from its roots,
and is about to lose its connection with the earth as well. There

23 James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 33.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

is no civilized country nowadays where the lowest strata of the
population are not in a state of unrest and dissent. In a number
of European nations such a condition is overtaking the upper
strata too. This state of affairs demonstrates our psychological
problem on a gigantic scale. Inasmuch as collectivities are mere
accumulations of individuals, their problems are accumulations
of individual problems. One set of people identifies itself with
the superior man and cannot descend, and the other set identi-
fies itself with the inferior man and wants to get to the top.

135 Such problems are never solved by legislation or by tricks.
They are solved only by a general change of attitude. And the
change does not begin with propaganda and mass meetings, or
with violence. It begins with a change in individuals. It will con-
tinue as a transformation of their personal likes and dislikes, of
their outlook on life and of their values, and only the accumula-
tion of these individual changes will produce a collective solu-
tion.

*3 6 The educated man tries to repress the inferior man in him-
self, not realizing that by so doing he forces the latter into re-
volt. It is characteristic of my patient that he once dreamt of a
military party that wanted "to strangle the left completely."
Somebody remarks that the left is weak enough anyway, but the
military party answers that this is just why it ought to be
strangled completely. The dream shows how my patient dealt
with his own inferior man. This is clearly not the right method.
The dream of the "House of the Gathering," on the contrary,
shows a religious attitude as the correct answer to his question.
The mandala seems to be an amplification of this particular
point. Historically, as we have seen, the mandala served as a
symbol to clarify the nature of the deity philosophically, or to
represent the same thing in a visible form for the purpose of
adoration, or, as in the East, as a yantra for yoga practices. The
wholeness ("perfection") of the celestial circle and the square-
ness of the earth, combining the four principles or elements or
psychic qualities, 24 express completeness and union. Thus the
mandala has the status of a "uniting symbol." 25 As the union of

24 in Tibetan Buddhism the four colours are associated with psychic qualities (the
four forms of wisdom). Cf. my psychological commentary to the Tibetan Book
of the Dead, below, p. 522.

25 See Psychological Types, Def. 51.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

God and man is expressed in the symbol of Christ or the cross, 26
we would expect the patient's world clock to have a similar
reconciling significance. Prejudiced by historical analogies, we
would expect a deity to occupy the centre of the mandala. The
centre is, however, empty. The seat of the deity is unoccupied,
in spite of the fact that, when we analyse the mandala in terms
of its historical models, we arrive at the god symbolized by the
circle and the goddess symbolized by the square. Instead of
"goddess" we could also say "earth" or "soul." Despite the his-
torical prejudice, however, the fact must be insisted upon that
(as in the "House of the Gathering," where the place of the
sacred image was occupied by the quaternity) we find no trace
of a deity in the mandala, but, on the contrary, a mechanism. I
do not believe that we have any right to disregard such an im-
portant fact in favour of a preconceived idea. A dream or a
vision is just what it seems to be. It is not a disguise for some-
thing else. It is a natural product, which is precisely a thing with-
out ulterior motive. I have seen many hundreds of mandalas,
done by patients who were quite uninfluenced, and I have found
the same fact in an overwhelming majority of cases: there was
never a deity occupying the centre. The centre, as a rule, is
emphasized. But what we find there is a symbol with a very
different meaning. It is a star, a sun, a flower, a cross with equal
arms, a precious stone, a bowl filled with water or wine, a ser-
pent coiled up, or a human being, but never a god. 27
*37 When we find a triumphant Christ in the rose window of a
medieval church, we rightly assume that this must be a central
symbol of the Christian cult. At the same time we also assume
that any religion which is rooted in the history of a people is
as much an expression of their psychology as the form of polit-
ical government, for instance, that the people have developed.

26 The cross has also the meaning of a boundary-stone between heaven and hell,
since it is set up in the centre of the cosmos and extends to all sides. (Cf. Kroll,
Gott und Holle, p. 18, n. 3.) The Tibetan mandala occupies a similar central
position, its upper half rising up to heaven out of the earth (like the hemispher-
ical stupas at Sanchi, India), with hell lying below. I have often found the same
construction in individual mandalas: the light world on top, the dark below, as
if they were projecting into these worlds. There is a similar design in Jakob
Bohme's "reversed eye" or "philosophical mirror" (XL Questions concerning the
Soule, 1647).

27 [Cf. the illustrations in Jung, "On Mandala Symbolism." EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

If we apply the same method to the modern mandates that
people have seen in dreams or visions, or have developed through
"active imagination," 28 we reach the conclusion that mandalas
are expressions of a certain attitude which we cannot help call-
ing "religious." Religion is a relationship to the highest or most
powerful value, be it positive or negative. The relationship is
voluntary as well as involuntary, that is to say you can accept,
consciously, the value by which you are possessed unconsciously.
That psychological fact which wields the greatest power in your
system functions as a god, since it is always the overwhelming
psychic factor that is called "God." As soon as a god ceases to
be an overwhelming factor he dwindles to a mere name. His
essence is dead and his power is gone. Why did the gods of an-
tiquity lose their prestige and their effect on the human soul?
Because the Olympians had served their time and a new mystery
began: God became man.

If we allow ourselves to draw conclusions from modern
mandalas we should ask people, first, whether they worship stars,
suns, flowers, and snakes. They will deny this, and at the same
time they will assert that the globes, stars, crosses, and the like
are symbols for a centre in themselves. And if asked what they
mean by this centre, they will begin to stammer and to refer to
this or that experience which may turn out to be something very
similar to the confession of my patient, who found that the
vision of his world clock had left him with a wonderful feeling
of perfect harmony. Others will confess that a similar vision
came to them in a moment of extreme pain or profound despair.
To others again it is the memory of a sublime dream or of a
moment when long and fruitless struggles came to an end and a
reign of peace began. If you sum up what people tell you about
their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to
themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to be-
come reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to
adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used
to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God,

28 This is a technical term referring to a method I have proposed for raising un-
conscious contents to consciousness. [Cf. "The Relations between the Ego and the
Unconscious," pp. 22off.; "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1950/51 edn.,
pp. 228ff.), and Mysterium Coniunctionis (Swiss edn., II, pp. goyff.), EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the
will of God.

A modern mandala is an involuntary confession of a peculiar
mental condition. There is no deity in the mandala, nor is there
any submission or reconciliation to a deity. The place of the
deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of man. 29

When one speaks of man, everybody means his own ego-
personality that is, his personality so far as he is conscious of
it and when one speaks of others one assumes that they have a
very similar personality. But since modern research has ac-
quainted us with the fact that individual consciousness is based
on and surrounded by an indefinitely extended unconscious
psyche, we must needs revise our somewhat old-fashioned preju-
dice that man is nothing but his consciousness. This naive
assumption must be confronted at once with the critical ques-
tion: Whose consciousness? The fact is, it would be a difficult
task to reconcile the picture I have of myself with the one which
other people have of me. Who is right? And who is the real indi-
vidual? If we go further and consider the fact that man is also
what neither he himself nor other people know of himan un-
known something which can yet be proved to exist the problem
of identity becomes more difficult still. Indeed, it is quite im-
possible to define the extent and the ultimate character of
psychic existence. When we now speak of man we mean the
indefinable whole of him, an ineffable totality, which can only
be formulated symbolically. I have chosen the term "self" to
designate the totality of man, the sum total of his conscious and
unconscious contents. 30 I have chosen this term in accordance
with Eastern philosophy, 31 which for centuries has occupied it-
self with the problems that arise when even the gods cease to
incarnate. The philosophy of the Upanishads corresponds to a
psychology that long ago recognized the relativity of the gods. 32
This is not to be confused with a stupid error like atheism. The

29 For the psychology of the mandala, see my commentary on The Secret of the
Golden Flower (1931 edn., pp. g6ff.) [Also "On Mandala Symbolism" (Swiss edn.,
pp. iS^ff.). EDITORS.]

30 See Psychological Types, Def. 51. [Also "The Relations between the Ego and
the Unconscious," par. 274; Aion 3 pars. 436:. (Swiss edn., pp. 446:.) EDITORS.]

31 Cf. Hauer, "Symbole und Erfahrung des Selbstes," p. 33,

32 Concerning the concept of the "relativity of God," see Psychological Types
(1933 edn., pp. 2972.).

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes
peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be ob-
served among primitives living today), the main body o psychic
life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was
projected, as we should say now. 33 Consciousness can hardly exist
in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of
emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious
knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began
with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the
withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This
was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One
step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were with-
drawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals.
Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost un-
recognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with
them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in
books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our
actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are
still so sure we know what other people think or what their true
character is. We are convinced that certain people have all the
bad qualities we do not know in ourselves or that they practise
all those vices which could, of course, never be our own. We
must still be exceedingly careful not to project our own shadows
too shamelessly; we are still swamped with projected illusions.
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all
these projections, then you get an individual who is conscious
of a considerable shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with
new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem
to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that,
they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the
"House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is
wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal
with his own shadow he has done something real for the world.
He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part
of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. These
problems are mostly so difficult because they are poisoned by
mutual projections. How can anyone see straight when he does
not even see himself and the darkness he unconsciously carries
with him into all his dealings?

33 This fact accounts for the theory of animism.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Modern psychological development leads to a much better
understanding as to what man really consists of. The gods at
first lived in superhuman power and beauty on the top of snow-
clad mountains or in the darkness of caves, woods, and seas.
Later on they drew together into one god, and then that god
became man. But in our day even the God-man seems to have
descended from his throne and to be dissolving himself in the
common man. That is probably why his seat is empty. Instead,
the common man suffers from a hybris of consciousness that
borders on the pathological. This psychic condition in the indi-
vidual corresponds by and large to the hypertrophy and totali-
tarian pretensions of the idealized State. In the same way that
the State has caught the individual, the individual imagines
that he has caught the psyche and holds her in the hollow of his
hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposi-
tion that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the
psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. In
reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and
even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far be-
yond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily
be compared to an island in the ocean. Whereas the island is
small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and
contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything
known on the island so that if it is a question of space, it does
not matter whether the gods are "inside" or "outside." It might
be objected that there is no proof that consciousness is nothing
more than an island in the ocean. Certainly it is impossible to
prove this, since the known range of consciousness is confronted
with the unknown extension of the unconscious, of which we
only know that it exists and by the very fact of its existence
exerts a limiting influence on consciousness and its freedom.
Wherever unconsciousness reigns, there is bondage and posses-
sion. The immensity of the ocean is simply a comparison; it
expresses in allegorical form the capacity of the unconscious to
limit and threaten consciousness. Empirical psychology loved,
until recently, to explain the "unconscious" as mere absence of
consciousness the term itself indicates as much just as shadow
is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of uncon-
scious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us,
that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

mere shadow could never be endowed with. When Carus, YOU
Hartmann and, in a sense, Schopenhauer equated the uncon-
scious with the world-creating principle, they were only sum*
ming up all those teachings of the past which, grounded iu
inner experience, saw the mysterious agent personified as the
gods. It suits our hypertrophied and hybristic modern conscious-
ness not to be mindful of the dangerous autonomy of the
unconscious and to treat it negatively as an absence of conscious-
ness. The hypothesis of invisible gods or daemons would be,
psychologically, a far more appropriate formulation, even
though it would be an anthropomorphic projection. But since
the development of consciousness requires the withdrawal of
all the projections we can lay our hands on, it is not possible
to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. If
the historical process of world despiritualization continues as
hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character out-
side us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown
man, whence it apparently originated,

142 The materialistic error was probably unavoidable at first.
Since the throne of God could not be discovered among the
galactic systems, the inference was that God had never existed.
The second unavoidable error is psychologism: if God is any-
thing, he must be an illusion derived from certain motives
from will to power, for instance, or from repressed sexuality.
These arguments are not new. Much the same thing was said
by the Christian missionaries who overthrew the idols of
heathen gods. But whereas the early missionaries were conscious
of serving a new God by combatting the old ones, modern
iconoclasts are unconscious of the one in whose name they are
destroying old values, Nietzsche thought himself quite conscious
and responsible when he smashed the old tablets, yet he felt a
peculiar need to back himself up with a revivified Zarathustra,
a sort of alter ego, with whom he often identifies himself in his
great tragedy Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche was no atheist,
but his God was dead. The result of this demise was a split in
himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self "Zarathustra"
or, at times, "Dionysus." In his fatal illness he signed his letters
"Zagreus," the dismembered god of the Thracians. The tragedy
of Zarathustra is that, because his God died, Nietzsche himself
became a ^od; and this happened because he was no atheist. He

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

was of too positive a nature to tolerate the urban neurosis of
atheism. It seems dangerous for such a man to assert that "God
is dead": he instantly becomes the victim of inflation. 34 Far
from being a negation, God is actually the strongest and most
effective "position" the psyche can reach, in exactly the same
sense in which Paul speaks of people "whose God is their belly"
(Phil. 3: 19). The strongest and therefore the decisive factor in
any individual psyche compels the same belief or fear, sub-
mission or devotion which a God would demand from man.
Anything despotic and inescapable is in this sense "God," and it
becomes absolute unless, by an ethical decision freely chosen,
one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a
position that is equally strong and invincible. If this psychic
position proves to be absolutely effective, it surely deserves to be
named a "God," and what is more, a spiritual God, since it
sprang from the freedom of ethical decision and therefore from
the mind. Man is free to decide whether "God" shall be a
"spirit" or a natural phenomenon like the craving of a morphine
addict, and hence whether "God" shall act as a beneficent or a
destructive force.

143 However indubitable and clearly understandable these psy-
chic events or decisions may be, they are very apt to lead people
to the false, unpsychological conclusion that it rests with them
to decide whether they will create a "God" for themselves or
not. There is no question of that, since each of us is equipped
with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree
and makes it practically illusory. Not only is "freedom of the
will" an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a mis-
nomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who
is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, im-
pulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind
of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an
Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served,
feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this
assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity. Bondage
and possession are synonymous. Always, therefore, there is
something in the psyche that takes possession and limits or
suppresses our moral freedom. In order to hide this undeniable

34 Concerning the concept "inflation," see "The Relations between the Ego and
the Unconscious," pp. 140(1,

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

but exceedingly unpleasant fact from ourselves and at the same
time pay lip-service to freedom, we have got accustomed to
saying apotropaically, "/ have such and such a desire or habit
or feeling of resentment/' instead of the more veracious "Such
and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment has me." The
latter formulation would certainly rob us even of the illusion
of freedom. But I ask myself whether this would not be better
in the end than fuddling ourselves with words. The truth is
that we do not enjoy masterless freedom; we are continually
threatened by psychic factors which, in the guise of "natural
phenomena/' may take possession of us at any moment. The
withdrawal of metaphysical projections leaves us almost defence-
less in the face of this happening, for we immediately identify
with every impulse instead of giving it the name of the "other,"
which would at least hold it at arm's length and prevent it from
storming the citadel of the ego. "Principalities and powers" are
always with us; we have no need to create them even if we could.
It is merely incumbent on us to choose the master we wish to
serve, so that his service shall be our safeguard against being
mastered by the "other" whom we have not chosen. We do not
create "God," we choose him.

144 Though our choice characterizes and defines "God," it is
always man-made, and the definition it gives is therefore finite
and imperfect. (Even the idea of perfection does not posit per-
fection.) The definition is an image, but this image does not
raise the unknown fact it designates into the realm of intelligi-
bility, otherwise we would be entitled to say that we had created
a God. The "master" we choose is not identical with the image
we project of him in time and space. He goes on working as
before, like an unknown quantity in the depths of the psyche.
We do not even know the nature of the simplest thought, let
alone the ultimate principles of the psyche. Also, we have no
control over its inner life. But because this inner life is in-
trinsically free and not subject to our will and intentions, it may
easily happen that the living thing chosen and defined by us will
drop out of its setting, the man-made image, even against our
will. Then, perhaps, we could say with Nietzsche, "God is dead."
Yet it would be truer to say, "He has put off our image, and
where shall we find him again?" The interregnum is full of
danger, for the natural facts will raise their claim in the form

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

of various -isms, which ate productive of nothing but anarchy
and destruction because inflation and man's hybris between
them have elected to make the ego, in all its ridiculous paltri-
ness, lord of the universe. That was the case with Nietzsche, the
uncomprehended portent of a whole epoch,

The individual ego is much too small, its brain is much too
feeble, to incorporate all the projections withdrawn from the
world. Ego and brain burst asunder in the effort; the psychia-
trist calls it schizophrenia. When Nietzsche said "God is dead/'
he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of Europe.
People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because
it stated a widespread psychological fact. The consequences were
not long delayed: after the fog of -isms, the catastrophe. Nobody
thought of drawing the slightest conclusions from Nietzsche's
pronouncement. Yet it has, for some ears, the same eerie sound
as that ancient cry which came echoing over the sea to mark
the end of the nature gods: "Great Pan is dead." 85

The life of Christ is understood by the Church on the one
hand as an historical, and on the other hand as an eternally exist-
ing, mystery. This is especially evident in the sacrifice of the
Mass. From a psychological standpoint this view can be trans-
lated as follows: Christ lived a concrete, personal, and unique
life which, in all essential features* had at the same time an
archetypal character. This character can be recognized from the
numerous connections of the biographical details with world-
wide myth-motifs. These undeniable connections are the main
reason why it is so difficult for researchers into the life of Jesus
to construct from the gospel reports an individual life divested
of myth. In the gospels themselves factual reports, legends, and
myths are woven into a whole. This is precisely what constitutes
the meaning of the gospels, and they would immediately lose
their character of wholeness if one tried to separate the indi-
vidual from the archetypal with a critical scalpel. The life of
Christ is no exception in that not a few of the great figures of
history have realized, more or less clearly, the archetype of the
hero's life with its characteristic changes of fortune. But the
ordinary man, too, unconsciously lives archetypal forms, and if
these are no longer valued it is only because of the prevailing
psychological ignorance. Indeed, even the fleeting phenomena

35 plutatdh, Zte defettu orctdulorum, 17*

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

of dreams often reveal distinctly archetypal patterns. At bottom,
all psychic events are so deeply grounded in the archetype and
are so much interwoven with it that in every case considerable
critical effort is needed to separate the unique from the typical
with any certainty. Ultimately, every individual life is at the
same time the eternal life of the species. The individual is con-
tinuously "historical" because strictly time-bound; the relation
of the type to time, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Since the
life of Christ is archetypal to a high degree, it represents to just
that degree the life of the archetype. But since the archetype
is the unconscious precondition of every human life, its life,
when revealed, also reveals the hidden, unconscious ground-
life of every individual. That is to say, what happens in the life
of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian
archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured and are expressed
over and over again or once and for all. And in it, too, the ques-
tion that concerns us here of God's death is anticipated in perfect
form. Christ himself is the typical dying and self-transforming
God.

147 The psychological situation from which we started is tanta-
mount to "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not
here" (Luke 24: si). But where shall we find the risen Christ?

*48 I do not expect any believing Christian to pursue these
thoughts of mine any further, for they will probably seem to him
absurd. I am not, however, addressing myself to the happy
possessors of faith, but to those many people for whom the light
has gone out, the mystery has faded, and God is dead. For most
of them there is no going back, and one does not know either
whether going back is always the better way. To gain an under-
standing of religious matters, probably all that is left us today
is the psychological approach. That is why I take these thought-
forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down
again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience. It
is certainly a difficult undertaking to discover connecting links
between dogma and immediate experience of psychological
archetypes, but a study of the natural symbols of the unconscious
gives us the necessary raw material.

J 49 God's death, or his disappearance, is by no means only a
Christian symbol. The search which follows the death is still
repeated today after the death of a Dalai Lama, and in antiquity

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

it was celebrated in the annual search for the Kore. Such a wide
distribution argues in favour of the universal occurrence of
this typical psychic process: the highest value, which gives life
and meaning, has got lost. This is a typical experience that has
been repeated many times, and its expression therefore occupies
a central place in the Christian mystery. The death or loss must
always repeat itself: Christ always dies, and always he is born;
for the psychic life of the archetype is timeless in comparison
with our individual time-boundness. According to what laws
now one and now another aspect of the archetype enters into
active manifestation, I do not know. I only know and here I am
expressing what countless other people know that the present
is a time of God's death and disappearance. The myth says he
was not to be found where his body was laid. "Body" means the
outward, visible form, the erstwhile but ephemeral setting for
the highest value. The myth further says that the value rose
again in a miraculous manner, transformed. It appears as a
miracle, for, when a value disappears, it always seems to be lost
irretrievably. So it is quite unexpected that it should come back.
The three days' descent into hell during death describes the
sinking of the vanished value into the unconscious, where, by
conquering the power of darkness, it establishes a new order,
and then rises up to heaven again, that is, attains supreme clarity
of consciousness. The fact that only a few people see the Risen
One means that no small difficulties stand in the way of finding
and recognizing the transformed value.

15 I showed earlier, with the help of dreams, how the uncon-
scious produces a natural symbol, technically termed a mandala,
which has the functional significance of a union of opposites, or
of mediation. These speculative ideas, symptomatic of an acti-
vated archetype, can be traced back to about the time of the
Reformation, which we find them formulated in the alchemical
treatises as symbolic geometrical figures which sought to express
the nature of the Deus terrenus, the philosophers' stone. For
instance, we read in the commentary to the Tractatus aureus:

This one thing to which the elements must be reduced is that little
circle holding the place of the centre in this squared figure. It is a
mediator making peace between enemies or the elements, that they
may love one another in a meet embrace. He alone brings about the

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

squaring of the circle, which many hitherto have sought, but few
have found. 36

Of this "mediator," the wonderful stone, Orthelius says:

For as ... the supernatural and eternal good, Christ Jesus our
Mediator and Saviour, who delivers us from eternal death, from the
devil, and from all evil, partakes of two natures, the divine and the
human, so likewise is that earthly saviour composed of two parts,
the heavenly and the earthly. With these he has restored us to health,
and delivers us from diseases heavenly and earthly, spiritual and
corporeal, visible and invisible. 37

Here the "saviour" does not come down from heaven but out
of the depths of the earth, i.e., from that which lies below con-
sciousness. These philosophers suspected that a "spirit" was im-
prisoned there, in the vessel of matter; a "white dove" compara-
ble to the Nous in the krater of Hermes, of which it is said:
"Plunge into this krater, if thou canst, by recognizing to what
end thou wast created, 38 and by believing that thou wilt rise up
to Him, who hath sent the krater down to earth." 39
15* This Nous or spirit was known as "Mercurius," 40 and it is
to this arcanum that the alchemical saying refers: "What-
ever the wise seek is in mercury." A very ancient formula, at-
tributed by Zosimos to the legendary Ostanes, runs: "Go to the
waters of the Nile, and there thou wilt find a stone that hath a
spirit [pneuma]." A commentator explains that this refers to
quicksilver (hydrargyron, mercury). 41 This spirit, coming from
God, is also the cause of the "greenness," the benedicta viriditas,
much praised by the alchemists. Mylius says of it: "God has
breathed into created things ... a kind of germination, which
is the viridescence." In Hildegard of Bingen's Hymn to the Holy
Ghost, which begins "O ignis Spiritus paraclite," we read:
"From you the clouds rain down, the heavens move, the stones
have their moisture, the waters give forth streams, and the earth

36 Manget, Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, I (1702), p. 408.

37 Theatrum chemicum, VI (1661), p. 431.

38 Cf. the very similar formula in the "Fundamentum" of St. Ignatius Loyola's
Spiritual Exercises. 39 Corpus Hermeticum, IV, 4.

40 Mercury is "wholly aerial and spiritual." Theobald de Hoghelande, "De
alchemiae difficultatibus," Theatr. chem., I (1602), p. 183.

41 Berthelot, Alch. grecs, III, vi, 5.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

sweats out greenness." This water of the Holy Ghost played an
important role in alchemy since the remotest times, as the
vdo)p Otlov or aqua permanens, a symbol of the spirit assimilated
to matter, which according to Heraclitus turned to water. The
Christian parallel was naturally Christ's blood, for which reason
the water of the philosophers was named "spiritualis sanguis." 42
The arcane substance was also known simply as the rotun-
dum, by which was understood the anima media natura, iden-
tical with the anima mundi. The latter is a virtus Dei, an organ
or a sphere that surrounds God. Of this Mylius says: "[God has]
love all round him. Others have declared him to be an intellec-
tual and fiery spirit, 43 having no form, but transforming himself
into whatsoever he wills and making himself equal to all things;
who by a manifold relation is in a certain measure bound up
with his creatures." M This image of God enveloped by the
anima is the same as Gregory the Great's allegory of Christ and
the Church: "A woman shall compass a man" (Jeremiah 31:
22). 45 This is an exact parallel to the Tantric conception of Shiva
in the embrace of his Shakti. 46 From this fundamental image of
the male-female opposites united in the centre is derived
another designation of the lapis as the ' 'hermaphrodite"; it is
also the basis for the mandala motif. The extension of God as
the anima media natura into every individual creature means
that there is a divine spark, the scintilla, 47 indwelling even in

42 Mylius, Philosophia reformata, p. 42; Hildegard's hymn in Daniel, Thesaurus,
V, pp. 201-2; Dorn, "Congeries," Theatr. chem., I, p. 584; "Turba philoso-
phorum," Arils auriferae, I (1593), P- ^9-

43 Originally a Platonic idea. 44 Mylius, p. 8.

45 St. Gregory, Expositiones in Hbrum I Regum, I, i, i; Migne, P.L., vol. 79,
col. 23.

46 Barbelo or Ennoia plays the role of the anima in Barbelo-Gnosis. Bousset
thinks the name "Barbelo" is a corruption of parthenos, Virgin.' It is also trans-
lated as 'God is in the Four.'

47 This idea was formulated in the conception of the "anima in compedibus," the
fettered or imprisoned soul. (Cf. Dorn, "Speculativa philosophia," Theatr. chem.,
I, pp. 272, 298; "De spagirico artificio," etc., ibid., I, pp. 457, 497.) So far, I
have found no evidence that the medieval natural philosophers based themselves
consciously on any heretical traditions. But the parallels are astonishing. Those
"enchained in Hades" are mentioned very early on, in the Comarius text dating
from the ist century (Berthelot, Alch. grecs, IV, xx, 8.) For the spark in the dark-
ness and the spirit imprisoned in matter, see Leisegang, Die Gnosis, pp. i54f. and
233. A similar motif is the conception of the "natura abscondita," which is dis-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

dead matter, in utter darkness. The medieval natural philoso-
phers endeavoured to make this spark rise up again as a divine
image from the "round vessel." Such ideas can only be based on
the existence of unconscious psychic processes, for otherwise we
simply could not understand how the same ideas crop up every-
where. Our dream-example shows that such images are not in-
ventions o the intellect; rather, they are natural revelations.
And they will probably be found again and again in exactly
the same way. The alchemists themselves say that the arcanum
is sometimes revealed in a dream. 48

153 The old natural philosophers not only felt pretty clearly, but
actually said, that the miraculous substance whose essential
nature they symbolized by a circle divided into four parts, was
man himself. The "Aenigmata philosophorum" 49 speaks of
the homo albus who is formed in the hermetic vessel. This
"white man" is the equivalent of the priest figure in the visions
of Zosimos. In the Arabic-transmitted "Book of Krates" 50 we
find an equally significant allusion in the dialogue between the
spiritual and the worldly man (corresponding to the pneu-
matikos and sarkikos of the Gnostics). The spiritual man says
to the worldly man: "Are you capable of knowing your soul in
a complete manner? If you knew it as is fitting, and if you knew
what makes it better, you would be able to recognize that the
names which the philosophers formerly gave it are not its true
names. . . . O dubious names which resemble the true names,
what errors and agonies you have provoked among men!" The
names refer in turn to the philosophers' stone. A treatise
ascribed to Zosimos, though it more likely derives from the

coverable in man and in all things, and is of the same nature as the anima. Thus
Dorn ("De spagirico artificio," p. 457) says: "In the body of man there is hidden
a certain substance of heavenly nature known to very few.*' In his "Philosophia
specUlativa" (p. 298) the same author says: ''There is in natural things a certain
truth not seen by the outward eye but perceived by the mind alone. Of this the
philosophers had experience, and found its virtue to be such that it worked
miracles." The idea of the "hidden nature" occurs already in Pseudo-DemocritUs.
(Berthelot, II, iii, 6.)

48 A classical example is the "Visio Arislei" (Art. autif., I, pp. 146^.). Also the
visions of Zosimos (Berthelot, III, i-vi; and my "Some Observations on the Visions
of ZOsimos." Revelation of the magistery in a dream in Setidivogius, "Parabola"
(Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, II, 1702, p. 475).

49 Art. aurif., I, p. 151. so Berthelot, La Chimie au moyen age, III, p* 56.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

Arabic-Latinist school of literature, says unmistakably o the
stone: ''Thus it comes from man, and you are its mineral (raw
material); in you it is found, and from you it is extracted . . .
and it remains inseparably in you." 51 Solomon Trismosin ex-
presses it most clearly of all:

Study what thou art,
Whereof thou art a part,
What thou knowest of this art,
This is really what thou art.
All that is without thee
Also is within.
Thus wrote Trismosin. 52

And Gerhard Dorn cries out: "Transform yourselves into
living philosophical stones!" 53 There can hardly be any doubt
that not a few of those seekers had the dawning knowledge that
the secret nature of the stone was man's own self. This "self"
was evidently never thought of as an entity identical with the
ego, and for this reason it was described as a "hidden nature"
dwelling in inanimate matter, as a spirit, daemon, 54 or fiery
spark. By means of the philosophical opus, which was mostly
thought of as a mental one, 55 this entity was freed from darkness
and imprisonment, and finally it enjoyed a resurrection, often
represented in the form of an apotheosis and equated with the
resurrection of Christ. 56 It is clear that these ideas can have

5i"Rosinus ad Sarratantam," Art. aurif., I, p. 311.

52 Aureum vellus (1598), p. 5. Trans, by J. K. in Splendor soils (1920).

53 "Speculativa philosophia," Theatr. chem., I, p. 267.

54 Olympiodorus (Berthelot, Alch. grecs f II, iv, 43).

55 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 2436:.

56 Mylius (Phil, ref., p. 106) says that the masculine and feminine components of
the stone must first be killed "that they may be brought to life again in a new
and incorruptible resurrection, so that thereafter they may be immortal." The
stone is also compared to the future resurrected body as a "corpus glorificatum."
The "Aurea hora/' or "Aurora consurgens" (Art. aurif., I, p. 200) says it is "like
to a body which is glorified in the day of judgment." Cf. de Hoghelande, Theatr.
chem., I, p. 189; "Consilium coniugii," Ars chemica (1566), p. 128; "Aurea hora,"
Art. aurtf., I, p. 195; Djabir, "Le Livre de la mis&ricorde," in Berthelot, La Chimie
au moyen age, III, p. 188; "Le Livre d'Ostanes," in ibid., p. 117; Comarius, in
Berthelot, Alch. grecs, IV, xx, 15; Zosimos, in ibid., Ill, viii, 2, and III, i, 2; Turba
phil., ed. Ruska, p. 139; Michael Maier, Symbola aureae mensae (1617), p. 599;
Rosarium philosophorum (1550), fol. 2a, IV, illustration.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

nothing to do with the empirical ego, but are concerned with a
"divine nature" quite distinct from it, and hence, psycholog-
ically speaking, with a consciousness-transcending content issu-
ing from the realm of the unconscious.

155 With this we come back to our modern experiences. They
are obviously similar in nature to the basic medieval and clas-
sical ideas, and can therefore be expressed by the same, or at any
rate similar, symbols. The medieval representations of the circle
are based on the idea of the microcosm, a concept that was also
applied to the stone. 57 The stone was a 'little world' ' like man
himself, a sort of inner image of the cosmos, reaching not into
immeasurable distances but into an equally immeasurable
depth-dimension, i.e., from the small to the unimaginably small-
est. Mylius therefore calls this centre the "punctum cordis." 58

*5 6 The experience formulated by the modern mandala is typi-
cal of people who cannot project the divine image any longer.
Owing to the withdrawal and introjection of the image they are
in danger of inflation and dissociation of the personality. The
round or square enclosures built round the centre therefore
have the purpose of protective walls or of a vas hermeticum, to
prevent an outburst or a disintegration. Thus the mandala de-
notes and assists exclusive concentration on the centre, the self.
This is anything but egocentricity. On the contrary, it is a much
needed self-control for the purpose of avoiding inflation and
dissociation.

157 The enclosure, as we have seen, has also the meaning of what
is called in Greek a temenos, the precincts of a temple or any
isolated sacred place. The circle in this case protects or isolates
an inner content or process that should not get mixed up with
things outside. Thus the mandala repeats in symbolic form
archaic ways and means which were once concrete realities. As I
have already mentioned, the inhabitant of the temenos was a
god. But the prisoner, or the well-protected dweller in the man-
dala, does not seem to be a god, since the symbols used stars,
crosses, globes, etcdo not signify a god but an obviously im-
portant part of the human personality. One might almost say
that man himself, or his innermost soul, is the prisoner or the

57 "Aphorism! Basiliani," Theatr. chern., IV (1613), p. 368; de Hoghelande, ibid.,
I (1602), p. 178; Dorn, "Congeries," ibid., I, p. 585; and many other places.

58 philosophia reformata (1622), p. 21.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

protected inhabitant of themandala. Since modern mandalas are
amazingly close parallels to the ancient magical circles, which
usually have a deity in the centre, it is clear that in the modern
mandala manthe deep ground, as it were, of the self is not a
substitute but a symbol for the deity.

*58 It is a remarkable fact that this symbol is a natural and spon-
taneous occurrence and that it is always an essentially uncon-
scious product, as our dream shows. If we want to know what
happens when the idea of God is no longer projected as an
autonomous entity, this is the answer of the unconscious psyche.
The unconscious produces the idea of a deified or divine man
who is imprisoned, concealed, protected, usually depersonalized,
and represented by an abstract symbol. The symbols often con-
tain allusions to the medieval conception of the microcosm, as
was the case with my patient's world clock, for instance. Many
of the processes that lead to the mandala, and the mandala it-
self, seem to be direct confirmations of medieval speculation.
It looks as if the patients had read those old treatises on the
philosophers' stone, the divine water, the rotundum, the squar-
ing of the circle, the four colours, etc. And yet they have never
been anywhere near alchemical philosophy and its abstruse
symbolism.

*59 It is difficult to evaluate such facts properly. They could be
explained as a sort of regression to archaic ways of thinking, if
one's chief consideration was their obvious and impressive
parallelism with medieval symbolism. But whenever such re-
gressions occur, the result is always inferior adaptation and a
corresponding lack of efficiency. This is by no means typical
of the psychological development depicted here. On the con-
trary, neurotic and dissociated conditions improve considerably
and the whole personality undergoes a change for the better.
For this reason I do not think the process in question should be
explained as regression, which would amount to saying that it
was a morbid condition. I am rather inclined to understand the
apparently retrograde connections of mandala psychology 59 as
the continuation of a process of spiritual development which
began in the early Middle Ages, and perhaps even further back,

< r >9 Koepgen (see above, p, 5911.), rightly speaks of the "circular thinking" of the
Gnostics. This is only another term for totality or "all-round" thinking, since,
symbolically, roundness is the same as wholeness.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

in early Christian times. There is documentary evidence that
the essential symbols of Christianity were already in existence
in the first century. I am thinking of the Greek treatise entitled:
"Comarius, the Archpriest, teaches Cleopatra the Divine Art/* 60
The text is of Egyptian origin and bears no trace of Christian
influence. There are also the mystical texts of Pseudo-Democritus
and Zosimos. 61 Jewish and Christian influences are noticeable
in the last-named author, though the main symbolism is Neo-
platonist and is closely connected with the philosophy of the
Corpus Hermeticum. Q2

The fact that the symbolism connected with the mandala
traces its near relatives back to pagan sources casts a peculiar
light upon these apparently modern psychological occurrences.
They seem to continue a Gnostic trend of thought without be-
ing supported by direct tradition. If lam right in supposing that
every religion is a spontaneous expression of a certain predomi-
nant psychological condition, then Christianity was the formula-
tion of a condition that predominated at the beginning of our
era and lasted for several centuries. But a particular psycholog-
ical condition which predominates for a certain length of time
does not exclude the existence of other psychological conditions
at other times, and these are equally capable of religious ex-
pression. Christianity had at one time to fight for its life against
Gnosticism, which corresponded to another psychological condi-
tion. Gnosticism was stamped out completely and its remnants
are so badly mangled that special study is needed to get any in-
sight at all into its inner meaning. But if the historical roots of
our symbols extend beyond the Middle Ages they are certainly
to be found in Gnosticism. It would not seem to me illogical if
a psychological condition, previously suppressed, should re-
assert itself when the main ideas of the suppressive condition
begin to lose their influence. In spite of the suppression of the
Gnostic heresy, it continued to flourish throughout the Middle
Ages under the disguise of alchemy. It is a well-known fact that
alchemy consisted of two parts which complement one another
on the one hand chemical research proper and on the other the

60 Berthelot, Alch. grecs, IV, xx. According to F. Sherwood Taylor, in "A Survey
of Greek Alchemy," pp. logff., this is probably the oldest Greek text of the ist
century. Cf. also Jensen, Die alteste Alchemic.

61 Berthelot, III, i. 62 Scott, Hermetica.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

"theoria" or "philosophia." 63 As is clear from the writings of
Pseudo-Democritus in the first century, entitled rd <wt*a /cat rd
jtiucrrocd, 64 the two aspects already belonged together at the be-
ginning of our era. The same holds true of the Leiden papyri
and the writings of Zosimos in the third century. The religious
or philosophical views of ancient alchemy were clearly Gnostic.
The later views seem to cluster round the following central idea:
The anima mundi, the demiurge or divine spirit that incubated
the chaotic waters of the beginning, remained in matter in a
potential state, and the initial chaotic condition persisted with
it. 65 Thus the philosophers, or the "sons of wisdom" as they

63 Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 276ff.

64 Berthelot, Alch. grecs, II, i f.

65 Very early among the Greek alchemists we encounter the idea of the "stone
that has a spirit" (Berthelot, Alch. grecs, III, vi). The "stone" is the prima
materia, called hyle or chaos or massa confusa. This alchemical terminology was
based on Plato's Timaeus. Joannes C. Steeb (Coelum sephiroticum Hebraeorum,
1679) says: "Neither earth, nor air, nor fire, nor water, nor those things which are
made of these things nor those things of which these are made, should be called
the prima materia, which must be the receptacle and the mother of that which
is made and that which can be beheld, but a certain species which cannot be
beheld and is formless and sustains all things" (p. 26). The same author calls the
prima materia "the primeval chaotic earth, Hyle, Chaos, the abyss, the mother of
things. . . . That first chaotic matter . . . was watered by the streams of heaven,
and adorned by God with numberless Ideas of the species." He explains how the
spirit of God descended into matter and what became of him there (p. 33): "The
spirit of God fertilized the upper waters with a peculiar fostering warmth and
made them as it were milky. . . . The fostering warmth of the Holy Spirit
brought about, therefore, in the waters that are above the heavens [aquis
supracoelestibus; cf. Genesis 1:7], a virtue subtly penetrating and nourish-
ing all things, which, combining with light, generated in the mineral kingdom
of the lower regions the mercurial serpent [this could refer just as well to the
caduceus of Aesculapius, since the serpent is also the origin of the medicina
catholica, the panacea], in the vegetable kingdom the blessed greenness [chloro-
phyll], in the animal kingdom a formative virtue, so that the supracelestial spirit
of the waters united in marriage with light may justly be called the soul of the
world." "The lower waters are darksome, and absorb the outflowings of light in
their capacious depths" (p. 38). This doctrine is based on nothing less than the
Gnostic legend of the Nous descending from the higher spheres and being caught
in the embrace of Physis. The Mercurius of the alchemists is winged ("volatile").
Abul-Qasim Muhammad (Kitab al'ilm al muktasab, etc., ed. Holmyard), speaks
of "Hermes, the volatile" (p. 37), and in many other places he is called a
"spiritus." Moreover, he was understood to be a Hermes psychopompos, showing
the way to Paradise (Michael Maier, Symbola, p. 592). This is very much the

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

called themselves, took their prima materia to be a part of the
original chaos pregnant with spirit. By "spirit" they understood
a semimaterial pneuma, a sort of "subtle body," which they also
called "volatile*' and identified chemically with oxides and other
dissoluble compounds. They called this spirit Mercurius, which
was chemically quicksilver though "Mercurius noster" was no
ordinary Hgl and philosophically Hermes, the god of revela-
tion, who, as Hermes Trismegistus, was the arch-authority on

role of a redeemer, which was attributed to the Nous in "Epfiou Trpfo Tar." (Scott,
Hermetica, I, pp. 1496:.)* For the Pythagoreans the soul was entirely devoured by
matter, except for its reasoning part. (Zeller, Die Philosophic der Griechen, III,

n, P- 138-)

In the old "Commentariolum in Tabulam smaragdinam" (Ars chemica),
Hortulanus speaks of the "massa confusa" or the "chaos confusum" from which
the world was created and from which also the mysterious lapis is generated. The
lapis was identified with Christ from the beginning of the i4th century (Petrus
Bonus, Pretiosa margarita, 1546). Orthelius (Theatr. chem., VI, p. 431) says: "Our
Saviour Jesus Christ . . . partakes of two natures. ... So likewise is that earthly
saviour made up of two parts, the heavenly and the earthly." In the same way
the Mercurius imprisoned in matter was identified with the Holy Ghost. Johannes
Grasseus ("Area arcani," Theatr. chem. f VI. p. 314) quotes: "The gift of the Holy
Spirit, that is the lead of the philosophers which they call the lead of the air,
wherein is a resplendent white dove which is called the salt of the metals, in
which consists the magistery of the work."

Concerning the extraction and transformation of the Chaos, Christopher of
Paris ("Elucidarius artis transmutatoriae," Theatr. chem., VI, p. 228) writes:
"In this Chaos the said precious substance and nature truly exists potentially, in
a single confused mass of the elements. Human reason ought therefore to apply
itself to bringing our heaven into actuality." "Our heaven" refers to the micro-
cosm and is also called the "quintessence." It is "incorruptible" and "immaculate."
Johannes de Rupescissa (La Vertu et la Proprie'te de la Quinte Essence, 1581)
calls it "le ciel humain." It is clear that the philosophers projected the vision of
the golden and blue circle onto their aurum philosophicum (which was named
the "rotundum"; see Maier, De circulo, 1616, p. 15) and onto the blue quin-
tessence. The terms chaos and massa confusa were in general use, according to
the testimony of Bernardus Sylvestris, a contemporary of William of Champeaux
(1070-1121). His work, De mundi universitate libri duo, had a widespread influ-
ence. He speaks of the "confusion of the primary matter, that is, Hyle" (p. 5, li.
18), the "congealed mass, formless chaos, refractory matter, the face of being, a
discolored mass discordant with itself" (p. 7, li. 18-19), "a mass of confusion" (p.
56, XI, li. 10). Bernardus also mentions the descensus spiritus as follows: "When
Jove comes down into the lap of his bride, all the world is moved and would
urge the soil to bring forth" (p. 51, li. 21-22). Another variant is the idea of the
King submerged or concealed in the sea (Maier, Symbola, p. 380; "Visio Arislei,"
Art. aurif., I, pp. 1466:.).

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

alchemy. 66 Their aim was to extract the original divine spirit
out of the chaos, and this extract was called the quinta essentia,
aqua permanens, Mwp 0w, 0a<^ or tinctura. A famous alche-
mist, Johannes de Rupescissa (d. 1375)> 6T calls the quintessence
"le ciel humain," the human sky or heaven. For him it was a
blue liquid and incorruptible like the sky. He says that the
quintessence is of the colour of the sky "and our sun has adorned
it, as the sun adorns the sky." The sun is an allegory of gold.
He says: "This sun is true gold." He continues: "These two
things joined together influence in us ... the condition of the
Heaven of heavens, and of the heavenly Sun." His idea is, obvi-
ously, that the quintessence, the blue sky with the golden sun
in it, evokes corresponding images of the heaven and the heaven-
ly sun in ourselves. It is a picture of a blue and golden micro-
cosm, 68 and I take it to be a direct parallel to Guillaume's celes-
tial vision. The colours are, however, reversed; with Rupescissa
the disc is golden and the sky blue. My patient, therefore, hav-
ing a similar arrangement, seems to lean more towards the
alchemical side.

The miraculous liquid, the divine water, called sky or
heaven, probably refers to the supra-celestial waters of Genesis
1:7. In its functional aspect it was thought to be a sort of bap-
tismal water which, like the holy water of the Church, possesses
a creative and transformative quality. 69 The Catholic Church

66 For instance, the genius of the planet Mercury reveals the mysteries to Pseudo-
Democritus. (Berthelot, Alch. grecs, I, Introduction, p. 236.)

67 j. de Rupescissa, La Vertu, p. 19.

68 Djabir, in La Lime de la Misericorde, says that the philosophers' stone is equal
to a microcosm. (Berthelot, La Chimie au moyen age, III, p. 179.)

69 It is difficult not to assume that the alchemists were influenced by the alle-
gorical style of patristic literature. They even claimed some of the Fathers as
representatives of the Royal Art, for instance Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas,
Alanus de Insulis. A text like the "Aurora consurgens" is full of allegorical inter-
pretations of the scriptures. It has even been ascribed to Thomas Aquinas. Never-
theless, water was in fact used as an allegory of the Holy Spirit: "Water is the
living grace of the Holy Spirit" (Rupert, Abbot of Deutz, in Migne, PZ., vol. 169,
col. 353). "Flowing water is the Holy Spirit" (Bruno, Bishop of Wiirzburg, in
Migne, P.L., vol. 142, col. 293). "Water is the infusion of the Holy Spirit" (Gar-
nerius of St. Victor, in Migne, PZ., vol. 193, col. 279). Water is also an allegory
of Christ's humanity (Gaudentius, in Migne, PZ., vol. 20, col. 983). Very often
water appears as dew (ros Gedeonis), and dew, likewise, is an allegory of Christ:

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

still performs the rite of the benedictio fontis on Holy Saturday
before Easter. 70 The rite consists in a repetition of the descensus
spiritus sancti in aquam. The ordinary water thereby acquires
the divine quality of transforming and giving spiritual rebirth
to man. This is exactly the alchemical idea of the divine water,
and there would be no difficulty whatever in deriving the aqua
permanens of alchemy from the rite of the benedictio fontis
were it not that the former is of pagan origin and certainly the
older of the two. We find the miraculous water mentioned in
the first treatises of Greek alchemy, which belong to the first
century. 71 Moreover the descent of the spirit into Physis is a
Gnostic legend that greatly influenced Mani. And it was possibly
through Manichean influences that it became one of the main
ideas of Latin alchemy. The aim of the philosophers was to
transform imperfect matter chemically into gold, the panacea,
or the elixir vitae, but philosophically or mystically into the

"Dew is seen in the fire" (Romanus, De theophania, in Pitra, Analecta sacra, I, p.
21). "Now has Gideon's dew flowed on earth" (Romanus, De nativitate, ibid., p.
237). The alchemists thought that their aqua permanens was endued with a virtue
which they called "flos" (flower). It had the power of changing body into spirit
and giving it an incorruptible quality (Turba phil, ed. Ruska, p. 197). The
water was also called "acetum" (acid), "whereby God finished his work, whereby
also bodies take on spirit and are made spiritual" (Turba, p. 126). Another name
for it is "spiritus sanguis" (blood spirit, Turba, p. 129). The Turba is an early
Latin treatise of the isth century, translated from an originally Arabic compila-
tion dating back to the Qth and loth centuries. Its contents, however, stem from
Hellenistic sources. The Christian allusion in "spiritualis sanguis" might be due
to Byzantine influence. Aqua permanens is quicksilver, argentum -vivum (Hg).
"Our living silver is our clearest water" (Rosarium phil, in Art. aurif., II, p.
213). The aqua is also called fire (ibid., p. 218). The body, or substance, is trans-
formed by water and fire, a complete parallel to the Christian idea of baptism
and spiritual transformation.

70 Missale Romanum. The rite is old and was known as the "lesser (or greater)
blessing of salt and water" from about the 8th century.

71 In "Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horus" (Berthelot, Alch. grecs, I, xiii), an
angel brings Isis a small vessel filled with transparent water, the arcanum. This
is an obvious parallel to the krater of Hermes (Corpus Hermeticum, I) and of
Zosimos (Berthelot, III, li, 8), which was filled with nous. In the ^uo-tica Kal ^arma.
of Pseudo-Democritus (Berthelot, II, i, 63), the divine water is said to effect a
transformation by bringing the "hidden nature" to the surface. And in the
treatise of Comarius we find the miraculous waters that produce a new springtime
(Berthelot, Traductions, p. 281).

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

divine hermaphrodite, the second Adam, 72 the glorified, incor-
ruptible body of resurrection, 73 or the lumen luminum the
illumination of the human mind, or sapientia. As I have shown,
together with Richard Wilhelm, Chinese alchemy produced the
same idea, that the goal of the opus magnum is the creation of
the "diamond body." 75

All these parallels are an attempt to put my psychological
observations into their historical setting. Without the historical
connection they would remain suspended in mid air, a mere
curiosity, although one could find numerous other modern
parallels to the dreams described here. For instance, there is the
following dream of a young woman. The initial dream was
mainly concerned with the memory of an actual experience, a
baptizing ceremony in a Protestant sect that took place under
particularly grotesque and even repulsive conditions. The asso-
ciations were a precipitate of all the dreamer's disappointments
with religion. But the dream that came immediately after
showed her a picture which she did not understand and could
not relate to the previous dream. One could have aided her
understanding by the simple device of prefacing her second
dream with the words "on the contrary." This was the dream:
She was in a planetarium, a very impressive place overhung by
the vault of the sky. In the sky two stars were shining; a white
one, which was Mercury, but the other star emitted warm red

72 Gnosius (in Hermetis Trismegisti Tractatus vere Aureus, cum Scholiis Dominici
Gnosii, 1610, pp. 44 and 101) speaks of "Hermaphroditus noster Adamicus" when
treating of the quaternity in the circle. The centre is the "mediator making peace
between enemies," obviously a uniting symbol (cf. Psychological Types, 1923 edn.,
pp. 2346:. and Def. 51). [Also Aion, par. 304 (Swiss edn., pp. 2 8sff. EDITORS.] The
hermaphrodite is born of the "self-impregnating dragon" (Art. aurif., I, p. 303),
who is none other than Mercurius, the anima mundi. (Maier, Symbola, p. 43;
Berthelot, I, 87.) The uroboros is an hermaphroditic symbol. The hermaphrodite
is also called the Rebis ("made of two"), frequently depicted in the form of an
apotheosis (for instance in the Rosarium, in Art. aurif., II, pp. 291 and 359;
Reusner, Pandora, 1588, p, 253).

73 The "Aurora consurgens" (Part I) says, quoting Senior: "There is one thing
which never dies, for it lives by continual increase, when the body shall be
glorified in the final resurrection of the dead. . . . Then shall the second Adam
say to the first and to his children: Come ye blessed of my Father/' etc.

74 Alphidius (i2th cent.?): "Of them is born the modern light (lux moderna), to
which no light is like in all the world." (Rosarium, in Art. aurif., II, p. 248;
"Tractatus aureus," Ars chem.)

75 Jung and Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden Flower.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

waves of light and was unknown to her. She now saw that the
walls underneath the vault were covered with frescoes. But she
could recognize only one of them: it was an antique picture of
the tree-birth of Adonis.

163 The "red waves of light" she took to be "warm feelings/' i.e.,
love, and she now thought the star must have been Venus. She
had once seen a picture of the tree-birth in a museum and had
fancied that Adonis, as the dying and resurgent god, must also
be a god of rebirth.

164 In the first dream, then, there was violent criticism of
Church religion, followed in the second dream by the mandala
vision of a world clock which is what a planetarium is in the
fullest sense. In the sky the divine pair stands united, he white,
she red, thus reversing the famous alchemical pair, where he is
red and she is white, whence she was called Beya (Arabic al
baida, 'the White One'), and he was called "servus rubeus,"
the 'red slave/ although, as Gabricius (Arabic kibrit> 'sulphur'),
he is her royal brother. The divine pair makes one think of
Guillaume de Digulleville's Christian allegory. The allusion to
the tree-birth of Adonis corresponds to those dreams of my
patient which had to do with mysterious rites of creation and
renewal. 76

165 So in principle these two dreams largely repeat the thought-
processes of my patient, although having nothing in common
with the latter except the spiritual malaise of our time. As I
have already pointed out, the connection of spontaneous mod-
ern symbolism with ancient theories and beliefs is not estab-
lished by direct or indirect tradition, nor even by a secret
tradition as has sometimes been surmised, though there are no
tenable proofs of this. 77 The most careful inquiry has never
revealed any possibility of my patients' being acquainted with
the relevant literature or having any other information about
such ideas. It seems that their unconscious worked along the
same line of thought which has manifested itself time and again
in the last two thousand years. Such a continuity can only exist
if we assume a certain unconscious condition as an inherited
a priori factor. By this I naturally do not mean the inheritance
of ideas, which would be difficult if not impossible to prove. I

76 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, Part II.

77 Waite, The Secret Tradition in Alchemy.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

suppose, rather, the inherited quality to be something like the
formal possibility of producing the same or similar ideas over
and over again. I have called this possibility the "archetype.' 1
Accordingly, the archetype would be a structural quality or con-
dition peculiar to a psyche that is somehow connected with the
brain. 78

166 In the light of these historical parallels the mandala symbol-
izes either the divine being hitherto hidden and dormant in the
body and now extracted and revivified, or else the vessel or the
room in which the transformation of man into a divine being
takes place. I know such formulations are fatally reminiscent
of the wildest metaphysical speculations. I am sorry if it sounds
crazy, but this is exactly what the human psyche produces and
always has produced. Any psychology which assumes it can do
without these facts must exclude them artificially. I would call
this a philosophical prejudice, inadmissible from the empirical
point of view. I should perhaps emphasize that we do not estab-
lish any metaphysical truth with these formulations. It is merely
a statement that the psyche functions in such a way. And it is a
fact that my patient felt a great deal better after the vision of
the mandala. If you understand the problem it solved for him,
you can also understand why he had such a feeling of "sublime
harmony."

16 7 I would not hesitate for a moment to suppress all specula-
tions about the possible consequences of an experience as ab-
struse and remote as the mandala, if this were feasible. But for
me, unfortunately, this type of experience is neither abstruse nor
remote. On the contrary, it is an almost daily occurrence in my
profession. I know a fair number of people who have to take
their experience seriously if they want to live at all. They can
only choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. The devil
is the mandala or something equivalent to it and the deep blue
sea is their neurosis. The well-meaning rationalist will point
out that I am casting out the devil with Beelzebub and replacing
an honest neurosis by the swindle of a religious belief. As to the
former charge, I have nothing to say in reply, being no metaphys-
ical expert. But as to the latter one, I beg leave to point out that
it is not a question of belief but of experience. Religious experi-
ence is absolute; it cannot be disputed. You can only say that

78 Cf. my "Psychological Factors Determining Human Behaviour."

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION

you have never had such an experience, whereupon your oppo-
nent will reply: "Sorry, I have." And there your discussion will
come to an end. No matter what the world thinks about re-
ligious experience, the one who has it possesses a great treasure,
a thing that has become for him a source o life, meaning, and
beauty, and that has given a new splendour to the world and to
mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by
which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such
an experience is not valid, and that such pistis is mere illusion?
Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about the ultimate
things than the one that helps you to live? That is the reason
why I take careful account religiol of the symbols produced
by the unconscious. They are the one thing that is capable of
convincing the critical mind of modern man. And they are con-
vincing for a very old-fashioned reason: They are overwhelming,
which is precisely what the Latin word conmncere means. The
thing that cures a neurosis must be as convincing as the neurosis,
and since the latter is only too real, the helpful experience must
be equally real. It must be a very real illusion, if you want to
put it pessimistically. But what is the difference between a real
illusion and a healing religious experience? It is merely a differ-
ence of words. You can say, for instance, that life is a disease
with a very bad prognosis: it lingers on for years, only to end
with death; or that normality is a general constitutional defect;
or that man is an animal with a fatally overgrown brain. This
kind of thinking is the prerogative of habitual grumblers with
bad digestions. No one can know what the ultimate things are.
We must therefore take them as we experience them. And if
such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful,
more complete and more satisfactory to yourself and to those
you love, you may safely say: "This was the grace of God."

No transcendental truth is thereby demonstrated, and we
must confess in all humility that religious experience is extra
ecclesiam, subjective, and liable to boundless error. Yet, if the
spiritual adventure of our time is the exposure of human con-
sciousness to the undefined and indefinable, there would seem
to be good reasons for thinking that even the Boundless is per-
vaded by psychic laws, which no man invented, but of which
he has "gnosis" in the symbolism of Christian dogma. Only heed-
less fools will wish to destroy this; the lover of the soul, never.

105

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE
DOGMA OF THE TRINITY

Noli foras ire, in teipsum redi;

in interiore homine habitat veritas.

(Go not outside, return into thyself:
Truth dwells in the inward man.)

St. Augustine,
Liber de vera religione, xxix (72)

INTRODUCTION

The present study grew up out of a lecture I gave at the
Eranos meeting in 1940, under the title "On the Psychology of
the Idea of the Trinity." The lecture, though subsequently
published, 1 was no more than a sketch, and it was clear to me
from the beginning that it needed improving. Hence I felt
under a kind of moral obligation to return to this theme in
order to treat it in a manner befitting its dignity and importance.

From the reactions the lecture provoked, it was plain that
some of my readers found a psychological discussion of Chris-
tian symbols objectionable even when it carefully avoided any
infringement of their religious value. Presumably my critics
would have found less to object to had the same psychological
treatment been accorded to Buddhist symbols, whose sacredness
is just as indubitable. Yet, what is sauce for the goose is sauce
for the gander. I have to ask myself also, in all seriousness,
whether it might not be far more dangerous if Christian symbols
were made inaccessible to thoughtful understanding by being
banished to a sphere of sacrosanct unintelligibility. They can
easily become so remote from us that their irrationality turns

i"Zur Psychologic der Trinitatsidee," Eranos-Jahrbuch 1940-41 (Zurich, 1942).
[Later revised and expanded as "Versuch zu einer psychologischen Deutung des
Trinitatsdogmas," Symbolik des Geistes (Zurich, 1948), pp. 321-446, from which
version the present translation is made. EDITORS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

into preposterous nonsense. Faith is a charisma not granted to
all; instead, man has the gift of thought, which can strive after
the highest things. The timid defensiveness certain moderns
display when it comes to thinking about symbols was certainly
not shared by St. Paul or by many of the venerable Church
Fathers. 2 This timidity and anxiety about Christian symbols is
not a good sign. If these symbols stand for a higher truth which,
presumably, my critics do not doubt then science can only
make a fool of itself if it proceeds incautiously in its efforts to
understand them. Besides, it has never been my intention to
invalidate the meaning of symbols; I concern myself with them
precisely because I am convinced of their psychological validity.
People who merely believe and don't think always forget that
they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy:
doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background.
But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable
stepping-stone to better knowledge. People who can believe
should be a little more tolerant with those of their fellows who
are only capable of thinking. Belief has already conquered the
summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing. The
believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon
the thinker, thereby suspecting him of destructive designs. If
the ancients had not done a bit of thinking we would not possess
any dogma about the Trinity at all. The fact that a dogma is
on the one hand believed and on the other hand is an object of
thought is proof of its vitality. Therefore let the believer rejoice
that others, too, seek to climb the mountain on whose peak
he sits.

My attempt to make the most sacred of all dogmatic symbols,
the Trinity, an object of psychological study is an undertaking
of whose audacity I am very well aware. Not having any theolog-
ical knowledge worth mentioning, I must rely in this respect
on the texts available to every layman. But since I have no in-
tention of involving myself in the metaphysics of the Trinity,

1 am free to accept the Church's own formulation of the dogma,
without having to enter into all the complicated metaphysical
speculations that have gathered round it in the course of history.
For the purposes of psychological discussion the elaborate ver-

2 Of the older ones I refer chiefly to Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 216), Origen
(d. 253), and Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite (d. end of 5th cent,).

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

sion contained in the Athanasian Creed would be sufficient, as
this shows very clearly what Church doctrine understands by the
Trinity. Nevertheless, a certain amount o historical explana-
tion has proved unavoidable for the sake of psychological under-
standing. My chief object, however, is to give a detailed exposi-
tion of those psychological views which seem to me necessary if
we are to understand the dogma as a symbol in the psychological
sense. Yet my purpose would be radically misunderstood if it
were conceived as an attempt to "psychologize' * the dogma.
Symbols that have an archetypal foundation can never be re-
duced to anything else, as must be obvious to anybody who
possesses the slightest knowledge of my writings. To many
people it may seem strange that a doctor with a scientific train-
ing should interest himself in the Trinity at all. But anyone
who has experienced how closely and meaningfully these
representations collectives are bound up with the weal and woe
of the human soul will readily understand that the central sym-
bol of Christianity must have, above all else, a psychological
meaning, for without this it could never have acquired any uni-
versal meaning whatever, but would have been relegated long
ago to the dusty cabinet of spiritual monstrosities and shared the
fate of the many-armed and many-headed gods of India and
Greece. But since the dogma stands in a relationship of living
reciprocity to the psyche, whence it originated in the first place,
it expresses many of the things I am endeavouring to say over
again, even though with the uncomfortable feeling that there
is much in my exposition that still needs improvement.

111

i. PRE-CHRISTIAN PARALLELS

I. BABYLONIA

172 In proposing to approach this central symbol of Christianity,
the Trinity, from the psychological point of view, I realize that
I am trespassing on territory that must seem very far removed
from psychology. But everything to do with religion, everything
it says, impinges so closely on the human soul that psychology
cannot, in my opinion, afford to overlook it, A conception like
the Trinity pertains so much to the realm of theology that the
only one of the profane sciences to pay any attention to it nowa-
days is history. Indeed, most people have ceased even to think
about dogma, especially about a concept as hard to visualize
as the Trinity. Even among professing Christians there are very
few who think seriously about the Trinity as a matter of dogma
and would consider it a possible subject for reflection not to
mention the educated public. A recent exception is Georg
Koepgen's very important book, Die Gnosis des Chris tent urns, 1 -
which, unfortunately, soon found its way onto the Index despite
the episcopal "Placet." For all those who are seriously concerned
to understand dogmatic ideas, this book of Koepgen's is a per-
fect example of thinking which has fallen under the spell of
trinitarian symbolism.

1 Salzburg, 1939.

112!

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

173 Triads of gods appear very early, at a primitive level. The
archaic triads in the religions of antiquity and of the East are
too numerous to be mentioned here. Arrangement in triads is
an archetype in the history of religion, which in all probability
formed the basis of the Christian Trinity. Often these triads do
not consist of three different deities independent of one another;
instead, there is a distinct tendency for certain family relation-
ships to arise within the triads. I would mention as an example
the Babylonian triads, of which the most important is Anu,
Bel, and Ea. Ea, personifying knowledge, is the father of Bel
("Lord"), who personifies practical activity. 2 A secondary, rather
later triad is the one made up of Sin (moon), Shainash (sun),
and Adad (storm). Here Adad is the son of the supreme god,
Anu. 3 Under Nebuchadnezzar, Adad was the "Lord of heaven
and earth." This suggestion of a father-son relationship comes
out more clearly at the time of Hammurabi: Marduk, the son
of Ea, was entrusted with Bel's power and thrust him into the
background. 4 Ea was a "loving, proud father, who willingly
transferred his power and rights to his son." 5 Marduk was
originally a sun-god, with the cognomen "Lord" (Bel); 6 he was
the mediator between his father Ea and mankind. Ea declared
that he knew nothing that his son did not know. 7 Marduk, as
his fight with Tiamat shows, is a redeemer. He is "the com-
passionate one, who loves to awaken the dead"; the "Great-
eared," who hears the pleadings of men. He is a helper and
healer, a true saviour. This teaching about a redeemer flour-
ished on Babylonian soil all through the Christian era and goes
on living today in the religion of the Mandaeans (who still exist
in Mesopotamia), especially in their redeemer figure Manda d'
Hayya or Hibil Ziwa. 8 Among the Mandaeans he appears also as
a light-bringer and at the same time as a world-creator. 9 Just
as, in the Babylonian epic, Marduk fashions the universe out of
Tiamat, so Mani, the Original Man, makes heaven and earth
from the skin, bones, and excrement of the children of dark-
ness. 10 "The all-round influence which the myth of Marduk

2 Jastroxv, Die Religion Bdbyloniens und Assyriens, I, p. 61.

3 Ibid., pp. 102, 143! 4P.112. SP.lgO. 6P.M2.

7 p. 130. Cf. John 16: 15.

3 Jereniias, The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East, I, p. 137.

9 Cf. John 1:3. 10 Kessler, Mani, pp. 26>jfi.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION .' WEST

had on the religious ideas of the Israelites is surprising/' n
*74 It appears that Hammurabi worshipped only a dyad, Anu
and Bel; but, as a divine ruler himself, he associated himself
with them as the "proclaimer of Anu and Bel," 12 and this at a
time when the worship of Marduk was nearing its height. Ham-
murabi felt himself the god of a new aeon 13 the aeon of Aries,
which was then beginning and the suspicion is probably justi-
fied that tacit recognition was given to the triad Anu-Bel-
Hammurabi. 14

*75 The fact that there is a secondary triad, Sin-Shamash-Ishtar,
is indicative of another intra-triadic relationship. Ishtar 15 ap-
pears here in the place of Adad, the storm god. She is the mother
of the gods, and at the same time the daughter 16 of Anu as well
as of Sin.

176 Invocation of the ancient triads soon takes on a purely
formal character. The triads prove to be ''more a theological
tenet than a living force." 17 They represent, in fact, the earliest
beginnings of theology. Anu is the Lord of heaven, Bel is the
Lord of the lower realm, earth, and Ea too is the god of an
"underworld," but in his case it is the watery deep. 18 The knowl-
edge that Ea personifies comes from the "depths of the waters."
According to* one Babylonian legend, Ea created Uddushu-
namir, a creature of light, who was the messenger of the gods
on Ish tar's journey to hell. The name means: "His light (or
rising) shines." 19 Jeremias connects him with Gilgamesh, the
hero who was more than half a god. 20 The messenger of the gods
was usually called Girru (Sumerian "Gibil"), the god of fire.
As such he has an ethical aspect, for with his purifying fire he
destroys evil. He too is a son of Ea, but on the other hand he is
also described as a son of Anu. In this connection it is worth
mentioning that Marduk as well has a dual nature, since in one

11 Roscher, Lexikon, II, 2, cols. 237 if., s.v. "Marduk."

12 Jastrow, p 139. Cf. John 1:18. 13 Cf. the Christian fish-symbol.

14 "Anu and Bel called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, the worshipper of
the Gods, to go forth like the sun ... to enlighten the land." Harper, The Code
of Hammurabi^ p. 3.

15 Cf. the invocation of the Holy Ghost as "Mother" in the Acts of Thomas
(James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 376). Also the feminine nature of
Sophia, who frequently represents the Holy Ghost.

16 Cf. Mary as creature and as 0or6Kos.

17 Jastrow, p. 141. 18 p. 61. 19 P. 133. 20 Jeremias, I, pp. 247**.

114

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

hymn he is called Mar Mummi, 'son of chaos/ In the same hymn
his consort Sarpanitu is invoked along with Ea's wife, the
mother of Marduk, as the "Silver-shining One." This is probably
a reference to Venus, the femina alba. In alchemy the albedo
changes into the moon, which, in Babylonia, was still mascu-
line. 21 Marduk's companions were four dogs. 22 Here the number
four may signify totality, just as it does in the case of the four
sons of Horus, the four seraphim in the vision of Ezekiel, and
the four symbols of the evangelists, consisting of three animals
and one angel.

n. EGYPT

17? The ideas which are present only as intimations in Babylo-
nian tradition are developed to full clarity in Egypt. I shall pass
lightly over this subject here, as I have dealt with the Egyptian
prefigurations of the Trinity at greater length elsewhere, in an
as yet unfinished study of the symbolical bases of alchemy. 1 I
shall only emphasize that Egyptian theology asserts, first and
foremost, the essential unity (homoousia) of God as father and
son, both represented by the king. 2 The third person appears in
the form of Ka-mutef ("the bull of his mother"), who is none
other than the ka, the procreative power of the deity. In it and
through it father and son are combined not in a triad but in a
triunity. To the extent that Ka-mutef is a special manifestation
of the divine ka> we can "actually speak of a triunity of God,
king, and ka y in the sense that God is the father, the king is the
son, and ka the connecting-link between them." 3 In his con-
cluding chapter Jacobsohn draws a parallel between this Egyp-
tian idea and the Christian credo. Apropos the passage "qui
conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine," he

21 Cf. Mary's connections with the moon in Rahner, Griechische Mythen in
christlicher Deutung, pp. sooff., and "Mysterium Lunae," p. 80.

22 A possible reference to the realm of the dead on the one hand and to Nimrod
the mighty hunter on the other. See Roscher, Lexikon, II, cols. 2371!, s.v.
"Marduk."

1 [Mysterium Coniunctionis: now complete in the Swiss edn., 1955-57. -EDITORS.]

2 Jacobsohn, "Die dogmatische Stellung des Konigs in der Theologie der alten
Aegypter," p. 17.

3 Ibid., p. 58.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION t WEST

cites Karl Earth's formulation: "There is indeed a unity of God
and man; God himself creates it. ... It is no other unity than
his own eternal unity as father and son. This unity is the Holy
Ghost." 4 As procreator the Holy Ghost would correspond to
Ka-mutef, who connotes and guarantees the unity of father and
son. In this connection Jacobsohn cites Earth's comment on
Luke i : 35 ("The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that
holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son
of God"): "When the Bible speaks of the Holy Ghost, it is
speaking of God as the combination of father and son, of the
vinculum caritatis." 5 The divine procreation of Pharaoh takes
place through Ka-mutef, in the human mother of the king. But,
like Mary, she remains outside the Trinity. As Preisigke points
out, the early Christian Egyptians simply transferred their tra-
ditional ideas about the ka to the Holy Ghost. 6 This explains the
curious fact that in the Coptic version of Pistis Sophia, dating
from the third century, Jesus has the Holy Ghost as his double,
just like a proper ka. 7 The Egyptian mythologem of the unity of
substance of father and son, and of procreation in the king's
mother, lasted until the Vth dynasty (about 2500 B.C.), Speak-
ing of the birth of the divine boy in whom Horus manifests
himself, God the Father says: "He will exercise a kingship of
grace in this land, for my soul is in him," and to the child he
says: "You are the son of my body, begotten by me." 8 "The
sun he bears within him from his father's seed rises anew in
him." His eyes are the sun and moon, the eyes of Horus. 9 We
know that the passage in Luke 1:78!: "Through the tender
mercy of our God, whereby the dayspring from on high hath
visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the
shadow of death," refers to Malachi 4:2: "But unto you that
fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing
in his wings." Who does not think here of the winged sun-disc
of Egypt?

4 P. 64. arth, Credo, p. 70. 5 Barth, Bihehtunden tiber Luk I, p. 36.

6 Preisigke, Die Gotteskraft der friihchristlichen Zeit;also Vom gottlichen Flutdum
nach dgypttscher Anschauung.

7 Pistis Sophia (trans, by Mead), p. n.

s Cf. Hebrews 1:5: "Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten trjee."
9 A. Moret, "Bu caractere religieux de la royaute pharaonique."

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

178 These ideas 10 passed over into Hellenistic syncretism and
were transmitted to Christianity through Philo and Plutarch. 11
So it is not true, as is sometimes assetted even by modern theo-
logians, that Egypt had little if any influence on the formation
of Christian ideas. Quite the contrary. It is, indeed, highly im-
probable that only Babylonian ideas should have penetrated
into Palestine, considering that this small buffer state had long
been under Egyptian hegemony and had, moreover, the closest
cultural ties with its powerful neighbour, especially after a flour-
ishing Jewish colony established itself in Alexandria, several
centuries before the birth of Christ. It is difficult to understand
what could have induced Protestant theologians, whenever pos-
sible, to make it appear that the world of Christian ideas
dropped straight out of heaven. The Catholic Church is liberal
enough to look upon the Osiris-Horus-Isis myth, or at any rate
suitable portions of it, as a prefiguration of the Christian legend
of salvation. The numinous power of a mythologem and its
value as truth are considerably enhanced if its archetypal char-
acter can be proved. The archetype is "that which is believed
always, everywhere, and by everybody," and if it is not recog-
nized consciously, then it appears from behind in its "wrathful"
form, as the dark "son of chaos," the evil-doer, as Antichrist
instead of Saviour a fact which is all too clearly demonstrated
by contemporary history.

III. GREECE

179 In enumerating the pre-Christian sources of the Trinity con-
cept, we should not omit the mathematical speculations of the
Greek philosophers. As we know, the philosophizing temper of
the Greek mind is discernible even in St, John's gospel, a work
that is, very obviously, of Gnostic inspiration. Later, at the time
of the Greek Fathers, this spirit begins to amplify the archetypal
content of the Revelation, interpreting it in Gnostic terms.
Pythagoras and his school probably had the most to do with the
moulding of Greek thought, and as one aspect of the Trinity is
based on number symbolism, it would be worth our while to

10 Further material concerning pagan sources in Nielsen, Der dreieinige Gott, I.

11 Cf. Norden, Die Geburt des Kindts, pp. 77ff.

117

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

examine the Pythagorean system of numbers and see what it has
to say about the three basic numbers with which we are con-
cerned here. Zeller * says: "One is the first from which all other
numbers arise, and in which the opposite qualities of numbers,
the odd and the even, must therefore be united; two is the first
even number; three the first that is uneven and perfect, because
in it we first find beginning, middle, and end." 2 The views
of the Pythagoreans influenced Plato, as is evident from his
Timaeus; and, as this had an incalculable influence on the philo-
sophical speculations of posterity, we shall have to go rather
deeply into the psychology of number speculation.
180 The number one claims an exceptional position, which we
meet again in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. Ac-
cording to this, one is not a number at all; the first number is
two. 3 Two is the first number because, with it, separation and
multiplication begin, which alone make counting possible. With
the appearance of the number two, another appears alongside
the one, a happening which is so striking that in many languages
"the other" and "the second" are expressed by the same word.
Also associated with the number two is the idea of right and
left, 4 and remarkably enough, of favourable and unfavourable,
good and bad. The "other" can have a "sinister" significance
or one feels it, at least, as something opposite and alien. There-
fore, argues a medieval alchemist, God did not praise the second
day of creation, because on this day (Monday, the day of the
moon) the binarius, alias the devil, 5 came into existence. Two
implies a one which is different and distinct from the "number-
less" One. In other words, as soon as the number two appears,
a unit is produced out of the original unity, and this unit is none
other than that same unity split into two and turned into a
"number." The "One" and the "Other" form an opposition, but
there is no opposition between one and two, for these are simple
numbers which are distinguished only by their arithmetical

1 A History of Greek Philosophy, I, p. 429.

2 Authority for the latter remark in Aristotle, De coelo, I, i, s68a.

3 The source for this appears to be Macrobius, Commentarius in Somnium
Scipionis, I, 6, 8.

4 Cf. "the movement of the Different to the left" in the Timaeus g6C (trans, by
Cornford, p. 73).

5 Cf. the etymological relations between G. zwei, 'two/ and Zweifler, 'doubter/ [In
Eng., cf. duplicity, double-dealer, double-cross, two-faced.TRANS.]

118

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

value and by nothing else. The "One," however, seeks to hold
to its one-and-alone existence, while the "Other" ever strives to
be another opposed to the One. The One will not let go o the
Other because, if it did, it would lose its character; and the
Other pushes itself away from the One in order to exist at all.
Thus there arises a tension of opposites between the One and
the Other. But every tension of opposites culminates in a re-
lease, out of which comes the "third." In the third, the tension
is resolved and the lost unity is restored. Unity, the absolute
One, cannot be numbered, it is indefinable and unknowable;
only when it appears as a unit, the number one, is it knowable,
for the "Other" which is required for this act'of knowing is lack-
ing in the condition of the One. Three is an unfolding of the
One to a condition where it can be known unity become recog-
nizable; had it not been resolved into the polarity of the One
and the Other, it would have remained fixed in a condition de-
void of every quality. Three therefore appears as a suitable
synonym for a process of development in time, and thus forms,
a parallel to the self-revelation of the Deity as the absolute One
unfolded into Three. The relation of Threeness to Oneness can
be expressed by an equilateral triangle, 6 A = B =: C, that is, by
the identity of the three, threeness being contained in its en-
tirety in each of the three angles. This intellectual idea of the
equilateral triangle is a conceptual model for the logical image
of the Trinity.

In addition to the Pythagorean interpretation of numbers,
we have to consider, as a more direct source of trinitarian ideas
in Greek philosophy, the mystery-laden Timaeus of Plato. I
shall quote, first of all, the classical argument in sections

Hence the god, when he began to put together the body of the uni-
verse, set about making it of fire and earth. But two things alone
cannot be satisfactorily united without a third; for there must be
some bond between them drawing them together. And of all bonds
the best is that which makes itself and the terms it connects a unity
in the fullest sense; and it is of the nature of a continued geometrical
proportion to effect this most perfectly. For whenever, of three num-
bers, the middle one between any two that are either solids or planes

6Harnack (Dogmengeschichte, II, p. 303) compares the scholastic conception of
the Trinity to an equilateral triangle.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

[i.e., cubes or squares] is such that, as the first is to it, so is it to the
last, and conversely as the last is to the middle, so is the middle to
the first, then since the middle becomes first and last, and again the
last and first become middle, in that way all will necessarily come
to play the same part towards one another, and by so doing they
will all make a unity. 7

In a geometrical progression, the quotient (q) of a series of
terms remains the same, e.g.: 2: i === 4 : 2 =; 8:4 = 2, or, alge-
braically expressed: a, aq, aq 2 . The proportion is therefore as
follows: 2 is to 4 as 4 is to 8, or a is to aq as aq is to aq 2 .
182 This argument is now followed by a reflection which has far-
reaching psychological implications: if a simple pair of opposites,
say fire and earth, are bound together by a mean (AJ&JW), and if
this bond is a geometrical proportion, then one mean can only
connect plane figures, since two means are required to connect
solids:

Now if it had been required that the body of the universe should be
a plane surface with no depth, a single mean would have been
enough to connect its companions and itself; but in fact the world
was to be solid in form, and solids are always conjoined, not by one
mean, but by two. 8

Accordingly, the two-dimensional connection is not yet a physi-
cal reality, for a plane without extension in the third dimension
is only an abstract thought. If it is to become a physical reality,
three dimensions and therefore two means are required. Sir
Thomas Heath 9 puts the problem in the following algebraic
formulae:

Union in two dimensions of earth (p 2 ) and fire (q 2 ):

P 2 >.pq=pq:q 2
Obviously the mean is pq.

Physical union pf earth and fire, represented by p B and q*
respectively:

P*:p*q^p 2 q:pf-pq 2 ;q*

The two means are p 2 q and pq*, corresponding to the physical
elements water and air.

T Trans, by Cornford, p. 44. * Ibid., p. 44.

9 A History of Greek Mathematics, I, p. 89; Cornford, p. 47.

120

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

Accordingly, the god set water and air between fire and earth, and
rfiade them, so far as was possible, proportional to one another, so
that as fire is to air, so is air to Water, afid as ait is to water, so is
water to earth, and thus he bound together the frame of a world
visible and tangible. For these reasons and from such constituents,
four in number, the body of the universe was brought into being,
coming into concord by means of proportion, and from these it ac-
quired Amity, so that united with itself it became indissoluble by
any other power save him who bound it together. 10

183 The union of one pair of opposites only produces a two-
dimensional triad: p 2 + pq + q 2 . This, being a plane figure, is
not a reality but a thought. Hence two pairs of opposites, mak-
ing a quaternio (p* + p*q + pq 2 + <J 3 ), are needed to represent
physical reality. Here we meet, at any rate in veiled form, the
dilemma of three and four alluded to in the opening words of
the Timaeus. Goethe intuitively grasped the significance of this
allusion when he says of the fourth Cabir in Faust: "He was the
right one / Who thought for them all," and that "You might ask
on Olympus" about the eighth "whom nobody thought of." n

184 It is interesting to note that Plato begins by representing the
union of opposites two-dimensionally, as an intellectual prob-
lem to be solved by thinking, but then comes to see that its solu-
tion does not add up to reality. In the former case we have to do
with a self-subsistent triad, and in the latter with a quaternity.
This was the dilemma that perplexed the alchemists for more
than a thousand years, and, as the "axiom of Maria Prophetissa"
(the Jewess or Copt), it appears in modern dreams, 12 and is also
found in psychology as the opposition between the functions of
consciousness, three of which are fairly well differentiated, while
the fourth, undifferentiated, "inferior" function is undomesti-
cated, unadapted, uncontrolled, and primitive. Because of its
contamination with the collective unconscious, it possesses
archaic and mystical qualities, and is the complete opposite of
the most differentiated function. For instance, if the most differ-
entiated is thinking, or the intellect, then the inferior, 13 fourth

10 Cornford, pp. 44-45, slightly modified.

11 For a detailed account see Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 1508:.

12 As the dream in Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 147!, shows.

13 Judging, of course, from the Standpoint of thfe most differentiated function.

121

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

function will be feeling. 14 Hence the opening words of the
Timaeus "One, two, three but where, my dear Timaeus, is
the fourth . . . ?"- all familiarly upon the ears of the psycholo-
gist and alchemist, and for him as for Goethe there can be no
doubt that Plato is alluding to something of mysterious import.
We can now see that it was nothing less than the dilemma as to
whether something we think about is a mere thought or a real-
ity, or at least capable of becoming real. And this, for any phi-
losopher who is not just an empty babbler, is a problem of the
first order and no whit less important than the moral problems
inseparably connected with it. In this matter Plato knew from
personal experience how difficult is the step from two-dimen-
sional thinking to its realization in three-dimensional fact. 15
Already with his friend Dionysius the Elder, tyrant of Syracuse,
he had so many disagreements that the philosopher-politician
contrived to sell him as a slave, from which fate he was preserved
only because he had the good fortune to be ransomed by friends.
His attempts to realize his political theories under Dionysius the
Younger also ended in failure, and from then on Plato aban-
doned politics for good. Metaphysics seemed to him to offer
more prospects than this ungovernable world. So, for him per-
sonally, the main emphasis lay on the two-dimensional world of
thought; and this is especially true of the Timaeus, which was
written after his political disappointments. It is generally reck-
oned as belonging to Plato's late works.

185 In these circumstances the opening words, not being attrib-
utable either to the jocosity of the author or to pure chance,
take on a rather mournful significance: one of the four is absent
because he is "unwell." If we regard the introductory scene as
symbolical, this means that of the four elements out of which
reality is composed, either air or water is missing. If air is miss-
ing, then there is no connecting link with spirit (fire), and if
water is missing, there is no link with concrete reality (earth).
Plato certainly did not lack spirit; the missing element he so
much desired was the concrete realization of ideas. He had to

14 cf. Psychological Types, Def. 30.

15 "The world is narrow and the brain is wide;

Thoughts in the head dwell lightly side by side,
Yet things in space run counter and fall foul."

Schiller, Wallensteins Tod, II, 2.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

content himself with the harmony o airy thought-structures
that lacked weight, and with a paper surface that lacked depth.
The step from three to four brought him sharply up against
something unexpected and alien to his thought, something
heavy, inert, and limited, which no *>?) 6V' 16 and no "privatio
boni" can conjure away or diminish. Even God's fairest creation
is corrupted by it, and idleness, stupidity, malice, discontent,
sickness, old age and death fill the glorious body of the "blessed
god/' Truly a grievous spectacle, this sick world-soul, and unfor-
tunately not at all as Plato's inner eye envisaged it when he
wrote:

All this, then, was the plan of the everlasting god for the god who was
going to be. According to this plan he made the body of the world
smooth and uniform, everywhere equidistant from its centre, a body
whole and complete, with complete bodies for its parts. And in the
centre he set the soul and caused it to extend throughout the whole
body, and he further wrapped the body round with soul on the out-
side. So he established one world alone, round and revolving in a
circle, solitary but able by reason of its excellence to bear itself com-
pany, needing no other acquaintance or friend but sufficient unto
itself. On all these accounts the world which he brought into being
was a blessed god. 17

186 This world, created by a god, is itself a god, a son of the self-
manifesting father. Further, the demiurge furnished it with a
soul which is "prior" to the body (346). The world-soul was
fashioned by the demiurge as follows: he made a mixture of the
indivisible (d^pes) and the divisible (ptpiffrbv), thus producing a
third form of existence. This third form had a nature independ-
ent of the "Same" (TO avrov) and the "Different" (TO trepov). At
first sight the "Same" seems to coincide with the indivisible
and the "Different" with the divisible. 18 The text says: 19 From

16 "Not being." * 7 Cornford, p. 58, slightly modified.

iSTheodor Gomperz (Greek Thinkers, III, p. 215) mentions two primary sub-
stances which are designated as follows in Plato's Philebus: limit, unlimited; the
same, the other; the divisible, the indivisible. He adds that Plato's pupils would
have spoken of "unity" and of "the great and the small" or of "duality." From
this it is clear that Gomperz regards the "Same" and the "indivisible" as synon-
ymous, thus overlooking the resistance of the "Other," and the fundamentally
fourfold nature of the world soul. (See below.)

19 [The version here given is translated from the German text of Otto Apelt
(Plato: Timaios und Kritias, p. 52) cited by the author. TRANS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

the indivisible and ever the same substance [Cornford's "Same-
ness"], and that which is physically divisible, he mixed an inter-
mediate, third form of existence which had its own being beside
the Same and the Different, and this form he fashioned accord-
ingly [/card raurd] as a mean between the indivisible and the
physically divisible (35 A). Then he took all three existences
and mixed them again, "forcing the nature of the Different,
though it resisted the mixture, into union with the Same."
Thus, "with the admixture of being (ofola), the three became

one. 51

187 The world-soul, representing the governing principle bf the
whole physical world, therefore possesses a triune nature. And
since, for Plato, the world is a <$e&repos 8e&s (second god), the
world-soul is a revelation or unfolding of the God-image. 21

188 Plato's account of the actual process of creation is very curi-
ous and calls for some elucidation. The first thing that strikes
us is the twice-repeated (rwKp<l(raro ('he mixed'). Why should the
mixture be repeated, since it consists of three elements in the
first place and contains no more than three at the end, and, in
the second place, Same and Different appear to correspond with
indivisible and divisible? Appearances, however, are deceptive.
During the first mixture there is nothing to suggest that the
divisible was recalcitrant and had to be forcibly united with
the indivisible, as was the case with their supposed analogues.
In both mixtures it is rather a question of combining two sepa-

20 TTJS apeplcrrov Kal ael /caret rubra kxofxn]S abfflas Kal TTJS av irepi ra crcojuara
jcicptcrrfjs, rpirop <= a^olv kv ju<rcp <rvveKpacraro oixrLas eldos' TTJS re raflrou Screws aD
irkpi Kdl TTJS rov erepov, Kal Kara ravra avvkcrryGev ev pecrc*) rov re ayepovs abr&v Kal rov
Kara ra <r&jj,ara juepttrrou' /cat rpta Xa/3cw abra bvra avveKepacraro els uLav iravra idkav,
rrjv darepov <i>v<Ti,v dvcrjjLetKrov ovvav els ravr6v <rvvapfj.6rr(av fiia, peiyvvs Se /zero, rijs
o^crlas.

Cornford (pp. 59-60) translates as follows: "Between the indivisible Existence
that is ever in the same state and the divisible Existence that becomes in bodies,
he compounded a third form of Existence composed of both. Again, in the case
of Sameness and in that of Difference, he also on the same principle made a
compound intermediate between that kind of them which is indivisible and the
kind that is divisible in bodies. Then, taking the three, he blended them all into
a unity, forcing the nature of Difference, hard as it was to mingle, into union
with Sameness, and mixing them together with Existence."
21 Cf. Timaeus 37 C, where the first God is described as the "father" and his
creation as the copy of an original "pattern," which is himself (Cornford> p. 97).

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

rate pairs of opposites, 22 which, because they are called upon to
make a unity, may be thought o as arranged in a quaternio:

Same

Indivisible

Divisible

Different

Indivisible and divisible, together with their mean, form a
simple triad which has "its own being" beside the Same and the
Different. This triad corresponds to the condition of "thought"
not yet become "reality." For this a second mixture is needed,
in which the Different (i.e., the "Other") is incorporated by
force. The "Other" is therefore the "fourth" element, whose
nature it is to be the "adversary" and to resist harmony. But the
fourth, as the text says, is intimately connected with Plato's de-
sire for "being." One thinks, not unnaturally, of the impatience
the philosopher must have felt when reality proved so intracta-
ble to his ideas. That reasonableness might, under certain cir-
cumstances, have to be imposed by force is a notion that must
sometimes have crossed his mind.

i The passage as a whole, however, is far from simple. It can
be translated in many ways and interpreted in many more. The
critical point for us is vwk<rrti<r& kv itrq TOV re a^iepovs, literally, he
compounded (a form of the nature of sameness and difference)
in the middle (kv ^) of the indivisible (and the divisible)/
Consequently the middle term of the second pair of opposites
would coincide with the middle term of the first pair. The re-
sultant figure is a quincunx, since the two pairs of opposites have
a common mean or "third form" (rplrov eI5os):

22 This seems borne out by the fact that the first pair of opposites is correlated
with oMa, (being), and the second with & ffa (nature). If one had to choose be-
tween dWa and *fcw, the latter would probably be considered the more concrete
of the two.

125

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Indivisib le Divisib le

Different Same

I have placed the pairs of opposites side by side, instead of
facing one another (as in the previous diagram), in order to illus-
trate their union in a single mean. Three elements are to be
distinguished in our diagram: the two pairs of opposites and
their common mean, and I understand the text as referring to
these three elements when it says: "Then, taking these three
existences . . ." Since the mean is called the "third form," each
pair of opposites can presumably be taken as representing the
first and second forms: Indivisible = first form, Divisible =
second form, mean = third form, and so on. Their union in a
quincunx signifies union of the four elements in a world-body.
Thomas Taylor, who was strongly influenced by Proclus, says
in his commentary to the Timaeus: "For those which are con-
nected with her essence in a following order, proceed from her
[the anima mundi] according to the power of the fourth term (4),
which possesses generative powers; but return to her according
to the fifth (9) which reduces them to one." 23 Further confirma-
tion of the quaternary nature of the world-soul and world-body
may be found in the passage where the demiurge splits this
whole fabric lengthwise into two halves and joins them up again
in the form of a X- 24 According to Porphyry, a X i* 1 a circle

23 Reprinted as Bollingen Series III, Plato: Timaeus and Critias, p. 71.

24 Timaeus 366 (Cornford, p. 73).

126

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

signified the world-soul for the Egyptians. 25 It is, in fact, the
hieroglyph for 'city/ 26 Perhaps Plato was trying, in this passage,
to bring forth the mandala structure that later appeared as the
capital of Atlantis in his Critias.

19 1 The two mixtures could be regarded as a parallel to the two
means of the physical elements. Cornford, on the other hand,
considers that Plato is referring to three intermedia, which he
calls "Intermediate Existence/' 'Intermediate Sameness/' "In-
termediate Difference/' 27 His main insistence is on the three-
fold procedure and not on the four substances. The Middle
Ages were also familiar with the quatuor elementa (A B C D)
and the tria regimina (three procedures) which united them as
follows: AB, BC, CD. From this point of view, Cornford fails
to catch Plato's subtle allusion to the recalcitrant fourth.

192 We do not wish it to be supposed that the thought-processes
we have deduced from the text of the Timaeus represent Plato's
conscious reflections. However extraordinary his genius may
have been, it by no means follows that his thoughts were all
conscious ones. The problem of the fourth, for instance, which
is an absolutely essential ingredient of totality, can hardly have
reached his consciousness in complete form. If it had, he would
have been repelled by the violence with which the elements were
to be forced into a harmonious system. Nor would he have been
so illogical as to insist on the threefoldness of his world-soul.
Again, I would not venture to assert that the opening words of
the Timaeus are a conscious reference to the underlying prob-
lem of the recalcitrant fourth. Everything suggests that the same
unconscious spiritus rector was at work which twice impelled the
master to try to write a tetralogy, the fourth part remaining
unfinished on both occasions. 28 This factor also ensured that
Plato would remain a bachelor to the end of his life, as if affirm-
ing the masculinity of his triadic God-image.

25 Taylor, p. 75. ^.

26 Griffith, A Collection of Hieroglyphs, p. 34 B. Fig. 142: B?%| =Plan of a vil-
lage with cross-streets. ^O^

27 p. 61. The intermedia are constructed on the assumption that Indivisible and
Divisible are opposite attributes of each of the three principles, Existence, Same-
ness, Difference. I do not know whether the text permits of such an operation.

28 Gomperz, III, p. 200 [The two unfinished tetralogies are (a) Republic, Timaeus,
Critias (left incomplete), (Hermocrates, never written); (b) Theaetetus, Sophist,
Statesman, (Philosopher, never written). TRANS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

*93 As history draws nearer to the beginning of our era, the gods
become more and more abstract and spiritualized. Even Yahweh
had to submit to this transformation. In the Alexandrian phi-
losophy that arose in the last century B.C., we witness not only
an alteration of his nature but an emergence of two other divini-
ties in his immediate vicinity: the Logos and Sophia. Together
with him they form a triad, 29 and this is a clear prefiguration of
the post-Christian Trinity.

29 Leisegang, Der Heilige Geist, p. 86.

128

2. FATHER, SON, AND SPIRIT

194 I have dwelt at some length on the views of the Babylo-
nians and Egyptians, and on Platonist philosophy, in order to
give the reader some conception of the trinitarian and Unitarian
ideas that were in existence many centuries before the birth of
Christianity. Whether these ideas were handed down to poster-
ity as a result of migration and tradition or whether they arose
spontaneously in each case is a question of little importance.
The important thing is that they occurred because, once having
sprung forth from the unconscious of the human race (and not
just in Asia Minor!), they could rearise anywhere at any time.
It is, for instance, more than doubtful whether the Church
Fathers who devised the homoousios formula were even re-
motely acquainted with the ancient Egyptian theology of king-
ship. Nevertheless, they neither paused in their labours nor
rested until they had finally reconstructed the ancient Egyptian
archetype. Much the same sort of thing happened when, in
A.D. 431, at the Council of Ephesus, whose streets had once rung
with hymns of praise to many-breasted Diana, the Virgin Mary
was declared the BZOTOKOS, 'birth-giver of the god/ l As we
from Epiphanius, 2 there was even a sect, the Collyridians,

l Here one might recall the legend that, after the death of Christ, Mary betook
herself with John to Ephesus, where she is said to have lived until her death.
zpanarium (Contra octeginta haereses) LXXIX. See Migne, P.G., vol. 41, cols.

739^-

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

who worshipped Mary after the manner of an antique goddess.
Her cult had its chief centres in Arabia, Thrace, and Upper
Scythia, the most enthusiastic devotees being women. Their
provocations moved Epiphanius to the rebuke that "the whole
female sex is slippery and prone to error, with a mind that is
very petty and narrow." 3 It is clear from this chastening sermon
that there were priestesses who on certain feast days decorated
a wagon or four-cornered seat and covered it with linen, on
which they placed offerings of bakemeats "in the name of
Mary" (els ovo^a -njs Mapias), afterwards partaking of the sacri-
ficial meal. This plainly amounted to a Eucharistic feast in
honour of Mary, at which wheaten bread was eaten. The ortho-
dox standpoint of the time is aptly expressed in the words of
Epiphanius: "Let Mary be held in honour, and let the Father
and the Son and the Holy Ghost be adored, but let no one adore
Mary."

195 Thus the archetype reasserted itself, since, as I have tried to
show, archetypal ideas are part of the indestructible foundations
of the human mind. However long they are forgotten and
buried, always they return, sometimes in the strangest guise,
with a personal twist to them or intellectually distorted, as in
the case of the Arian heresy, but continually reproducing them-
selves in new forms representing the timeless truths that are
innate in man's nature. 4

196 Even though Plato's influence on the thinkers of the next
few centuries can hardly be overestimated, his philosophically
formulated triad cannot be held responsible for the origins of
the Christian dogma of the Trinity. For we are concerned here
not with any philosophical, that is conscious, assumptions but
with unconscious, archetypal forms. The Platonic formula for
the triad contradicts the Christian Trinity in one essential
point: the triad is built on opposition, whereas the Trinity con-
tains no opposition of any kind, but is, on the contrary, a com-
plete harmony in itself. The three Persons are characterized in
such a manner that they cannot possibly be derived from Pla-

3 "Quod genus lubricum et in errorem proclive, ac pusilli admodum et angusti
animi esse solet."

4 The special emphasis I lay on archetypal predispositions does not mean that
mythologems are of exclusively psychic origin. I am not overlooking the social
conditions that are just as necessary for their production.

IgO

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

tonic premises, while the terms Father, Son, and Holy Ghost do
not proceed in any sense from the number three. At most, the
Platonic formula supplies the intellectual scaffolding for contents
that come from quite other sources. The Trinity may be con-
ceived platonically as to its form, but for its content we have to
rely on psychic factors, on irrational data that cannot be
logically determined beforehand. In other words, we have to
distinguish between the logical idea of the Trinity and its
psychological reality. The latter brings us back to the very much
more ancient Egyptian ideas and hence to the archetype, which
provides the authentic and eternal justification for the existence
of any trinitarian idea at all.

197 The psychological datum consists of Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost. If we posit "Father/' then "Son" logically follows; but
"Holy Ghost" does not follow logically from either "Father"
or "Son." So we must be dealing here with a special factor that
rests on a different presupposition. According to the old doc-
trine, the Holy Ghost is "vera persona, quae a filio et patre missa
est" (a real person who is sent by the Son and the Father). The
"processio a patre filioque" (procession from the Father and the
Son) is a "spiration" and not a "begetting," This somewhat
peculiar idea corresponds to the separation, which still existed
in the Middle Ages, of "corpus" and "spiramen," the latter be-
ing understood as something more than mere "breath." What
it really denoted was the anima, which, as its name shows, is a
breath-being (anemos = wind). Although an activity of the
body, it was thought of as an independent substance (or hyposta-
sis) existing alongside the body. The underlying idea is that the
body "lives," and that "life" is something superadded and auton-
omous, conceived as a soul unattached to the body. Applying
this idea to the Trinity formula, we would have to say: Father,
Son, and Life the life proceeding from both or lived by both.
The Holy Ghost as "life" is a concept that cannot be derived
logically from the identity of Father and Son, but is, rather, a
psychological idea, a datum based on an irrational, primordial
image. This primordial image is the archetype, and we find it
expressed most clearly in the Egyptian theology of kingship.
There, as we have seen, the archetype takes the form of God the
father, Ka-mutef (the begetter), and the son. The ka is the life-
spirit, the animating principle of men and gods, and therefore

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

can be legitimately interpreted as the soul or spiritual double.
He is the "life" of the dead man, and thus corresponds on the
one hand to the living man's soul, and on the other to his
"spirit" or "genius." We have seen that Ka-mutef is a hyposta-
tization of procreative power. 5 In the same way, the Holy Ghost
is hypostatized procreative power and life-force. 6 Hence, in the
Christian Trinity, we are confronted with a distinctly archaic
idea, whose extraordinary value lies precisely in the fact that it
is a supreme, hypostatic representation of an abstract thought
(two-dimensional triad). The form is still concretistic, in that
the archetype is represented by the relationship "Father" and
"Son." Were it nothing but that, it would only be a dyad. The
third element, however, the connecting link between "Father"
and "Son," is spirit and not a human figure. The masculine
father-son relationship is thus lifted out of the natural order
(which includes mothers and daughters) and translated to a
sphere from which the feminine element is excluded: in ancient
Egypt as in Christianity the Theotokos stands outside the Trin-
ity. One has only to think of Jesus's brusque rejection of his
mother at the marriage in Cana: "Woman, what have I to do
with thee?" (John 2:4), and also earlier, when she sought the
twelve-year-old child in the temple: "How is it that ye sought
me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"
(Luke 2 149). We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that
this special sphere to which the father-son relationship is re-
moved is the sphere of primitive mysteries and masculine initia-
tions. Among certain tribes, women are forbidden to look at the
mysteries on pain of death. Through the initiations the young
men are systematically alienated from their mothers and are
reborn as spirits. The celibacy of the priesthood is a continua-
tion of this archetypal idea. 7

The intellectual operation that lies concealed in the higher
father-son relationship consists in the extrapolation of an invisi-

5 The ka of the king even has an individual name. Thus "the living ka of the
Lord of the Two Lands," Thutmosis III, was called the "victorious bull which
shines in Thebes." Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 307.

6 The "doubling" of the spirit occurs also in the Old Testament, though more
as a "potency" emanating from God than as an hypostasis. Nevertheless, Isaiah
48: 16 looks very like a hypostasis in the Septuagint text: Kfyuos K6pios d7recrraXj>
/ze Kal TO irvevfta afrrou (The Lord the Lord sent me and his spirit).

? For an instructive account of the Greek background see Harrison, Themis, ch. i.

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

ble figure, a "spirit" that is the very essence of masculine life.
The life of the body or of a man is posited as something differ-
ent from the man himself. This led to the idea of a ka or
immortal soul, able to detach itself from the body and not de-
pendent on it for its existence. In this respect, primitives have
extraordinarily well developed ideas about a plurality of souls.
Some are immortal, others are only loosely attached to the body
and can wander off and get lost in the night, or they lose their
way and get caught in a dream. There are even souls that belong
to a person without being lodged in his body, like the bush-soul,
which dwells outside in the forest, in the body of an animal.
The juxtaposition of a person and his "life" has its psychological
basis in the fact that a mind which is not very well differentiated
cannot think abstractly and is incapable of putting things into
categories. It can only take the qualities it perceives and place
them side by side: man and his life, or his sickness (visualized
as a sort of demon), or his health or prestige (mana, etc.). This is
obviously the case with the Egyptian ka. Father-son-life (or
procreative power), together with rigorous exclusion of the
Theo tokos, constitute the patriarchal formula that was "in the
air" long before the advent of Christianity.

The Father is, by definition, the prime cause, the creator, the
auctor rerum, who, on a level of culture where reflection is still
unknown, can only be One. The Other follows from the One by
splitting off from it. This split need not occur so long as there
is no criticism of the auctor rerum so long, that is to say, as a
culture refrains from all reflection about the One and does not
start criticizing the Creator's handiwork. A feeling of oneness,
far removed from critical judgment and moral conflict, leaves
the Father's authority unimpaired.

I had occasion to observe this original oneness of the father-
world when I was with a tribe of Negroes on Mount Elgon.
These people professed to believe that the Creator had made
everything good and beautiful. "But what about the bad animals
that kill your cattle?" I asked. They replied: "The lion is good
and beautiful." "And your horrible diseases?" "You lie in the
sun, and it is beautiful." I was impressed by their optimism.
But at six o'clock in the evening this philosophy came to a sud-
den stop, as I was soon to discover. After sunset, another world
took over the dark world of the Ayik, who is everything evil,

133

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

dangerous, and terrifying. The optimistic philosophy ends and
a philosophy of fear, ghosts, and magical spells for averting the
Evil One begins. Then, at sunrise, the optimism starts off again
without any trace of inner contradiction.

201 Here man, world, and God form a whole, a unity unclouded
by criticism. It is the world of the Father, and of man in his
childhood state. Despite the fact that twelve hours out of every
twenty-four are spent in the world of darkness, and in agonizing
belief in this darkness, the doubt never arises as to whether God
might not also be the Other. The famous question about the
origin of evil does not yet exist in a patriarchal age. Only with
the coming of Christianity did it present itself as the principal
problem of morality. The world of the Father typifies an age
which is characterized by a pristine oneness with the whole of
Nature, no matter whether this oneness be beautiful or ugly or
awe-inspiring. But once the question is asked: "Whence comes
the evil, why is the world so bad and imperfect, why are there
diseases and other horrors, why must man suffer?*' then reflec-
tion has already begun to judge the Father by his manifest
works, and straightway one is conscious of a doubt, which is it-
self the symptom of a split in the original unity. One comes to
the conclusion that creation is imperfect nay more, that the
Creator has not done his job properly, that the goodness and
almightiness of the Father cannot be the sole principle of the
cosmos. Hence the One has to be supplemented by the Other,
with the result that the world of the Father is fundamentally
altered and is superseded by the world of the Son.

202 This was the time when the Greeks started criticizing the
world, the time of "gnosis" in its widest sense, which ultimately
gave birth to Christianity. The archetype of the redeemer-god
and first man is age-old we simply do not know how old.
The Son, the revealed god, who voluntarily or involuntarily
offers himself for sacrifice as a man, in order to create the world
or redeem it from evil, can be traced back to the Purusha of
Indian philosophy, and is also found in the Persian conception
of the Original Man, Gayomart. Gayomart, son of the god of
light, falls victim to the darkness, from which he must be set
free in order to redeem the world. He is the prototype of the
Gnostic redeemer-figures and of the teachings concerning Christ,
redeemer of mankind.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

203 It is not hard to see that a critique which raised the question
of the origin of evil and of suffering had in mind another world
a world filled with longing for redemption and for that state
of perfection in which man was still one with the Father. Long-
ingly he looked back to the world of the Father, but it was lost
forever, because an irreversible increase in man's consciousness
had taken place in the meantime and made it independent.
With this mutation he broke away from the world of the Father
and entered upon the world of the Son, with its divine drama
of redemption and the ritualistic retelling of those things which
the God-man had accomplished during his earthly sojourn. 8
The life of the God-man revealed things that could not possibly
have been known at the time when the Father ruled as the One.
For the Father, as the original unity, was not a defined or de-
finable object; nor could he, strictly speaking, either be called
the "Father" or be one. He only became a "Father" by incarnat-
ing in the Son, and by so doing became defined and definable.
By becoming a father and a man he revealed to man the secret
of his divinity.

204 One of these revelations is the Holy Ghost. As a being who
existed before the world was, he is eternal, but he appears em-
pirically in this world only when Christ had left the earthly
stage. He will be for the disciples what Christ was for them.
He will invest them with the power to do works greater, per-
haps, than those of the Son (John 14: 12). The Holy Ghost is
a figure who deputizes for Christ and who corresponds to what
Christ received from the Father. From the Father comes the
Son, and common to both is the living activity of the Holy
Ghost, who, according to Christian doctrine, is breathed forth
("spirated") by both. As he is the third term common to Father
and Son, he puts an end to the duality, to the "doubt" in the
Son. He is, in fact, the third element that rounds out the Three
and restores the One. The point is that the unfolding of the
One reaches its climax in the Holy Ghost after polarizing itself
as Father and Son. Its descent into a human body is sufficient
in itself to make it become another, to set it in opposition to
itself. Thenceforward there are two: the "One" and the "Other,"

8 Cf. the detailed exposition of the death and rebirth of the divine icoupos in Har-
rison, Themis.

135

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

which results in a certain tension. 9 This tension works itself out
in the suffering and fate of the Son 10 and, finally, in Christ's
admission of abandonment by God (Matthew 27:46).

205 Although the Holy Ghost is the progenitor of the Son
(Matthew 1:18), he is also, as the Paraclete, a legacy from him.
He continues the work of redemption in mankind at large, by
descending upon those who merit divine election. Consequently,
the Paraclete is, at least by implication, the crowning figure in
the work of redemption on the one hand and in God's revelation
of himself on the other. It could, in fact, be said that the Holy
Ghost represents the final, complete stage in the evolution of
God and the divine drama. For the Trinity is undoubtedly a
higher form of God-concept than mere unity, since it corre-
sponds to a level of reflection on which man has become more
conscious.

206 The trinitarian conception of a life-process within the Deity,
which I have outlined here, was, as we have seen, already in
existence in pre-Christian times, its essential features being a
continuation and differentiation of the primitive rites of re-
newal and the cult-legends associated with them. Just as the gods
of these mysteries become extinct, so, too, do the mysteries them-
selves, only to take on new forms in the course of history. A
large-scale extinction of the old gods was once more in progress
at the beginning of our era, and the birth of a new god, with
new mysteries and new emotions, was an occurrence that healed
the wound in men's souls. It goes without saying that any con-
scious borrowing from the existing mystery traditions would
have hampered the god's renewal and rebirth. It had to be an
entirely unprejudiced revelation which, quite unrelated to any-
thing else, and if possible without preconceptions of any kind,
would usher into the world a new dp&pevov and a new cult-
legend. Only at a comparatively late date did people notice the
striking parallels with the legend of Dionysus, which they then
declared to be the work of the devil. This attitude on the part
of the early Christians can easily be understood, for Christianity

a The relation of Father to Son is not arithmetical, since both the One and the
Other are still united in the original Unity and are, so to speak, eternally on the
point of becoming two. Hence the Son is eternally being begotten by the Father,
and Christ's sacrificial death is an eternally present act.
10 The irddrj of Dionysus would be the Greek parallels.

136

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

did indeed develop in this unconscious fashion, and furthermore
its seeming lack of antecedents proved to be the indispensable
condition for its existence as an effective force. Nobody can
doubt the manifold superiority of the Christian revelation over
its pagan precursors, for which reason it is distinctly superfluous
today to insist on the unheralded and unhistorical character of
the gospels, seeing that they swarm with historical and psycho-
logical assumptions of very ancient origin.

. THE SYMBOLA

207 The trinitarian drama of redemption (as distinct from the
intellectual conception of it) burst upon the world scene at the
beginning of a new era, amid complete unconsciousness of its re-
suscitation from the past. Leaving aside the so-called prefigura-
tions in the Old Testament, there is not a single passage in the
New Testament where the Trinity is formulated in an intellec-
tually comprehensible manner. 1 Generally speaking, it is more
a question of formulae for triple benediction, such as the end of
the second epistle to the Corinthians: "The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the
Holy Ghost, be with you all," 2 or the beginning of the first

1 The so-called "Comma Johanneum," which would seem to be an exception, is a
demonstrably late interpolation of doubtful origin. Regarded as a dogmatic and
revealed text per se f it would afford the strongest evidence for the occurrence of
the Trinity in the New Testament. The passage reads (I John 5:8: "And there
are three that bear witness: the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these
three are one" (DV). That is to say, they agree in their testimony that Christ
"came in water and in blood" (verse 6, DV). [In verse 8, AV has "and these three
agree in one"; RSV: "and these three agree." TRANS.] The Vulgate has the late
interpolation in verse 7: "Quoniam tres sunt, qui testimonium dant m ca<?/o; Pater,
Verbum et Spiritus Sanctus: et hi tres unum sunt/' Note that in the Greek text
the three neuter nouns x^Cjua, 55wp, and al/m are followed by a masculine plural:
ol rpeis els r6 %v daw.

2 II Cor. 13: 14 (AV). The baptismal formula "In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Ghost" comes into this category, though its authenticity is

138

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

epistle of Peter: ". . chosen and destined by God the Father
and sanctified by the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and
for sprinkling with his blood," 3 or Jude 20-21. Another passage
cited in favour of the Trinity is I Corinthians 12 14-6, but this
only gives the emphatic assurance that the Spirit is one (repeated
in Ephesians 4 : 4-6), and may be taken more as an incantation
against polytheism and polydemonism than an assertion of the
Trinity. Triadic formulae were also current in the post-apostolic
epoch. Thus Clement says in his first letter (46:6): ". . . Have
we not one God, and one Christ, and one Spirit . . ." 4 Epipha-
nius even reports that Christ taught his disciples that "the
Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are the same." 5

208 Epiphanius took this passage from the apocryphal "Gospel
according to the Egyptians," 6 of which unfortunately only frag-
ments are preserved. The formula is significant insofar as it pro-
vides a definite starting-point for a "modalistic" concept of the
Trinity.

209 Now the important point is not that the New Testament con-
tains no trinitarian formulae, but that we find in it three figures
who are reciprocally related to one another: the Father, the
Son, begotten through the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost.
Since olden times, formulae for benediction, all solemn agree-
ments, occasions, attributes, etc. have had a magical, threefold
character (e.g., the Trishagion). 7 Although they are no evidence
for the Trinity in the New Testament, they nevertheless occur
and, like the three divine Persons, are clear indications of an
active archetype operating beneath the surface and throwing up
triadic formations. This proves that the trinitarian archetype is

doubted. It seems that originally people were baptized only in the name of Jesus
Christ. The formula does not occur in Mark and Luke. Cf. Krueger, Das Dogma
von der Dreieinigkeit und Gottmenschheit in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung,
p. 11. 3 1 Peter i : 2 (RSV).

4 Apostolic Fathers, trans, by Lake, I, p. 89. Clement was the third bishop of
Rome after Peter, according to Irenaeus. His dating is unsure, but he seems to
have been born in the second half of the 2nd cent.

5 Panarium, LXII, n, in Migne, P.O., vol. 41, cols. 1052-53.

6 Cf. James, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. lof.

T We might also mention the division of Christ's forbears into 3 x H generations
in Matthew 1:17. Cf. the role of the 14 royal ancestors in ancient Egypt: Jacob-
sohn, "Die dogmatische Stellung des Konigs in der Theologie der alten Aegypter,"
pp. 66ff.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

already at work in the New Testament, for what comes after
is largely the result of what has gone before, a proposition which
is especially apposite when, as in the case of the Trinity, we are
confronted with the effects of an unconscious content or arche-
type. From the creeds to be discussed later, we shall see that at
the synods of the Fathers the New Testament allusions to the
divine trio were developed in a thoroughly consistent manner
until the homoousia was restored, which again happened un-
consciously, since the Fathers knew nothing of the ancient
Egyptian model that had already reached the homoousian level.
The after-effects on posterity were inevitable consequences of
the trinitarian anticipations that were abroad in the early days
of Christianity, and are nothing but amplifications of the con-
stellated archetype. These amplifications, so far as they were
naive and unprejudiced, are direct proof that what the New
Testament is alluding to is in fact the Trinity, as the Church
also believes.

210 Since people did not actually know what it was that had so
suddenly revealed itself in the "Son of Man/' but only believed
the current interpretations, the effects it had over the centuries
signify nothing less than the gradual unfolding of the archetype
in man's consciousness, or rather, its absorption into the pattern
of ideas transmitted by the cultures of antiquity. 8 From this
historical echo it is possible to recognize what had revealed it-
self in a sudden flash of illumination and seized upon men's
minds, even though the event, when it happened, was so far
beyond their comprehension that they were unable to put it
into a clear formula. Before "revealed" contents can be sorted
out and properly formulated, time and distance are needed.
The results of this intellectual activity were deposited in a series
of tenets, the dogmata, which were then summed up in the
"symbolum" or creed. This breviary of belief well deserves the
name "symbolum," for, from a psychological point of view, it
gives symbolical expression to, and paints an anthropomorphic
picture of, a transcendent fact that cannot be demonstrated or
explained rationally, the word "transcendent" being used here
in a strictly psychological sense. 9

8 As we know, St. John's gospel marks the beginning of this process.

9 Cf. Psychological Types, Def. 51,

140

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY
L THE SYMBOLUM APOSTOLICUM

The first of these summaries was attempted fairly early, if
tradition may be relied on. St. Ambrose, for instance, reports
that the confession used at baptism in the church of Milan
originated with the twelve apostles. 10 This creed of the old
Church is therefore known as the Apostles' Creed. As established
in the fourth century, it ran:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only
begotten Son our Lord, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the
Virgin Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, buried, and on
the third day rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and
sitteth on the right hand of the Father, whence he shall come to
judge the quick and the dead. And [I believe] in the Holy Ghost,
the holy Church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the flesh.

This creed is still entirely on the level of the gospels and
epistles: there are three divine figures, and they do not in any
way contradict the one God. Here the Trinity is not explicit,
but exists latently, just as Clement's second letter says of the
pre-existent Church: "It was spiritually there." Even in the very
early days of Christianity it was accepted that Christ as Logos
was God himself (John 1:1). For Paul he is pre-existent in God's
form, as is clear from the famous "kenosis" passage in Philip-
pians 2 : 6 (AV): "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not
robbery to be equal with God'* (TO elmt lea 0eo> = esse se
aequalem Deo). There are also passages in the letters where the
author confuses Christ with the Holy Ghost, or where the three
are seen as one, as in II Corinthians 3:17 (DV): "Now the Lord
is the spirit" (6 Be ttvpios TO irvevpa. kvnv =2 Dominus autem spirt-
tus est). When the next verse speaks of the "glory of the
Lord" (56a wptou = gloria Domini], "Lord" seems to refer to
Christ. But if you read the whole passage, from verses 7 to 18,
it is evident that the "glory" refers equally to God, thus proving
the promiscuity of the three figures and their latent Trinity.

10 Explanatio symboli ad initiandos.

141

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION *. WEST

II. THE SYMBOLUM OF GREGORY THAUMATURGUS

213 Although the Apostles' Creed does not stipulate the Trinity
in so many words, it was nevertheless "spiritually there" at a
very early date, and it is nothing but a quibble to insist, as many
people do, that the Trinity was "invented only long afterwards/*
In this connection, therefore, I must mention the vision of
Gregory Thaumaturgus (210-70), in which the Blessed Virgin
and St. John appeared to him and enunciated a creed which he
wrote down on the spot. 11 It runs:

One God, Father of the living Word, [of his] self-subsistent wisdom
and power, [of his] eternal likeness, perfect Begetter of what is per-
fect, Father of the only begotten Son. One Lord, Alone of the Alone,
God of God, veritable likeness of Godhead, effectual Word, com-
prehensive Wisdom by which all things subsist, Power that creates
all Creation, true Son of the true Father, unseen [Son] of the unseen
[Father], incorruptible of the incorruptible, deathless of the death-
less, everlasting of the everlasting. And one Holy Spirit, having
existence from God and appearing through the Son, Image of the
Son and perfect [Image] of the perfect [Father], Life and cause of
life, holy Fount, Ringleader [Xopi?7os] of holiness: in whom is mani-
fest God the Father, who is above all and in all, and God the Son,
who pervades all. Perfect Trinity, whose glory and eternity and
dominion is not divided and not separate. 12

214 This trinitarian creed had already established itself in a
position of authority long before the appearance of the Apostles'
Creed, which is far less explicit. Gregory had been a pupil of
Origen until about 238. Origen (182-251) employed the concept
of the Trinity 13 in his writings and gave it considerable thought,
concerning himself more particularly with its internal econ-
omy (okovo/xla, oeconomia) and the management of its power:
"I am of the opinion, then, that the God and Father, who holds
the universe together, is superior to every being that exists, for
he imparts to each one from his own existence that which each
one is. The Son, being less than the Father, is superior to

11 Gregory of Nyssa, De Vita S. Gregorii Thaumaturgi, in Migne, P.G., vol. 46,
cols. 911-14.

12 Caspar!, Alte und neue Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols, pp. 10-17.
is First mentioned in Tertullian (d. 220).

142

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

rational creatures alone (for he is second to the Father), The
Holy Spirit is still less, and dwells within the saints alone. So
that in this way the power of the Father is greater than that of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and in turn the power of the
Holy Spirit exceeds that of every other holy being." 14 He is not
very clear about the nature of the Holy Spirit, for he says: "The
Spirit of God, therefore, who, as it is written, moved upon the
waters in the beginning of the creation of the world, I reckon
to be none other than the Holy Spirit, so far as I can under-
stand.'* 15 Earlier he says: "But up to the present we have been
able to find no passage in the holy scriptures which would war-
rant us in saying that the Holy Spirit was a being made or cre-
ated." 16

III. THE NICAENUM

215 Trinitarian speculation had long passed its peak when the
Council of Nicaea, in 325, created a new creed, known as the
"Nicene." It runs:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of all things
visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, the
only begotten of the Father, being of the substance [ovala] of the
Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten
not made, consubstantial [6/ioofonos] with the Father, through whom
all things have been made which are in heaven and on earth. Who
for us men and for our salvation descended and was made flesh, be-
came man, suffered, rose again the third day, ascended into heaven,
and will come to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy
Spirit. As for those who say, "There was a time when He was not,"
or "Before He was begotten He was not," or "He was made from
that which was not, or from another subsistence [wrocrao-w], or sub-
stance," or "The Son of God is created, changeable, or subject to
change/' these the Catholic Church anathematizes. 17

2*6 Jt was, apparently, a Spanish bishop, Hosius of Cordoba,
who proposed to the emperor the crucial word o/iooixrtos. It did

i* Origen, On First Principles, trans, by Butterworth, pp. 33!.

15 Ibid., p. 31. 16 Ibid.

17 Cf. J. R. Palanque and others, The Church in the Christian Roman Empire, I:

The Church and the Arian Crisis, p. 96.

143

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

not occur then for the first time, for it can be found in Tertul-
lian, as the "unitas subs tan tiae." The concept of homoousia can
also be found in Gnostic usage, as for instance in Irenaeus' refer-
ences to the Valentinians (140-^. 200), where the Aeons are said
to be of one substance with their creator, Bythos. 18 The Nicene
Creed concentrates on the father-son relationship, while the
Holy Ghost receives scant mention.

IV. THE NICAENO-CONSTANTINOPOLITANUM,
THE ATHANASIANUM, AND THE LATERANENSE

217 The next formulation in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan
Creed of 381 brings an important advance. It runs:

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus
Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before
all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, be-
gotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom
all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came
down from heaven and was made flesh by the Holy Ghost and the
Virgin Mary and became man, and was crucified for us under
Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried, and on the third day rose
again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and
sitteth on the right hand of God the Father, whence he shall come
again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and whose kingdom
shall have no end. And [we believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord
and Giver of life, who proceeded! from the Father, 19 who with the
Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spake
through the prophets. And [we believe] in one holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission
of sins. And we await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the
world to come. Amen.

18 More accurately, the unity of substance consists in the fact that the Aeons
are descended from the Logos, which proceeds from Nous, the direct emanation
of Bythos. Cf. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, II, 17, 4, in Migne, P.G., vol. 7, cols.
762-63 (trans, by Roberts and Rambaut, p. 174).

19 [The addition at this point of the words "and from the Son" (Filioque), which,
though never accepted by the Eastern Churches, has been universal in the West,
both Catholic and Protestant, since the beginning of the eleventh century, is
still one of the principal points of contention between the two main sections of
the Christian body .EDITORS.]

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

218 Here the Holy Ghost is given due consideration: he is called
"Lord" and is worshipped together with Father and Son. But he
proceeds from the Father only. It was this point that caused the
tremendous controversy over the "filioque" question, as to
whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father only, or from
the Son as well. In order to make the Trinity a complete unity,
the filioque was just as essential as the homoousia. The (falsely
so-called) Athanasian Creed 20 insisted in the strongest possible
terms on the equality of all three Persons. Its peculiarities have
given much offence to rationalistic and liberal-minded theolo-
gians. I quote, as a sample, a passage from the beginning:

Now the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity,
and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing
the substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the
Son, another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all one; the glory equal, the
majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such
is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, the
Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father infinite, the Son infinite, the
Holy Ghost infinite. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy
Ghost eternal. And yet not three Eternals, but one Eternal. As also
there are not three Uncreated, nor three Infinites, but one Infinite
and one Uncreated. So likewise is the Father almighty, the Son al-
mighty, the Holy Ghost almighty; and yet there are not three Al-
mighties, but one Almighty. So the Father is God, the Son is God,
the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are not three Gods, but one
God. Likewise the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost
is Lord; and yet there are not three Lords, but one Lord. For just
as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge each
Person by himself to be both God and Lord, so we are forbidden by
the Catholic religion to say there are three Gods or three Lords.
The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten. The Son
is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten. The
Holy Ghost is of the Father and the Son, not made, nor created, nor
begotten, but proceeding. So there is one Father, not three Fathers;
one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.
And in this Trinity none is before or after, none is greater or less;
but all three Persons are coeternal together and coequal. So that in

20 it is also known as the "Symbolum Quicumque," on account of the opening
words: "Quicumque vult salvus esse" (Whosoever would be saved). It does not go
back to Athanasius.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

all ways, as is aforesaid, both the Trinity is to be worshipped in
Unity, and the Unity in Trinity. He, therefore, that would be saved,
let him think thus of the Trinity. 21

219 Here the Trinity is a fully developed conceptual schema in
which everything balances, the homoousia binding all three Per-
sons equally. The Creed of the Lateran Council, 1215, brings a
further differentiation. I shall quote only the beginning:

We firmly believe and wholeheartedly confess that there is only one
true God, eternal, infinite, and unchanging; incomprehensible,
almighty, and ineffable; Father and Son and Holy Ghost; three
Persons, but one essence; entirely simple in substance and nature.
The Father is of none, the Son is of the Father alone, and the Holy
Ghost is of both equally; for ever without beginning and without
end; the Father begetting, the Son being born, and the Holy Ghost
proceeding; consubstantial and coequal and coalmighty and co-
eternal. 22

220 The "filioque" is expressly taken up into this creed, thus
assigning the Holy Ghost a special activity and significance. So
far as I can judge, the later Creed of the Council of Trent adds
nothing further that would be of interest for our theme.

221 Before concluding this section, I would like to call attention
to a book well known in the Middle Ages, the Liber de Spiritu
et Anima^ which attempts a psychological interpretation of the
Trinity. The argument starts with the assumption that by self-
knowledge a man may attain to a knowledge o God. 24 The
mens rationalis is closest to God, for it is "excellently made, and
expressly after his likeness." If it recognizes its own likeness to
God it will the more easily recognize its creator. And thus
knowledge of the Trinity begins. For the intellect sees how wis-
dom (sapientia) proceeds from it and how it loves this wisdom.
But, from intellect and wisdom, there proceeds love, and thus
all three, intellect, wisdom, and love, appear in one. The origin
of all wisdom, however, is God. Therefore intellect (vovs) corre-
sponds to the Father, the wisdom it begets corresponds to the

21 [Official version from the Revised Book of Common Prayer (1928), with alterna-
tive readings. TRANS.]

22 [From the Decrees of the Lateran Council, ch. i. TRANS,]

23 Erroneously ascribed to St. Augustine. Cf. Opera, VI.

24 Ibid., p. 1194, B.

146

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

Son (XOTOS), and love corresponds to the Spirit (TVGJpa) breathed
forth between them. 25 The wisdom of God was often identified
with the cosmogonic Logos and hence with Christ. The medieval
mind finds it natural to derive the structure of the psyche from
the Trinity, whereas the modern mind reverses the procedure.

25 "The begetter is the Father, the begotten is the Son, and that which proceeds
from both is the Holy Spirit." Ibid., p. 1195, D.

147

THE THREE PERSONS IN THE LIGHT OF
PSYCHOLOGY

I. THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE ARCHETYPE

222 The sequence of creeds illustrates the evolution o the Trin-
ity idea through the centuries. In the course of its development
it either consistently avoided, or successfully combated, all
rationalistic deviations, such as, for instance, the so-plausible-
looking Arian heresy. The creeds superimposed on the trini-
tarian allusions in the Holy Scriptures a structure of ideas that
is a perpetual stumbling-block to the liberal-minded rationalist.
Religious statements are, however, never rational in the ordi-
nary sense of the word, for they always take into consideration
that other world, the world of the archetype, of which reason in
the ordinary sense is unconscious, being occupied only with ex-
ternals. Thus the development of the Christian idea of the Trin-
ity unconsciously reproduced the archetype of the homoousia
of Father, Son, and Ka-mutef which first appeared in Egyptian
theology. Not that the Egyptian model could be considered the
archetype of the Christian idea. The archetype an sich, as I have
explained elsewhere, 1 is an "irrepresentable" factor, a "disposi-
tion" which starts functioning at a given moment in the de-

i Cf. my "On the Nature of the Psyche" (1954/55 *&&> PP- 4ioff.).

148

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

velopment of the human mind and arranges the material of
consciousness into definite patterns. 2 That is to say, man's con-
ceptions of God are organized into triads and trinities, and a
whole host of ritualistic and magical practices take on a triple
or trichotomous character, as in the case of thrice-repeated
apotropaic spells, formulae for blessing, cursing, praising, giving
thanks, etc. Wherever we find it, the archetype has a compelling
force which it derives from the unconscious, and whenever its
effect becomes conscious it has a distinctly numinous quality.
There is never any conscious invention or cogitation, though
speculations about the Trinity have often been accused of this.
All the controversies, sophistries, quibbles, intrigues, and out-
rages that are such an odious blot on the history of this dogma
owe their existence to the compelling nuniinosity of the arche-
type and to the unexampled difficulty of incorporating it in the
world of rational thought. Although the emperors may have
made political capital out of the quarrels that ensued, this singu-
lar chapter in the history of the human mind cannot possibly
be traced back to politics, any more than social and economic
causes can be held responsible for it. The sole reason for the
dogma lies in the Christian "message," which caused a psychic
revolution in Western man. On the evidence of the gospels, and
of Paul's letters in particular, it announced the real and vera-
cious appearance of the God-man in this humdrum human
world, accompanied by all the marvellous portents worthy of
the son of God. However obscure the historical core of this
phenomenon may seem to us moderns, with our hankering for
factual accuracy, it is quite certain that those tremendous
psychic effects, lasting for centuries, were not causelessly called
21 have often been asked where the archetype comes from and whether it is
acquired or not. This question cannot be answered directly. Archetypes are, by
definition, factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain
images, characterized as archetypal, but in such a way that they can be recog-
nized only from the effects they produce. They exist preconsdously, and pre-
sumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general. They may
be compared to the invisible presence of the crystal lattice in a saturated solution.
As a priori conditioning factors they represent a special, psychological instance of
the biological "pattern of behaviour," which gives all living organisms their spe-
cific qualities. Just as the manifestations of this biological ground plan may
change in the course of development, so also can those of the archetype. Em-
pirically considered, however, the archetype did not ever come into existence as a
phenomenon of organic life, but entered into the picture with life itself.

149

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION .* WEST

forth, by just nothing at all. Unfortunately the gospel reports,
originating in missionary zeal, form the meagrest source imag-
inable for attempts at historical reconstruction. But, for that
very reason, they tell us all the more about the psychological re-
actions of the civilized world at that time. These reactions and
assertions are continued in the history of dogma, where they are
still conceived as the workings of the Holy Ghost. This interpre-
tation, though the psychologist has nothing to say in regard to
its metaphysical validity, is of the greatest moment, for it proves
the existence of an overwhelming opinion or conviction that
the operative factor in the formation of ideas is not man's in-
tellect but an authority above and beyond consciousness. This
psychological fact should on no account be overlooked, for any
theoretical reasons whatsoever. Rationalistic arguments to the
effect that the Holy Ghost is an hypothesis that cannot be proved
are not commensurable with the statements of the psyche. A
delusional idea is real, even though its content is, factually con-
sidered, nonsense. Psychology's concern is with psychic phe-
nomena and with nothing else. These may be mere aspects of
phenomena which, in themselves, could be subjected to a num-
ber of quite different modes of observation. Thus the statement
that dogmas are inspired by the Holy Ghost indicates that they
are not the product of conscious cogitation and speculation but
are motivated from sources outside consciousness and possibly
even outside man. Statements of this kind are the rule in arche-
typal experiences and are constantly associated with the sensed
presence of a numen. An archetypal dream, for instance, can so
fascinate the dreamer that he is very apt to see in it some kind
of illumination, warning, or supernatural help. Nowadays most
people are afraid of surrendering to such experiences, and their
fear proves the existence of a "holy dread" of the numinous.
Whatever the nature of these numinous experiences may be,
they all have one thing in common: they relegate their source to
a region outside consciousness. Psychology uses instead the con-
cept of the unconscious, and specially that of the collective un-
conscious as opposed to the personal unconscious. People who
reject the former and give credence only to the latter are forced
into persoiialistic explanations. But collective and, above all,
manifestly archetypal ideas can never be derived from the per-
sonal sphere. If Communism, for instance, refers to Engels,

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

Marx, Lenin, and so on as the ''fathers" of the movement, it
does not know that it is reviving an archetypal order of society
that existed even in primitive times, thereby explaining, inci-
dentally, the "religious" and "numinous" (i.e., fanatical) char-
acter of Communism. Neither did the Church Fathers know that
their Trinity had a prehistory dating back several thousand
years.

223 There can be no doubt that the doctrine of the Trinity
originally corresponded with a patriarchal order of society. But
we cannot tell whether social conditions produced the idea or,
conversely, the idea revolutionized the existing social order.
The phenomenon of early Christianity and the rise of Islam, to
take only these two examples, show what ideas can do. The lay-
man, having no opportunity to observe the behaviour of autono-
mous complexes, is usually inclined, in conformity with the
general trend, to trace the origin of psychic contents back to
the environment. This expectation is certainly justified so far
as the ideational contents of consciousness are concerned. In
addition to these, however, there are irrational, affective reac-
tions and impulses, emanating from the unconscious, which
organize the conscious material in an archetypal way. The more
clearly the archetype is constellated, the more powerful will
be its fascination, and the resultant religious statements will
formulate it accordingly, as something "daemonic" or "divine."
Such statements indicate possession by an archetype. The ideas
underlying them are necessarily anthropomorphic and are there-
by distinguished from the organizing archetype, which in itself
is irrepresentable because unconscious. 3 They prove, however,
that an archetype has been activated. 4

224 Thus the history of the Trinity presents itself as the gradual
crystallization of an archetype that moulds the anthropomorphic
conceptions of father and son, of life, and of different persons
into an archetypal and numinous figure, the "Most Holy Three-
in-One." The contemporary witnesses of these events appre-
hended it as something that modern psychology would call a
psychic presence outside consciousness. If there is a consensus of

3Cf. my detailed argument in "On the Nature of the Psyche" (1Q54/55 edn -
pp. 4ioff.).

4 It is very probable that the activation of an archetype depends on an alteration
of the conscious situation, which requires a new form of compensation.

151

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

opinion in respect of an idea, as there is here and always has
been, then we are entitled to speak of a collective presence.
Similar "presences" today are the Fascist and Communist ideol-
ogies, the one emphasizing the power of the chief, and the other
communal ownership of goods in a primitive society.

"Holiness" means that an idea or thing possesses the highest
value, and that in the presence of this value men are, so to speak,
struck dumb. Holiness is also revelatory: it is the illuminative
power emanating from an archetypal figure. Nobody ever feels
himself as the subject of such a process, but always as its object. 5
He does not perceive holiness, it takes him captive and over-
whelms him; nor does he behold it in a revelation, it reveals
itself to him, and he cannot even boast that he has understood
it properly. Everything happens apparently outside the sphere
of his will, and these happenings are contents of the uncon-
scious. Science is unable to say anything more than this, for it
cannot, by an act of faith, overstep the limits appropriate to its
nature.

II. CHRIST AS ARCHETYPE

226 The Trinity and its inner life process appear as a closed
circle, a self-contained divine drama in which man plays, at
most, a passive part. It seizes on him and, for a period of several
centuries, forced him to occupy his mind passionately with all
sorts of queer problems which today seem incredibly abstruse,
if not downright absurd. It is, in the first place, difficult to see
what the Trinity could possibly mean for us, either practically,
morally, or symbolically. Even theologians often feel that specu-
lation on this subject is a more or less otiose juggling with ideas,
and there are not a few who could get along quite comfortably
without the divinity of Christ, and for whom the role of the
Holy Ghost, both inside and outside the Trinity, is an em-
barrassment of the first order. Writing of the Athanasian Creed,
D. F. Strauss remarks: "The truth is that anyone who has sworn

5 Koepgen makes the following trenchant remark in his Gnosis des Christentums,
p. 198: "If there is such a thing as a history of the Western mind ... it would
have to be viewed from the standpoint of the personality of Western man, which
grew up under the influence of trinitarian dogma."

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

to the Symbolum Quicuinque has abjured the laws of human
thought." Naturally, the only person who can talk like that is
one who is no longer impressed by the revelation of holiness
and has fallen back on his own mental activity. This, so far as
the revealed archetype is concerned, is an inevitably retrograde
step: the liberalistic humanization of Christ goes back to the
rival doctrine of homoiousia and to Arianism, while modern
anti-trinitarianism has a conception of God that is more Old
Testament or Islamic in character than Christian.

227 Obviously, anyone who approaches this problem with ra-
tionalistic and intellectualistic assumptions, like D. F. Strauss,
is bound to find the patristic discussions and arguments com-
pletely nonsensical. But that anyone, and especially a theologian,
should fall back on such manifestly incommensurable criteria
as reason, logic, and the like, shows that, despite all the mental
exertions of the Councils and of scholastic theology, they failed
to bequeath to posterity an intellectual understanding of the
dogma that would lend the slightest support to belief in it.
There remained only submission to faith and renunciation of
one's own desire to understand. Faith, as we know from experi-
ence, often comes off second best and has to give in to criticism
which may not be at all qualified to deal with the object of faith.
Criticism of this kind always puts on an air of great enlighten-
mentthat is to say, it spreads round itself that thick darkness
which the Word once tried to penetrate with its light: "And
the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness compre-
hended it not."

228 Naturally, it never occurs to these critics that their way of
approach is incommensurable with their object. They think
they have to do with rational facts, whereas it entirely escapes
them that it is and always has been primarily a question of
irrational psychic phenomena. That this is so can be seen plainly
enough from the unhistorical character of the gospels, whose
only concern was to represent the miraculous figure of Christ
as graphically and impressively as possible. Further evidence of
this is supplied by the earliest literary witness, Paul, who was
closer to the events in question than the apostles. It is frankly
disappointing to see how Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus
of Nazareth to get a word in. Even at this early date (and not
only in John) he is completely overlaid, or rather smothered,

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by metaphysical conceptions: he is the ruler over all daemonic
forces, the cosmic saviour, the mediating God-man. The whole
pre-Christian and Gnostic theology of the Near East (some of
whose roots go still further back) wraps itself about him and
turns him before our eyes into a dogmatic figure who has no
more need of historicity. At a very early stage, therefore, the real
Christ vanished behind the emotions and projections that
swarmed about him from far and near; immediately and almost
without trace he was absorbed into the surrounding religious
systems and moulded into their archetypal exponent. He be-
came the collective figure whom the unconscious of his con-
temporaries expected to appear, and for this reason it is pointless
to ask who he "really" was. Were he human and nothing else,
and in this sense historically true, he would probably be no
more enlightening a figure than, say, Pythagoras, or Socrates,
or Apollonius of Tyana. He opened men's eyes to revelation pre-
cisely because he was, from everlasting, God, and therefore un-
historical; and he functioned as such only by virtue of the con-
sensus of unconscious expectation. If nobody had remarked that
there was something special about the wonder-working Rabbi
from Galilee, the darkness would never have noticed that a light
was shining. Whether he lit the light with his own strength, or
whether he was the victim of the universal longing for light
and broke down under it, are questions which, for lack of re-
liable information, only faith can decide. At any rate the
documentary reports relating to the general projection and
assimilation of the Christ-figure are unequivocal. There is
plenty of evidence for the co-operation of the collective uncon-
scious in view of the abundance of parallels from the history of
religion. In these circumstances we must ask ourselves what it
was in man that was stirred by the Christian message, and what
was the answer he gave.

229 If we are to answer this psychological question, we must first
of all examine the Christ-symbolism contained in the New
Testament, together with the patristic allegories and medieval
iconography, and compare this material with the archetypal con-
tent of the unconscious psyche in order to find out what arche-
types have been constellated. The most important of the
symbolical statements about Christ are those which reveal the
attributes of the hero's life: improbable origin, divine father,

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

hazardous birth, rescue in the nick of time, precocious develop-
ment, conquest of the mother and of death, miraculous deeds, a
tragic, early end, symbolically significant manner of death, post-
mortem effects (reappearances, signs and marvels, etc.). As the
Logos, Son of the Father, Rex gloriae, Judex mundi, Redeemer,
and Saviour, Christ is himself God, an all-embracing totality,
which, like the definition of Godhead, is expressed iconograph-
ically by the circle or mandala. 6 Here I would mention only the
traditional representation of the Rex gloriae in a mandala,
accompanied by a quaternity composed of the four symbols of
the evangelists (including the four seasons, four winds, four
rivers, and so on). Another symbolism of the same kind is the
choir of saints, angels, and elders grouped round Christ (or God)
in the centre. Here Christ symbolizes the integration of the
kings and prophets of the Old Testament. As a shepherd he is
the leader and centre of the flock. He is the vine, and those that
hang on him are the branches. His body is bread to be eaten,
and his blood wine to be drunk; he is also the mystical body
formed by the congregation. In his human manifestation he is
the hero and God-man, born without sin, more complete and
more perfect than the natural man, who is to him what a child
is to an adult, or an animal (sheep) to a human being.
*3 These mythological statements, coming from within the
Christian sphere as well as from outside it, adumbrate an arche-
type that expresses itself in essentially the same symbolism and
also occurs in individual dreams or in fantasy-like projections
upon living people (transference phenomena, hero-worship,
etc.). The content of all such symbolic products is the idea of
an overpowering, all-embracing, complete or perfect being,
represented either by a man of heroic proportions, or by an
animal with magical attributes, or by a magical vessel or some
other " treasure hard to attain/' such as a jewel, ring, crown, or,

6"Deus est circulus cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia vero nusquam"
(God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere). This
definition occurs in the later literature. In the form "Deus est sphaera infmita"
(God is an infinite sphere) it is supposed to have come from the Liber Hermetis,
Liber Termegisti, Cod. Paris. 6319 (i4th cent.); Cod. Vat. 3060 (1315). Cf. Baum-
gartner, Die Philosophie des Alanus de Insults, p. 118. In this connection, men-
tion should be made of the tendency of Gnostic thought to move in a circle, e.g.:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the
Word." Cf. Leisegang, Denkformen, pp. 6off.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

geometrically, by a mandala. This archetypal idea is a reflection
of the individual's wholeness, i.e., of the self, which is present
in him as an unconscious image. The conscious mind can form
absolutely no conception of this totality, because it includes not
only the conscious but also the unconscious psyche, which is, as
such, inconceivable and irrepresentable.

231 It was this archetype of the self in the soul of every man that
responded to the Christian message, with the result that the
concrete Rabbi Jesus was rapidly assimilated by the constellated
archetype. In this way Christ realized the idea of the self. 7 But
as one can never distinguish empirically between a symbol of
the self and a God-image, the two ideas, however much we try
to differentiate them, always appear blended together, so that
the self appears synonymous with the inner Christ of the
Johannine and Pauline writings, and Christ with God ("of one
substance with the Father"), just as the atman appears as the
individualized self and at the same time as the animating prin-
ciple of the cosmos, and Tao as a condition of mind and at the
same time as the correct behaviour of cosmic events. Psycholog-
ically speaking, the domain of "gods" begins where conscious-
ness leaves off, for at that point man is already at the mercy of
the natural order, whether he thrive or perish. To the symbols
of wholeness that come to him from there he attaches names
which vary according to time and place.

232 The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of
the individual. Anything that a man postulates as being a
greater totality than himself can become a symbol of the self.
For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as
the definition would require. Even the Christ-figure is not a
totality, for it lacks the nocturnal side of the psyche's nature,
the darkness of the spirit, and is also without sin. Without the
integration of evil there is no totality, nor can evil be "added
to the mixture by force." One could compare Christ as a sym-
bol to the mean of the first mixture: he would then be the
middle term of a triad, in which the One and Indivisible is
represented by the Father, and the Divisible by the Holy Ghost,
who, as we know, can divide himself into tongues of fire. But

TKoepgen (p. 307) puts it very aptly: "J esus relates everything to his ego, but
f&is ego is not the subjective ego, it is a cosmic ego."

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

this triad, according to the Timaeus, is not yet a reality. Conse-
quently a second mixture is needed.

233 The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is
self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself
only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and
indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization to put it
in religious or metaphysical terms amounts to God's incarna-
tion. That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son
of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic
task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of
the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened
with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being
robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak,
from the violence done to him by the self. 8 The analogous
passion of Christ signifies God's suffering on account of the in-
justice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and
the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity
with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can
get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way
towards realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of
conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the "divine" realm,
where it participates in "God's suffering." The cause of the
suffering is in both cases the same, namely "incarnation," which
on the human level appears as "individuation." The divine hero
born of man is already threatened with murder; he has nowhere
to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self
is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality,
only part of it conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life
of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the
form of symbols. The drama of the archetypal life of Christ de-
scribes in symbolic images the events in the conscious lifeas
well as in the life that transcends consciousness of a man who
has been transformed by his higher destiny.

III. THE HOLY GHOST

234 The psychological relationship between man and the trini-
tarian life process is illustrated first by the human nature of
8 Cf . Jacob's struggle with the angel at the ford.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION t WEST

Christ, and second by the descent of the Holy Ghost and his in-
dwelling in man, as predicted and promised by the Christian
message. The life of Christ is on the one hand only a short, his-
torical interlude for proclaiming the message, but on the other
hand it is an exemplary demonstration of the psychic experi-
ences connected with God's manifestation of himself (or the
realization of the self). The important thing for man is not
the dewvbjjLevov and the bp^vov (what is "shown" and "done"),
but what happens afterwards: the seizure of the individual by
the Holy Ghost.

2 35 Here, however, we run into a great difficulty. For if we fol-
low up the theory of the Holy Ghost and carry it a step further
(which the Church has not done, for obvious reasons), we come
inevitably to the conclusion that if the Father appears in the Son
and breathes together with the Son, and the Son leaves the Holy
Ghost behind for man, then the Holy Ghost breathes in man,
too, and thus is the breath common to man, the Son, and the
Father. Man is therefore included in God's sonship, and the
words of Christ "Ye are gods" (John 10:34) appear in a sig-
nificant light. The doctrine that the Paraclete was expressly left
behind for man raises an enormous problem. The triadic for-
mula of Plato would surely be the last word in the matter of
logic, but psychologically it is not so at all, because the psycho-
logical factor keeps on intruding in the most disturbing way.
Why, in the name of all that's wonderful, wasn't it "Father,
Mother, and Son?" That would be much more "reasonable"
and "natural" than "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." To this we
must answer: it is not just a question of a natural situation, but
of a product of human reflection 9 added on to the natural se-
quence of father and son. Through reflection, "life" and its
"soul" are abstracted from Nature and endowed with a separate
existence. Father and son are united in the same soul, or, accord-
ing to the ancient Egyptian view, in the same procreative force,

9 "Reflection" should be understood not simply as an act of thought, but rather
as an attitude. [Cf, Psychological Types, Def. 8. EDITORS.] It is a privilege born
of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law. As
the word itself testifies ("reflection" means literally "bending back"), reflection is
a spiritual act that runs counter to the natural process; an act whereby we stop,
call something to mind, form a picture, and take up a relation to and come to
terms with what we have seen. It should, therefore, be understood as an act of
becoming conscious.

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

Ka-mutef. Ka-mutef is exactly the same hypostatization of an
attribute as the breath or "spiration" of the Godhead. 10

This psychological fact spoils the abstract perfection of the
triadic formula and makes it a logically incomprehensible con-
struction, since, in some mysterious and unexpected way, an
important mental process peculiar to man has been imported
into it. If the Holy Ghost is, at one and the same time, the breath
of life and a loving spirit and the Third Person in whom the
whole trinitarian process culminates, then he is essentially a
product of reflection, an hypostatized noumenon tacked on to
the natural family-picture of father and son. It is significant that
early Christian Gnosticism tried to get round this difficulty by
interpreting the Holy Ghost as the Mother. 11 But that would
merely have kept him within the archaic family-picture, within
the tritheism and polytheism of the patriarchal world. It is,
after all, perfectly natural that the father should have a family
and that the son should embody the father. This train of thought
is quite consistent with the father-world. On the other hand,
the mother-interpretation would reduce the specific meaning
of the Holy Ghost to a primitive image and destroy the most
essential of the qualities attributed to him: not only is he the
life common to Father and Son, he is also the Paraclete whom
the Son left behind him, to procreate in man and bring forth
works of divine parentage. It is of paramount importance that
the idea of the Holy Ghost is not a natural image, but a recog-
nition of the living quality of Father and Son, abstractly con-
ceived as the "third" term between the One and the Other. Out
of the tension of duality life always produces a "third" that
seems somehow incommensurable or paradoxical. Hence, as the
"third," the Holy Ghost is bound to be incommensurable and
paradoxical too. Unlike Father and Son, he has no name and no
character. He is a function, but that function is the Third Per-
son of the Godhead.

10 "Active spiration" is a manifestation of life, an immanent act of Father and
Son; "passive spiration," on the other hand, is a quality of the Holy Ghost.
According to St. Thomas, spiration does not proceed from the intellect but from
the will of the Father and Son, In relation to the Son the Holy Ghost is not a
spiration, but a procreative act of the Father.

11 Cf. the Acts of Thomas (trans, by James, p. 388): "Come, O communion of the
male; come, she that knoweth the mysteries of him that is chosen. . . . Come,
holy dove that beareth the twin young; come, hidden mother."

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

2 37 He is psychologically heterogeneous in that he cannot be
logically derived from the father-son relationship and can only
be understood as an idea introduced by a process of human
reflection. The Holy Ghost is an exceedingly "abstract" concep-
tion, since a "breath" shared by two figures characterized as dis-
tinct and not mutually interchangeable can hardly be conceived
at all. Hence one feels it to be an artificial construction of the
mind, even though, as the Egyptian Ka-mutef concept shows,
it seems somehow to belong to the very essence of the Trinity.
Despite the fact that we cannot help seeing in the positing of
such a concept a product of human reflection, this reflection
need not necessarily have been a conscious act. It could equally
well owe its existence to a "revelation," i.e., to an unconscious
reflection, 12 and hence to an autonomous functioning of the un-
conscious, or rather of the self, whose symbols, as we have al-
ready said, cannot be distinguished from God-images. A religious
interpretation will therefore insist that this hypostasis was a
divine revelation. While it cannot raise any objections to such a
notion, psychology must hold fast to the conceptual nature of
the hypostasis, for in the last analysis the Trinity, too, is an
anthropomorphic configuration, gradually taking shape through
strenuous mental and spiritual effort, even though already
preformed by the timeless archetype.

238 This separating, recognizing, and assigning of qualities is a
mental activity which, although unconscious at first, gradually
filters through to consciousness as the work proceeds. What
started off by merely happening to consciousness later becomes
integrated in it as its own activity. So long as a mental or indeed
any psychic process at all is unconscious, it is subject to the law
governing archetypal dispositions, which are organized and
arranged round the self. And since the self cannot be dis-
tinguished from an archetypal God-image, it would be equally
true to say of any such arrangement that it conforms to natural
law and that it is an act of God's will. (Every metaphysical state-
ment is, ipso facto , unprovable). Inasmuch, then, as acts of cogni-
tion and judgment are essential qualities of consciousness, any
accumulation of unconscious acts of this sort 13 will have the

12 For this seeming contradictio in adjecto see "On the Nature of the Psyche"
0954/55 edn., p. 383).

13 The existence of such processes is evidenced by the content of dreams.

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

effect of strengthening and widening consciousness, as one can
see for oneself in any thorough analysis of the unconscious.
Consequently, man's achievement of consciousness appears as
the result of prefigurative archetypal processes or to put it
metaphysically as part of the divine life-process. In other
words, God becomes manifest in the human act of reflection.

239 The nature of this conception (i.e., the hypostatizing of a
quality) meets the need evinced by primitive thought to form a
more or less abstract idea by endowing each individual quality
with a concrete existence of its own. Just as the Holy Ghost is
a legacy left to man, so, conversely, the concept of the Holy
Ghost is something begotten by man and bears the stamp of its
human progenitor. And just as Christ took on man's bodily
nature, so through the Holy Ghost man as a spiritual force is
surreptitiously included in the mystery of the Trinity, thereby
raising it far above the naturalistic level of the triad and thus
beyond the Platonic triunity. The Trinity, therefore, discloses
itself as a symbol that comprehends the essence of the divine and
the human. It is, as Koepgen 14 says, "a revelation not only of
God but at the same time of man."

240 The Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Ghost as the Mother
contains a core of truth in that Mary was the instrument of
God's birth and so became involved in the trinitarian drama as
a human being. The Mother of God can, therefore, be regarded
as a symbol of mankind's essential participation in the Trinity.
The psychological justification for this assumption lies in the
fact that thinking, which originally had its source in the self-
revelations of the unconscious, was felt to be the manifestation
of a power external to consciousness. The primitive does not
think; the thoughts come to him. We ourselves still feel certain
particularly enlightening ideas as "in-fluences," "in-spirations,"
etc. Where judgments and flashes of insight are transmitted by
unconscious activity, they are often attributed to an archetypal
feminine figure, the anima or mother-beloved. It then seems as
if the inspiration came from the mother or from the beloved,
the "femme inspiratrice." In view of this, the Holy Ghost
would have a tendency to exchange his neuter designation (TO
7rpVfj,(i ) for a feminine one. (It may be noted that the Hebrew
word for spirit ruach is predominantly feminine.) Holy Ghost

14 Die Gnosis des Ghristentums, p. 194.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

and Logos merge in the Gnostic idea of Sophia, and again in the
Sapientia of the medieval natural philosophers, who said of her:
"In gremio matris sedet sapientia patris" (the wisdom of the
father lies in the lap of the mother). These psychological rela-
tionships do something to explain why the Holy Ghost was
interpreted as the mother, but they add nothing to our under-
standing of the Holy Ghost as such, because it is impossible to
see how the mother could come third when her natural place
would be second.

241 Since the Holy Ghost is an hypostasis of "life," posited by an
act of reflection, he appears, on account of his peculiar nature,
as a separate and incommensurable "third/ 5 whose very pecu-
liarities testify that it is neither a compromise nor a mere
triadic appendage, but rather the logically unexpected reso-
lution of tension between Father and Son. The fact that it is
precisely a process of human reflection that irrationally creates
the uniting "third" is itself connected with the nature of the
drama of redemption, whereby God descends into the human
realm and man mounts up to the realm of divinity.

242 Thinking in the magic circle of the Trinity, or trinitarian
thinking, is in truth motivated by the "Holy Spirit" in so far as
it is never a question of mere cogitation but of giving expression
to imponderable psychic events. The driving forces that work
themselves out in this thinking are not conscious motives; they
come from an historical occurrence rooted, in its turn, in those
obscure psychic assumptions for which one could hardly find a
better or more succinct formula than the "change from father to
son," from unity to duality, from non-reflection to criticism. To
the extent that personal motives are lacking in trinitarian think-
ing, and the forces motivating it derive from impersonal and
collective psychic conditions, it expresses a need of the un-
conscious psyche far surpassing all personal needs. This need,
aided by human thought, produced the symbol of the Trinity,
which was destined to serve as a saving formula of wholeness in
an epoch of change and psychic transformation. Manifestations
of a psychic activity not caused or consciously willed by man
himself have always been felt to be daemonic, divine, or "holy,"
in the sense that they heal and make whole. His ideas of God
behave as do all images arising out of the unconscious: they com-
pensate or complete the general mood or attitude of the mo-

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

ment, and it is only through the integration of these unconscious
images that a man becomes a psychic whole. The "merely con-
scious" man who is all ego is a mere fragment, in so far as he
seems to exist apart from the unconscious. But the more the un-
conscious is split off, the more formidable the shape in which it
appears to the conscious mind if not in divine form, then in
the more unfavourable form of obsessions and outbursts of
affect. 15 Gods are personifications of unconscious contents, for
they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious activity of
the psyche. 16 Trinitarian thinking had something of the same
quality, and its passionate profundity rouses in us latecomers
a naive astonishment. We no longer know, or have not yet dis-
covered, what depths in the soul were stirred by that great turn-
ing-point in human history. The Holy Ghost seems to have
faded away without having found the answer to the question he
set humanity.

15 In the Rituale Romanum ("On the Exorcism of Persons Possessed by the
Devil": 1952 edn., pp. 8398:.), states of possession are expressly distinguished from
diseases. We are told that the exorcist must learn to know the signs hy which
the possessed person may be distinguished from "those suffering from melancholy
or any morbid condition." The criteria of possession are: "... speaking fluently
in unknown tongues or understanding those who speak them; revealing things
that take place at a distance or in secret; giving evidence of greater strength
than is natural in view of one's age or condition; and other things of the same
kind." The Church's idea of possession, therefore, is limited to extremely rare
cases, whereas I would use it in a much wider sense as designating a frequently
occurring psychic phenomenon: any autonomous complex not subject to the
conscious will exerts a possessive effect on consciousness proportional to its
strength and limits the latter's freedom. On the question of the Church's distinc-
tion between disease and possession, see Tonquedec, Les Maladies nerueuses ou
mentales et les manifestations diaboliques.

16 1 am always coming up against the misunderstanding that a psychological treat-
ment or explanation reduces God to "nothing but" psychology. It is not a question
of God at all, but of man's ideas of God, as I have repeatedly emphasized. There
are people who do have such ideas and who form such conceptions, and these
things are the proper study of psychology.

163

5. THE PROBLEM OF THE FOURTH

I. THE CONCEPT OF QUATERNITY

243 The TimaeuSy which was the first to propound a triadic for-
mula for the God-image in philosophical terms, starts off with
the ominous question: "One, two, three but . , . where is the
fourth?" This question is, as we know, taken up again in the
Cabiri scene in Faust:

Three we brought with us,

The fourth would not come.
He was the right one

Who thought for them all.

244 When Goethe says that the fourth was the one "who thought
for them all/' we rather suspect that the fourth was Goethe's
own thinking function. 1 The Cabiri are, in fact, the mysterious
creative powers, the gnomes who work under the earth, i.e.,
below the threshold of consciousness, in order to supply us with
lucky ideas. As imps and hobgoblins, however, they also play
all sorts of nasty tricks, keeping back names and dates that were

i "Feeling is all; / Names are sound and smoke." [This problem of the "fourth"
in Faust is also discussed in Psychology and Alchemy, pp. i48ff. -EDITORS.]

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

"on the tip of the tongue," making us say the wrong thing, etc.
They give an eye to everything that has not already been antici-
pated by the conscious mind and the functions at its disposal.
As these functions can be used consciously only because they
are adapted, it follows that the unconscious, autonomous func-
tion is not or cannot be used consciously because it is unadapted.
The differentiated and differentiable functions are much easier
to cope with, and, for understandable reasons, we prefer to leave
the "inferior" function round the corner, or to repress it alto-
gether, because it is such an awkward customer. And it is a fact
that it has the strongest tendency to be infantile, banal, primi-
tive, and archaic. Anybody who has a high opinion of himself
will do well to guard against letting it make a fool of him. On
the other hand, deeper insight will show that the primitive and
archaic qualities of the inferior function conceal all sorts of
significant relationships and symbolical meanings, and instead
of laughing off the Cabiri as ridiculous Tom Thumbs he may
begin to suspect that they are a treasure-house of hidden wis-
dom. Just as, in Faust, the fourth thinks for them all, so the
whereabouts of the eighth should be asked "on Olympus."
Goethe showed great insight in not underestimating his inferior
function, thinking, although it was in the hands of the Cabiri
and was undoubtedly mythological and archaic. He character-
izes it perfectly in the line: "The fourth would not come."
Exactly! It wanted for some reason to stay behind or below. 2
245 Three of the four orienting functions are available to con-
sciousness. This is confirmed by the psychological experience
that a rational type, for instance, whose superior function is
thinking, has at his disposal one, or possibly two, auxiliary func-
tions of an irrational nature, namely sensation (the "fonction du
reel") and intuition (perception via the unconscious). His in-
ferior function will be feeling (valuation), which remains in a
retarded state and is contaminated with the unconscious. It
refuses to come along with the others and often goes wildly off
on its own. This peculiar dissociation is, it seems, a product of
civilization, and it denotes a freeing of consciousness from any
excessive attachment to the "spirit of gravity." If that function,
which is still bound indissolubly to the past and whose roots

2 Cf. Psychological Types, Del 30.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

reach back as far as the animal kingdom, 3 can be left behind
and even forgotten, then consciousness has won for itself a new
and not entirely illusory freedom. It can leap over abysses on
winged feet; it can free itself from bondage to sense-impressions,
emotions, fascinating thoughts, and presentiments by soaring
into abstraction. Certain primitive initiations stress the idea of
transformation into ghosts and invisible spirits and thereby
testify to the relative emancipation of consciousness from the
fetters of non-differentiation. Although there is a tendency,
characteristic not only of primitive religions, to speak rather
exaggeratedly of complete transformation, complete renewal
and rebirth, it is, of course, only a relative change, continuity
with the earlier state being in large measure preserved. Were it
otherwise, every religious transformation would bring about a
complete splitting of the personality or a loss of memory, which
is obviously not so. The connection with the earlier attitude is
maintained because part of the personality remains behind in
the previous situation; that is to say it lapses into unconscious-
ness and starts building up the shadow. 4 The loss makes itself
felt in consciousness through the absence of at least one of the
four orienting functions, and the missing function is always the
opposite of the superior function. The loss need not necessarily
take the form of complete absence; in other words, the inferior
function may be either unconscious or conscious, but in both
cases it is autonomous and obsessive and not influenceable by
the will. It has the "all-or-none" character of an instinct. Al-
though emancipation from the instincts brings a differentiation
and enhancement of consciousness, it can only come about at the
expense of the unconscious function, so that conscious orienta-
tion lacks that element which the inferior function could have
supplied. Thus it often happens that people who have an amaz-
ing range of consciousness know less about themselves than the
veriest infant, and all because "the fourth would not come"

3Cf. the Hymn of Valentinus (Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 307):
"All things depending in spirit I see; all things supported in spirit I view; flesh
from soul depending; soul by air supported; air from aether hanging; fruits born
of the deep; babe born of the womb." Cf. also the Trpocr^vTfc \pvxfj of Isidorus,
who supposed that all manner of animal qualities attached to the human soul
in the form of "outgrowths."

4 Cf. the alchemical symbol of the umbra soils and the Gnostic idea that Christ
was born "not without some shadow."

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

it remained down below or up above in the unconscious
realm.

246 As compared with the trinitarian thinking o Plato, ancient
Greek philosophy favoured thinking of a quaternary type. In
Pythagoras the great role was played not by three but by four:
the Pythagorean oath, for instance, says that the tetraktys "con-
tains the roots of eternal nature." 5 The Pythagorean school was
dominated by the idea that the soul was a square and not a
triangle. The origin of these ideas lies far back in the dark pre-
history of Greek thought. The quaternity is an archetype of
almost universal occurrence. It forms the logical basis for any
whole judgment. If one wishes to pass such a judgment, it must
have this fourfold aspect. For instance, if you want to describe
the horizon as a whole, you name the four quarters of heaven.
Three is not a natural coefficient of order, but an artificial one.
There are always four elements, four prime qualities, four
colours, four castes, four ways of spiritual development, etc.
So, too, there are four aspects of psychological orientation, be-
yond which nothing fundamental remains to be said. In order
to orient ourselves, we must have a function which ascertains
that something is there (sensation); a second function which
establishes what it is (thinking); a third function which states
whether it suits us or not, whether we wish to accept it or not
(feeling); and a fourth function which indicates where it came
from and where it is going (intuition). When this has been done,
there is nothing more to say. Schopenhauer proves that the
"Principle of Sufficient Reason" has a fourfold root. 6 This is
so because the fourfold aspect is the minimum requirement for
a complete judgment. The ideal of completeness is the circle
or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity.

247 Now if Plato had had the idea of the Christian Trinity 7
which of course he did not and had on that account placed his
triad above everything, one would be bound to object that this
cannot be a whole judgment. A necessary fourth would be left

5 The four pif&juara of Empedocles.

6 "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," in Two Essays
by Arthur Schopenhauer.

i In Plato the quaternity takes the form of a cube, which he correlates with earth.
Lii Pu-wei (Friihling und Herbst, trans, into German by Wilhelm, p. 38) says:
"Heaven's way is round, earth's way is square."

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out; or, if Plato took the three-sided figure as symbolic of the
Beautiful and the Good and endowed it with all positive quali-
ties, he would have had to deny evil and imperfection to it. In
that case, what has become of them? The Christian answer is
that evil is a privatio boni. This classic formula robs evil of
absolute existence and makes it a shadow that has only a relative
existence dependent on light. Good, on the other hand, is
credited with a positive substantiality. But, as psychological ex-
perience shows, "good" and "evil" are opposite poles of a moral
judgment which, as such, originates in man. A judgment can be
made about a thing only if its opposite is equally real and pos-
sible. The opposite of a seeming evil can only be a seeming
good, and an evil that lacks substance can only be contrasted
with a good that is equally non-substantial. Although the op-
posite of "existence" is "non-existence," the opposite of an
existing good can never be a non-existing evil, for the latter is
a contradiction in terms and opposes to an existing good some-
thing incommensurable with it; the opposite of a non-existing
(negative) evil can only be a non-existing (negative) good. If,
therefore, evil is said to be a mere privation of good, the opposi-
tion of good and evil is denied outright. How can one speak of
"good" at all if there is no "evil"? Or of "light" if there is no
"darkness," or of "above" if there is no "below"? There is no
getting round the fact that if you allow substantiality to good,
you must also allow it to evil. If evil has no substance, good must
remain shadowy, for there is no substantial opponent for it to
defend itself against, but only a shadow, a mere privation of
good. Such a view can hardly be squared with observed reality.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that apotropaic tendencies
have had a hand in creating this notion, with the understand-
able intention of settling the painful problem of evil as optimis-
tically as possible. Often it is just as well that we do not know
the danger we escape when we rush in where angels fear to
tread.

248 Christianity also deals with the problem in another way, by
asserting that evil has substance and personality as the devil, or
Lucifer. There is one view which allows the devil a malicious,
goblin-like existence only, thus making him the insignificant
head of an insignificant tribe of wood-imps and poltergeists. An-
other view grants him a more dignified status, depending on the

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

degree to which it identifies him with "ills" in general. How far
"ills" may be identified with "evil" is a controversial question.
The Church distinguishes between physical ills and moral ills.
The former may be willed by divine Providence (e.g., for man's
improvement), the latter not, because sin cannot be willed by
God even as a means to an end. It would be difficult to verify the
Church's view in concrete instances, for psychic and somatic dis-
orders are "ills," and, as illnesses, they are moral as well as physi-
cal. At all events there is a view which holds that the devil,
though created, is autonomous and eternal. In addition, he is
the adversary of Christ: by infecting our first parents with origi-
nal sin he corrupted creation and made the Incarnation neces-
sary for God's work of salvation. In so doing he acted according
to his own judgment, as in the Job episode, where he was even
able to talk God round. The devil's prowess on these occasions
hardly squares with his alleged shadow-existence as the privatio
boni, which, as we have said, looks very like a euphemism. The
devil as an autonomous and eternal personality is much more in
keeping with his role as the adversary of Christ and with the
psychological reality of evil.

249 But if the devil has the power to put a spoke in God's Crea-
tion, or even corrupt it, and God does nothing to stop this nefari-
ous activity and leaves it all to man (who is notoriously stupid,
unconscious, and easily led astray), then, despite all assurances
to the contrary, the evil spirit must be a factor of quite incal-
culable potency. In this respect, anyhow, the dualism of the
Gnostic systems makes sense, because they at least try to do jus-
tice to the real meaning of evil. They have also done us the
supreme service of having gone very thoroughly into the ques-
tion of where evil comes from. Biblical tradition leaves us very
much in the dark on this point, and it is only too obvious why
the old theologians were in no particular hurry to enlighten us.
In a monotheistic religion everything that goes against God can
only be traced back to God himself. This thought is objection-
able, to say the least of it, and has therefore to be circumvented.
That is the deeper reason why a highly influential personage like
the devil cannot be accommodated properly in a trinitarian cos-
mos. It is difficult to make out in what relation he stands to the
Trinity. As the adversary of Christ, he would have to take up an

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equivalent counterposition and be, like him, a "son of God." 8
But that would lead straight back to certain Gnostic views ac-
cording to which the devil, as Satanael, 9 is God's first son, Christ
being the second. 9a A further logical inference would be the abo-
lition of the Trinity formula and its replacement by a quater-
nity.

*5 The idea of a quaternity of divine principles was violently
attacked by the Church Fathers when an attempt was made to
add a fourth God's "essence" to the Three Persons of the
Trinity. This resistance to the quaternity is very odd, consider-
ing that the central Christian symbol, the Cross, is unmistakably
a quaternity. The Cross, however, symbolizes God's suffering
in his immediate encounter with the world. 10 The "prince of
this world," the devil (John 12 : 31, 14: 30), vanquishes the God-
man at this point, although by so doing he is presumably pre-
paring his own defeat and digging his own grave. According to
an old view, Christ is the "bait on the hook" (the Cross), with
which he catches "Leviathan" (the devil). 11 It is therefore sig-
nificant that the Cross, set up midway between heaven and hell
as a symbol of Christ's struggle with the devil, corresponds to
the quaternity.

5* Medieval iconology, embroidering on the old speculations
about the Theotokos, evolved a quaternity symbol in its repre-
sentations of the coronation of the Virgin 12 and surreptitiously
put it in place of the Trinity. The Assumption of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, i.e., the taking up of Mary's soul into heaven with
her body,, is admitted as ecclesiastical doctrine but has not yet
become dogma. 13 Although Christ, too, rose up with his body,

8 In her "Die Gestalt des Satans im Alten Testament" (Symbolik des Geistes, pp.
i53ff.), Riwkah Scharf shows that Satan is in fact one of God's sons, at any rate
in the Old Testament sense.

9 The suffix -el means god, so Satanael = Satan-God.

9a Michael Psellus, "De Daemonibus," 1497, fol. NVv, ed. M. Ficino. Cf. also
Epiphanius, Panarium, Haer. XXX, in Migne, P.G., vol. 41, cols. 4o6ff.

10 Cf. Przywara's meditations on the Cross and its relation to God in Deus Semper
Major., I. Also the early Christian interpretation of the Cross in the Acts of John,
trans, by James, pp. 2s8ff. n Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus Deliciarum.

12 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 315$., and the first paper in this volume,
pars. i22ff.

13 As this doctrine has already got beyond the stage of "conclusio probabilis" and
has reached that of "conclusio certa," the "definitio sollemnis" is now only a
matter of time. The Assumption is, doctrinally speaking, a "revelatum im-

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

this has a rather different meaning, since Christ was a divinity
in the first place and Mary was not. In her case the body would
have been a much more material one than Christ's, much more
an element of space-time reality. 14 Ever since the Timaeus the
"fourth" has signified "realization/' i.e., entry into an essentially
different condition, that o worldly materiality, which, it is
authoritatively stated, is ruled by the Prince of this world for
matter is the diametrical opposite of spirit. It is the true abode
of the devil, whose hellish hearth-fire burns deep in the interior
of the earth, while the shining spirit soars in the aether, freed
from the shackles of gravity.

252 The Assumptio Mariae paves the way not only for the di-
vinity of the Theotokos (i.e., her ultimate recognition as a
goddess), 15 but also for the quaternity. At the same time, matter
is included in the metaphysical realm, together with the cor-
rupting principle of the cosmos, evil. One can explain that
matter was originally pure, or at least capable of purity, but this
does not do away with the fact that matter represents the con-
creteness of God's thoughts and is, therefore, the very thing that
makes individuation possible, with all its consequences. The
adversary is, quite logically, conceived to be the soul of matter,
because they both constitute a point of resistance without which

plicitum"; that is to say, it has never been revealed explicitly, but, in the gradual
course of development, it became clear as an original content of the Revelation.
(Cf. Wiederkehr, Die leibliche Aufnahme der allerseligsten Jungfrau Maria in
den Himmel.) From the psychological standpoint, however, and in terms of the
history of symbols, this view is a consistent and logical restoration of the
archetypal situation, in which the exalted status of Mary is revealed implicitly
and must therefore become a "conclusio certa" in the course of time.

[This note was written in 1948, two years before the promulgation of the
dogma. The bodily assumption of Mary into heaven was defined as a dogma of
the Catholic faith by Pope Pius XII in November 1950 by the Apostolic Consti-
tution Munificentissimus Deus (Ada Apostolicae Sedis, Rome, XLII, pp. 753ff-)>
and in an Encyclical Letter, Ad Caeli Reginam, of October 11, 1954, the same
Pope instituted a feast to be observed yearly in honour of Mary's "regalis dig-
nitas" as Queen of Heaven and Earth (Ada Apostolicae Sedis, XLVI, pp. 625^.).
EDITORS.]

14 Although the assumption of Mary is of fundamental significance, it was not
the first case of this kind. Enoch and Elijah were taken up to heaven with their
bodies, and many holy men rose from their graves when Christ died,
is Her divinity may be regarded as a tacit conclusio probabilis, and so too may
the worship or adoration (Tpoovcforjo-w) to which she is entitled.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

the relative autonomy of individual existence would be simply
unthinkable. The will to be different and contrary is character-
istic of the devil, just as disobedience was the hallmark of orig-
inal sin. These, as we have said, are the necessary conditions for
the Creation and ought, therefore, to be included in the divine
plan and ultimately in the divine realm. 16 But the Christian
definition of God as the summum bonum excludes the Evil One
right from the start, despite the fact that in the Old Testament
he was still one of the "sons of God." Hence the devil remained
outside the Trinity as the "ape of God" and in opposition to it.
Medieval representations of the triune God as having three
heads are based on the three-headedness of Satan, as we find it,
for instance, in Dante. This would point to an infernal Anti-
trinity, a true "umbra trinitatis" analogous to the Antichrist. 17
The devil is, undoubtedly, an awkward figure: he is the "odd
man out" in the Christian cosmos. That is why people would
like to minimize his importance by euphemistic ridicule or by
ignoring his existence altogether; or, better still, to lay the
blame for him at man's door. This is in fact done by the very
people who would protest mightily if sinful man should credit
himself, equally, with the origin of all good. A glance at the
Scriptures, however, is enough to show us the importance of
the devil in the divine drama of redemption. 18 If the power of
the Evil One had been as feeble as certain persons would wish it
to appear, either the world would not have needed God himself
to come down to it or it would have lain within the power of
man to set the world to rights, which has certainly not hap-
pened so far.

16 Koepgen (p. 185) expresses himself in similar terms: "The essence of the devil
is his hatred for God; and God allows this hatred. There are two things which
Divine Omnipotence alone makes possible: Satan's hatred and the existence of
the human individual. Both are by nature completely inexplicable. But so, too,
is their relationship to God."

IT Just how alive and ingrained such conceptions are can be seen from the title
of a modern book by Sosnosky, Die rote Dreifaltigkeit: Jakobiner und Bolsche-
viken ["The Red Trinity: Jacobins and Bolsheviks"].

18 Koepgen's views are not so far from my own in certain respects. For instance,
he says that "Satan acts, in a sense, as God's power. . . . The mystery of one God
in Three Persons opens out a new freedom in the depths of God's being, and this
even makes possible the thought of a personal devil existing alongside God and
in opposition to him" (p. 186).

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

253 Whatever the metaphysical position of the devil may be, in
psychological reality evil is an effective, not to say menacing,
limitation of goodness, so that it is no exaggeration to assume
that in this world good and evil more or less cancel each other
out, like day and night, and that this is the reason why the vic-
tory of the good is always a special act of grace.

254 If we disregard the specifically Persian system of dualism, it
appears that no real devil is to be found anywhere in the early
period of man's spiritual development. In the Old Testament,
he is vaguely foreshadowed in the figure of Satan. But the real
devil first appears as the adversary of Christ, 19 and with him we
gaze for the first time into the luminous realm of divinity on
the one hand and into the abyss of hell on the other. The devil
is autonomous; he cannot be brought under God's rule, for if
he could he would not have the power to be the adversary of
Christ, but would only be God's instrument. Once the inde-
finable One unfolds into two, it becomes something definite: the
man Jesus, the Son and Logos. This statement is possible only
by virtue of something else that is not Jesus, not Son or Logos.
The act of love embodied in the Son is counterbalanced by
Lucifer's denial.

255 Inasmuch as the devil was an angel created by God and "fell
like lightning from heaven/' he too is a divine "procession"
that became Lord of this world. It is significant that the Gnostics
thought of him sometimes as the imperfect demiurge and some-
times as the Saturnine archon, laldabaoth. Pictorial representa-
tions of this archon correspond in every detail with those of a
diabolical demon. He symbolized the power of darkness from
which Christ came to rescue humanity. The archons issued from
the womb of the unfathomable abyss, i.e., from the same source
that produced the Gnostic Christ.

256 A medieval thinker observed that when God separated the
upper waters from the lower on the second day of Creation, he
did not say in the evening, as he did on all the other days, that
it was good. And he did not say it because on that day he had

l Since Satan, like Christ, is a son of God, it is evident that we have here the
archetype of the hostile brothers. The Old Testament prefiguration would there-
fore be Cain and Abel and their sacrifice. Cain has a Luciferian nature because
of his rebellious progressiveness, but Abel is the pious shepherd. At all events,
the vegetarian trend got no encouragement from Yahweh.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

created the binariuSj the origin of all evil. 20 We come across a
similar idea in Persian literature, where the origin of Ahriman
is attributed to a doubting thought in Ahura-Mazda's mind. If
we think in non-trinitarian terms, the logic of the following
schema seems inescapable:

257 So it is not strange that we should meet the idea of Antichrist
so early. It was probably connected on the one hand with the
astrological synchronicity of the dawning aeon of Pisces, 21 and
on the other hand with the increasing realization of the duality
postulated by the Son, which in turn is prefigured in the fish
symbol: )-(, showing two fishes, joined by a commissure, moving
in opposite directions. 22 It would be absurd to put any kind of
causal construction on these events. Rather, it is a question of
preconscious, prefigurative connections between the archetypes
themselves, suggestions of which can be traced in other constella-
tions as well and above all in the formation of myths.

258 In our diagram, Christ and the devil appear as equal and
opposite, thus conforming to the idea of the "adversary." This
opposition means conflict to the last, and it is the task of human-
ity to endure this conflict until the time or turning-point is
reached where good and evil begin to relativize themselves, to
doubt themselves, and the cry is raised for a morality "beyond
good and evil." In the age of Christianity and in the domain of
trinitarian thinking such an idea is simply out of the question,
because the conflict is too violent for evil to be assigned any
other logical relation to the Trinity than that of an absolute
opposite. In an emotional opposition, i.e., in a conflict situation,

20 See the first paper in this volume, par. 104.

21 In antiquity, regard for astrology was nothing at all extraordinary. [Cf. "Syn-
chronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle" (1955 e ^n., pp. 6off.) and Aion, ch.
6. EDITORS.]

22 This applies to the zodion of the Fishes. In the astronomical constellation it-
self, the fish that corresponds approximately to the first 1,000 years of our era is
vertical, but the other fish is horizontal.

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

thesis and antithesis cannot be viewed together at the same time.
This only becomes possible with cooler assessment of the rela-
tive value of good and the relative non-value of evil. Then it
can no longer be doubted, either, that a common life unites not
only the Father and the "light" son, but the Father and his dark
emanation. The unspeakable conflict posited by duality resolves
itself in a fourth principle, which restores the unity of the first
in its full development. The rhythm is built up in three steps,
but the resultant symbol is a quaternity.

SPIRIT

259 The dual aspect of the Father is by no means unknown to
religious speculation. 23 This is proved by the allegory of the
monoceros, or unicorn, who symbolizes Yahweh's angry moodi-
ness. Like this irritable beast, he reduced the world to chaos and
could only be moved to love in the lap of a pure virgin. 24
Luther was familiar with a deus absconditus. Murder, sudden
death, war, sickness, crime, and every kind of abomination fall
in with the unity of God. If God reveals his nature and takes on
definite form as a man, then the opposites in him must fly apart:
here good, there evil. So it was that the opposites latent in the
Deity flew apart when the Son was begotten and manifested
themselves in the struggle between Christ and the devil, with
the Persian Ormuzd-Ahriman antithesis, perhaps, as the under-

23 God's antithetical nature is also expressed in his androgynity. Priscillian there-
fore calls him "masculofoemina," on the basis of Genesis i : 27: "So God created
man in his own image . . . male and female created he them."

24 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 52off.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

lying model. The world of the Son is the world of moral discord,
without which human consciousness could hardly have pro-
gressed so far as it has towards mental and spiritual differentia-
tion. That we are not unreservedly enthusiastic about this
progress is shown by the fits of doubt to which our modern con-
sciousness is subject.

260 Despite the fact that he is potentially redeemed, the Chris-
tian is given over to moral suffering, and in his suffering he
needs the Comforter, the Paraclete. He cannot overcome the
conflict on his own resources; after all, he didn't invent it. He
has to rely on divine comfort and mediation, that is to say on
the spontaneous revelation of the spirit, which does not obey
man's will but comes and goes as it wills. This spirit is an
autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm,
a reconciling light in the darknesses of man's mind, secretly
bringing order into the chaos of his soul. The Holy Ghost is a
comforter like the Father, a mute, eternal, unfathomable One
in whom God's love and God's terribleness come together in
wordless union. And through this union the original meaning
of the still-unconscious Father-world is restored and brought
within the scope of human experience and reflection. Looked at
from a quaternary standpoint, the Holy Ghost is a reconciliation
of opposites and hence the answer to the suffering in the God-
head which Christ personifies.

261 The Pythagorean quaternity was a natural phenomenon, an
archetypal image, but it was not yet a moral problem, let alone
a divine drama. Therefore it "went underground." It was a
purely naturalistic, intuitive idea born of the nature-bound
mind. The gulf that Christianity opened out between nature
and spirit enabled the human mind to think not only beyond
nature but in opposition to it, thus demonstrating its divine
freedom, so to speak. This flight from the darkness of nature's
depths culminates in trinitarian thinking, which moves in a
Platonic, "supracelestial" realm. But the question of the fourth,
rightly or wrongly, remained. It stayed down "below," and from
there threw up the heretical notion of the quaternity and the
speculations of Hermetic philosophy.

* 6 2 In this connection I would like to call attention to Gerhard
Dorn, a physician and alchemist, and a native of Frankfurt. He
took great exception to the traditional quaternity of the basic

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

principles of his art, and also to the fourfold nature of its goal,
the lapis philosophorum. It seemed to him that this was a heresy,
since the principle that ruled the world was a Trinity. The
quaternity must therefore be of the devil. 25 Four, he maintained,
was a doubling of two, and two was made on the second day of
Creation, but God was obviously not altogether pleased with the
result of his handiwork that evening. The binarius is the devil
of discord and, what is worse, of feminine nature. (In East and
West alike even numbers are feminine.) The cause of dissatis-
faction was that, on this ominous second day of Creation, just
as with Ahura-Mazda, a split was revealed in God's nature. Out
of it crept the "four-horned serpent/' who promptly succeeded
in seducing Eve, because she was related to him by reason of her
binary nature. ("Man was created by God, woman by the ape of
God.")

263 The devil is the aping shadow of God, the torliunQv OTeu/za,
in Gnosticism and also in Greek alchemy. He is "Lord of this
world," in whose shadow man was born, fatally tainted with the
original sin brought about by the devil. Christ, according to the
Gnostic view, cast off the shadow he was born with and re-
mained without sin. His sinlessness proves his essential lack of
contamination with the dark world of nature-bound man,
who tries in vain to shake off this darkness. ("Uns bleibt ein
Erdenrest / zu tragen peinlich." 26 ) Man's connection with
physis, with the material world and its demands, is the cause of
his anomalous position: on the one hand he has the capacity for
enlightenment, on the other he is in thrall to the Lord of this
world. ("Who will deliver me from the body of this death?")
On account of his sinlessness, Christ on the contrary lives in
the Platonic realm of pure ideas whither only man's thought can
reach, but not he himself in his totality. Man is, in truth, the
bridge spanning the gulf between "this world" the realm of
the dark Tricephalus and the heavenly Trinity. That is why,
even in the days of unqualified belief in the Trinity, there was
always a quest for the lost fourth, from the time of the Neo-
pythagoreans down to Goethe's Faust. Although these seekers
thought of themselves as Christians, they were really Christians

25 Cf. above, pars. io4ff.

26 Faust, Part II, Act 5. ("Earth's residue to bear / Hath sorely pressed us." Trans,
by Bayard Taylor.)

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

only on the side, devoting their lives to a work whose purpose it
was to redeem the "four-horned serpent," the fallen Lucifer,
and to free the anima mundi imprisoned in matter. What in
their view lay hidden in matter was the lumen luminum, the
Sapientia Dei, and their work was a "gift of the Holy Spirit."
Our quaternity formula confirms the Tightness of their claims;
for the Holy Ghost, as the synthesis of the original One which
then became split, issues from a source that is both light and
dark. 'Tor the powers of the right and the left unite in the
harmony of wisdom/' we are told in the Acts of John. 27
264 It will have struck the reader that two corresponding ele-
ments cross one another in our quaternity schema. On the one
hand we have the polaristic identity of Christ and his adversary,
and on the other the unity of the Father unfolded in the multi-
plicity of the Holy Ghost. The resultant cross is the symbol of
the suffering Godhead that redeems mankind. This suffering
could not have occurred, nor could it have had any effect at all,
had it not been for the existence of a power opposed to God,
namely "this world" and its Lord. The quaternity schema recog-
nizes the existence of this power as an undeniable fact by fetter-
ing trinitarian thinking to the reality of this world. The Platonic
freedom of the spirit does not make a whole judgment possible:
it wrenches the light half of the picture away from the dark half.
This freedom is to a large extent a phenomenon of civilization,
the lofty preoccupation of that fortunate Athenian whose lot it
was not to be born a slave. We can only rise above nature if
somebody else carries the weight of the earth for us. What sort
of philosophy would Plato have produced had he been his own
house-slave? What would the Rabbi Jesus have taught if he had
had to support a wife and children? if he had had to till the soil
in which the bread he broke had grown, and weed the vineyard
in which the wine he dispensed had ripened? The dark weight
of the earth must enter into the picture of the whole. In "this
world" there is no good without its bad, no day without its
night, no summer without its winter. But civilized man can live
without the winter, for he can protect himself against the cold;
without dirt, for he can wash; without sin, for he can prudently
cut himself off from his fellows and thereby avoid many an occa-
sion for evil. He can deem himself good and pure, because hard

27 Cf. James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 255.

178

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

necessity does not teach him anything better. The natural man,
on the other hand, has a wholeness that astonishes one, though
there is nothing particularly admirable about it. It is the same
old unconsciousness, apathy, and filth.

265 If, however, God is born as a man and wants to unite man-
kind in the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, he must suffer the
terrible torture of having to endure the world in all its reality.
This is the cross he has to bear, and he himself is a cross. The
whole world is God's suffering, and every individual man who
wants to get anywhere near his own wholeness knows that this
is the way of the cross.

266 These thoughts are expressed with touching simplicity and
beauty in the Negro film The Green Pastures?* For many years
God ruled the world with curses, thunder, lightning, and floods,
but it never prospered. Finally he realized that he would have
to become a man himself in order to get at the root of the
trouble.

267 After he had experienced the world's suffering, this God who
became man left behind him a Comforter, the Third Person of
the Trinity, who would make his dwelling in many individuals
still to come, none of whom would enjoy the privilege or even
the possibility of being born without sin. In the Paraclete, there-
fore, God is closer to the real man and his darkness than he is
in the Son. The light God bestrides the bridgeManfrom the
day side; God's shadow, from the night side. What will be the out-
come of this fearful dilemma, which threatens to shatter the
frail human vessel with unknown storms and intoxications? It.
may well be the revelation of the Holy Ghost out of man him-
self. Just as man was once revealed out of God, so, when the
circle closes, God may be revealed out of man. But since, in this
world, an evil is joined to every good, the torlpuwv irvev^a
will twist the indwelling of the Paraclete into a self-deification
of man, thereby causing an inflation of self-importance of which
we had a foretaste in the case of Nietzsche. The more uncon-
scious we are of the religious problem in the future, the greater
the danger of our putting the divine germ within us to some
ridiculous or demoniacal use, puffing ourselves up with it in-
stead of remaining conscious that we are no more than the

28 [From a play by Marc Connelly, adapted from stories by Roark Bradford
based on American Negro folk-themes. EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

manger in which the Lord is born. Even on the highest peak
we shall never be "beyond good and evil," and the more we
experience of their inextricable entanglement the more uncer-
tain and confused will our moral judgment be. In this conflict,
it will not help us in the least to throw the moral criterion on
the rubbish heap and to set up new tablets after known patterns;
for, as in the past, so in the future the wrong we have done,
thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls, no
matter whether we turn the world upside down or not. Our
knowledge of good and evil has dwindled with our mounting
knowledge and experience, and will dwindle still more in the
future, without our being able to escape the demands of ethics.
In this utmost uncertainty we need the illumination of a holy
and healing spirit a spirit that can be anything rather than our
own minds.

II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE QUATERNITY

*68 As I have shown in the previous chapter, one can think out
the problem of the fourth without having to discard a religious
terminology. The development of the Trinity into a quaternity
can be represented in projection on metaphysical figures, and
at the same time the exposition gains in plasticity. But any
statements of this kind canand for scientific reasons, must--
be reduced to man and his psychology, since they are mental
products which cannot be presumed to have any metaphysical
validity. They are, in the first place, projections of psychic proc-
esses, and nobody really knows what they are "in themselves,"
i.e., if they exist in an unconscious sphere inaccessible to man.
At any rate, science ought not to treat them as anything other
than projections. If it acts otherwise, it loses its independence.
And since it is not a question of individual fantasies but at
least so far as the Trinity is concernedof a collective phenome-
non, we must assume that the development of the idea of the
Trinity is a collective process, representing a differentiation of
consciousness that has been going on for several thousand years.

269 In order to interpret the Trinity-symbol psychologically, we
have to start with the individual and regard the symbol as an
expression of his psyche, rather as if it were a dream-image. It is

180

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

possible to do this because even collective ideas once sprang
from single individuals and, moreover, can only be "had" by
individuals. We can treat the Trinity the more easily as a dream
in that its life is a drama, as is also the case with every dream
that is moderately well developed.

270 Generally speaking, the father denotes the earlier state of
consciousness when one was still a child, still dependent on a
definite, ready-made pattern of existence which is habitual and
has the character of law. It is a passive, unreflecting condition, a
mere awareness of what is given, without intellectual or moral
judgment. 1 This is true both individually and collectively.

271 The picture changes when the accent shifts to the son. On
the individual level the change usually sets in when the son
starts to put himself in his father's place. According to the
archaic pattern, this takes the form of quasi-father-murder in
other words, violent identification with the father followed by
his liquidation. This, however, is not an advance; it is simply a
retention of the old habits and customs with no subsequent
differentiation of consciousness. No detachment from the father
has been effected. Legitimate detachment consists in conscious
differentiation from the father and from the habitus represented
by him. This requires a certain amount of knowledge of one's
own individuality, which cannot be acquired without moral
discrimination and cannot be held on to unless one has under-
stood its meaning. 2 Habit can only be replaced by a mode of life
consciously chosen and acquired. The Christianity symbolized
by the "Son" therefore forces the individual to discriminate and
to reflect, as was noticeably the case with those Church Fathers 8
who laid such emphasis on en-ion^ (knowledge) as opposed to

lYahweh approaches the moral problem comparatively late only in Job. Cf.
"Answer to Job," in this volume.

SKoepgen (p. 231) therefore calls Jesus, quite rightly, the first "autonomous"
personality.

3 Justin Martyr, Apologia II: "that we may not remain children of necessity and
ignorance, but of choice and knowledge." Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, I, 9:
"And how necessary is it for him who desires to be partaker of the power of God,
to treat of intellectual subjects by philosophizing!" II, 4: "Knowledge accordingly
is characterized by faith; and faith, by a kind of divine mutual and reciprocal
correspondence, becomes characterized by knowledge." VII, 10: "For by it
(Gnosis) faith is perfected, inasmuch as it is solely by it that the believer becomes
perfect." "And knowledge is the strong and sure demonstration of what is re-
ceived by faith/' (Trans, by Wilson, I, p. 380; II, pp. 10, 446-47-)

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

(necessity) and ayvoia (Ignorance). The same tendency is
apparent in the New Testament controversies over the Jews'
righteousness in the eyes o the law, which stands exclusively
for the old habitus.

272 The third step, finally, points beyond the "Son" into the
future, to a continuing realization of the "spirit/' i.e., a living
activity proceeding from "Father" and "Son" which raises the
subsequent stages of consciousness to the same level of inde-
pendence as that of "Father" and "Son." This extension of the
filiatiO; whereby men are made children of God, is a meta-
physical projection of the psychic change that has taken place.
The "Son" represents a transition stage, an intermediate state,
part child, part adult. He is a transitory phenomenon, and it is
thanks to this fact that the "Son"-gods die an early death. "Son"
means the transition from a permanent initial stage called
"Father" and "auctor rerum" to the stage of being a father one-
self. And this means that the son will transmit to his children
the procreative spirit of life which he himself has received and
from which he himself was begotten. Brought down to the level
of the individual, this symbolism can be interpreted as follows:
the state of unreflecting awareness known as "Father" changes
into the reflective and rational state of consciousness known as
"Son." This state is not only in opposition to the still-existing
earlier state, but, by virtue of its conscious and rational nature,
it also contains many latent possibilities of dissociation. In-
creased discrimination begets conflicts that were unconscious
before but must now be faced, because, unless they are clearly
recognized, no moral decisions can be taken. The stage of the
"Son" is therefore a conflict situation par excellence: the choice
of possible ways is menaced by just as many possibilities of error.
"Freedom from the law" brings a sharpening of opposites, in
particular of the moral opposites. Christ crucified between two
thieves is an eloquent symbol of this fact. The exemplary life
of Christ is in itself a "transitus" and amounts therefore to a
bridge leading over to the third stage, where the initial stage of
the Father is, as it were, recovered. If it were no more than a
repetition of the first stage, everything that had been won in
the second stagereason and reflection would be lost, only to
make room for a renewed state of semiconsciousness, of an irra-
tional and unreflecting nature. To avoid this, the values of the

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

second stage must be held fast; in other words, reason and re-
flection must be preserved intact. Though the new level of
consciousness acquired through the emancipation of the son
continues in the third stage, it must recognize that it is not the
source of the ultimate decisions and flashes of insight which
rightly go by the name of "gnosis," but that these are inspired
by a higher authority which, in projected form, is known as the
"Holy Ghost." Psychologically speaking, "inspiration" comes
from an unconscious function. To the naive-minded person the
agent of inspiration appears as an "intelligence" correlated with,
or even superior to, consciousness, for it often happens that an
idea drops in on one like a saving deus ex machina.

273 Accordingly, the advance to the third stage means something
like a recognition of the unconscious, if not actual subordina-
tion to it. 4 Adulthood is reached when the son reproduces his
own childhood state by voluntarily submitting to a paternal
authority, either in psychological form, or factually in pro-
jected form, as when he recognizes the authority of the Church's
teachings. This authority can, of course, be replaced by all man-
ner of substitutes, which only proves that the transition to the
third stage is attended by unusual spiritual dangers, consisting
chiefly in rationalistic deviations that run counter to the in-
stincts. 5 Spiritual transformation does not mean that one should
remain a child, but that the adult should summon up enough
honest self-criticism admixed with humility to see where, and
in relation to what, he must behave as a child irrationally, and
with unreflecting receptivity. Just as the transition from the
first stage to the second demands the sacrifice of childish de-
pendence, so, at the transition to the third stage, an exclusive
independence has to be relinquished.

274 It is clear that these changes are not everyday occurrences,
but are very fateful transformations indeed. Usually they have a
numinous character, and can take the form of conversions,
illuminations, emotional shocks, blows of fate, religious or

4 Submission to any metaphysical authority is, from the psychological standpoint,
submission to the unconscious. There are no scientific criteria for distinguishing
so-called metaphysical factors from psychic ones. But this does not mean that
psychology denies the existence of metaphysical factors.

5 The Church knows that the "discernment of spirits" is no simple matter. It
knows the dangers of subjective submission to God and therefore reserves the
right to act as a director of conscience.

18*

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

mystical experiences, or their equivalents. Modem man has
such hopelessly muddled ideas about anything "mystical/' or
else such a rationalistic fear of it, that, if ever a mystical experi-
ence should befall him, he is sure to misunderstand its true
character and will deny or repress its numinosity. It will then
be evaluated as an inexplicable, irrational, and even patho-
logical phenomenon. This sort of misinterpretation is always
due to lack of insight and inadequate understanding of the com-
plex relationships in the background, which as a rule can only
be clarified when the conscious data are supplemented by ma-
terial derived from the unconscious. Without this, too many
gaps remain unfilled in a man's experience of life, and each gap
is an opportunity for futile rationalizations. If there is even the
slightest tendency to neurotic dissociation, or an indolence verg-
ing upon habitual unconsciousness, then false causalities will
be preferred to truth every time.

275 The numinous character of these experiences is proved by
the fact that they are overwhelming an admission that goes
against not only our pride, but against our deep-rooted fear
that consciousness may perhaps lose its ascendency, for pride is
often only a reaction covering up a secret fear. How thin these
protective walls are can be seen from the positively terrifying
suggestibility that lies behind all psychic mass movements, be-
ginning with the simple folk who call themselves "Jehovah's
Witnesses," the "Oxford Groups" (so named for reasons of
prestige 6 ) among the upper classes, and ending with the National
Socialism of a whole nation all in search of the unifying mysti-
cal experience!

276 Anyone who does not understand the events that befall him
is always in danger of getting stuck in the transitional stage of
the Son. The criterion of adulthood does not consist in being a
member of certain sects, groups, or nations, but in submitting
to the spirit of one's own independence. Just as the "Son"
proceeds from the "Father," so the "Father" proceeds from the

6 The "Oxford Movement" was originally the name of the Catholicizing trend
started by the Anglican clergy in Oxford, 1833. [Whereas the "Oxford Groups," or
"Moral Rearmament Movement," were founded in 1921, also at Oxford, by Frank
Buchman as "a Christian revolution . . the aim of which is a new social order
under the dictatorship of the Spirit of God, and which issues in personal, social
racial, national, and supernational renaissance" (Buchman, cited in Webster's
International Dictionary, and edn., 1950). EDITORS.]

184

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

stage of the "Son," but this Father is not a mere repetition of
the original Father or an identification with him, but one in
whom the vitality of the "Father" continues its procreative
work. This third stage, as we have seen, means articulating one's
ego-consciousness with a supraordinate totality, of which one
cannot say that it is "I," but which is best visualized as a more
comprehensive being, though one should of course keep oneself
conscious all the time of the anthropomorphism of such a con-
ception. Hard as it is to define, this unknown quantity can be
experienced by the psyche and is known in Christian parlance as
the "Holy Ghost/' the breath that heals and makes whole. Chris-
tianity claims that this breath also has personality, which in the
circumstances could hardly be otherwise. For close on two
thousand years history has been familiar with the figure of the
Cosmic Man, the Anthropos, whose image has merged with that
of Yahweh and also of Christ. Similarly, the saints who received
the stigmata became Christ-figures in a visible and concrete
sense, and thus carriers of the Anthropos-image. They symbolize
the working of the Holy Ghost among men. The Anthropos is
a symbol that argues in favour of the personal nature of the
"totality," i.e., the self. If, however, you review the numerous
symbols of the self, you will discover not a few among them that
have no characteristics of human personality at all. I won't back
up this statement with psychological case histories, which are
terra incognita to the layman anyway, but will only refer to the
historical material, which fully confirms the findings of mod-
ern scientific research. Alchemical symbolism has produced,
aside from the personal figures, a whole series of non-human
forms, geometrical configurations like the sphere, circle, square,
and octagon, or chemical symbols like the Philosophers'^ Stone,
the ruby, diamond, quicksilver, gold, water, fire, and spirit (in
the sense of a volatile substance). This choice of symbols tallies
more or less with the modern products of the unconscious. 7 I
might mention in this connection that there are numerous
theriomorphic spirit symbols, the most important Christian ones
being the lamb, the dove, and the snake (Satan). The snake
symbolizing the Gnostic Nous and the Agathodaimon has a
pneumatic significance (the devil, too, is a spirit). These symbols
express the non-human character of the totality or self, as was

T Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, Part I.

185

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

reported long ago when, at Pentecost, the spirit descended on
the disciples in tongues o fire. From this point of view we can
share something of Origen's perplexity as to the nature of the
Holy Ghost. It also explains why the Third Person of the Trin-
ity, unlike Father and Son, has no personal quality. 8 "Spirit" is
not a personal designation but the qualitative definition of a
substance of aeriform nature.

277 When, as in the present instance, the unconscious always
makes such sweepingly contradictory statements, experience
tells us that the situation is far from simple. The unconscious is
trying to express certain facts for which there are no conceptual
categories in the conscious mind. The contents in question need
not be "metaphysical," as in the case of the Holy Ghost. Any
content that transcends consciousness, and for which the apper-
ceptive apparatus does not exist, can call forth the same kind
of paradoxical or antinomial symbolism. For a naive conscious-
ness that sees everything in terms of black and white, even the
unavoidable dual aspect of "man and his shadow* ' can be tran-
scendent in this sense and will consequently evoke paradoxical
symbols. We shall hardly be wrong, therefore, if we conjecture
that the striking contradictions we find in our spirit symbolism
are proof that the Holy Ghost is a complexio oppositorum
(union of opposites). Consciousness certainly possesses no con-
ceptual category for anything of this kind, for such a union is
simply inconceivable except as a violent collision in which the
two sides cancel each other out. This would mean their mutual
annihilation.

278 But the spontaneous symbolism of the complexio opposi-
torum points to the exact opposite of annihilation, since it
ascribes to the product of their union either everlasting dura-
tion, that is to say incorruptibility and adamantine stability, or
supreme and inexhaustible efficacy. 9

279 Thus the spirit as a complexio oppositorum has the same
formula as the "Father/' the auctor rerum, who is also, accord-

8 Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologica, I, xxxvi, art. i): "Non habet nomen
proprium" (he has no proper name). I owe this reference to the kindness of
Fr. Victor White, O.P.

9 Both these categories are, as we know, attributes of the lapis philosophorum
and of the symbols of the self.

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

ing to Nicholas of Cusa, a union of opposites. 10 The "Father/*
in fact, contains the opposite qualities which appear in his son
and his son's adversary. Riwkah Scharf 11 has shown just how far
the monotheism of the Old Testament was obliged to make
concessions to the idea of the ' 'relativity" of God. The Book of
Job comes within a hair's breadth of the dualism which flowered
in Persia for some centuries before and after Christ, and which
also gave rise to various heretical movements within Christianity
itself. It was only to be expected, therefore, that, as we said
above, the dual aspect of the "Father" should reappear in the
Holy Ghost, who in this way effects an apocatastasis of the
Father. To use an analogy from physics, the Holy Ghost could
be likened to the stream of photons arising out of the destruc-
tion of matter, while the "Father" would be the primordial
energy that promotes the formation of protons and electrons
with their positive and negative charges. This, as the reader will
understand, is not an explanation, but an analogy which is pos-
sible because the physicist's models ultimately rest on the same
archetypal foundations that also underlie the speculations of the
theologian. Both are psychology, and it too has no other founda-
tion.

III. GENERAL REMARKS ON SYMBOLISM

280 Although it is extremely improbable that the Christian
Trinity is derived directly from the triadic World-Soul in the
Timaeus, it is nevertheless rooted in the same archetype. If we
wish to describe the phenomenology of this archetype, we shall
have to consider all the aspects which go to make up the total
picture. For instance, in our analysis of the Timaeus, we found
that the number three represents an intellectual schema only,
and that the second mixture reveals the resistance of the "recalci-
trant fourth" ingredient, which we meet again as the "adver-
sary" of the Christian Trinity. Without the fourth the three
have no reality as we understand it; they even lack meaning,

10 It should not be forgotten, however, that the opposites which Nicholas had in
mind were very different from the psychological ones.

11 Cf. "Die Gestalt des Satans im Alten Testament," in Symbolik des Geistes, pp.

l8 7

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

for a "thought" has meaning only if it refers to a possible or
actual reality. This relationship to reality is completely lacking
in the idea of the Trinity, so much so that people nowadays tend
to lose sight of it altogether, without even noticing the loss. But
we can see what this loss means when we are faced with the prob-
lem of reconstruction that is to say in all those cases where
the conscious part of the psyche is cut off from the unconscious
part by a dissociation. This split can only be mended if con-
sciousness is able to formulate conceptions which give adequate
expression to the contents of the unconscious. It seems as if the
Trinity plus the incommensurable "fourth" were a conception
of this kind. As part of the doctrine of salvation it must, indeed,
have a saving, healing, wholesome effect. During the process of
integrating the unconscious contents into consciousness, un-
doubted importance attaches to the business of seeing how the
dream-symbols relate to trivial everyday realities. But, in a
deeper sense and on a long-term view, this procedure is not
sufficient, as it fails to bring out the significance of the arche-
typal contents. These reach down, or up, to quite other levels
than so-called common sense would suspect. As a priori condi-
tions of all psychic events, they are endued with a dignity which
has found immemorial expression in godlike figures. No other
formulation will satisfy the needs of the unconscious. The un-
conscious is the unwritten history of mankind from time unre-
corded. Rational formulae may satisfy the present and the
immediate past, but not the experience of mankind as a whole.
This calls for the all-embracing vision of the myth, as expressed
in symbols. If the symbol is lacking, man's wholeness is not
represented in consciousness. He remains a more or less acci-
dental fragment, a suggestible wisp of consciousness, at the
mercy of all the Utopian fantasies that rush in to fill the gap left
by the totality symbols. A symbol cannot be made to order as
the rationalist would like to believe. It is a legitimate symbol
only if it gives expression to the immutable structure of the
unconscious and can therefore command general acceptance.
So long as it evokes belief spontaneously, it does not require to
be understood in any other way. But if, from sheer lack of under-
standing, belief in it begins to wane, then, for better or worse,
one must use understanding as a tool if the incalculable conse-
quences of a loss are to be avoided. What should we then put

188

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

in place of the symbol? Is there anybody who knows a better
way o expressing something that has never yet been under-
stood?

281 As I have shown in Psychology and Alchemy and elsewhere,
trinity and quaternity symbols occur fairly frequently in dreams,
and from this I have learnt that the idea of the Trinity is based
on something that can be experienced and must, therefore, have
a meaning. This insight was not won by a study of the tradi-
tional sources. If I have succeeded in forming an intelligible
conception of the Trinity that is in any way based on empirical
reality, I have been helped by dreams, folklore, and the myths in
which these number motifs occur. As a rule they appear spon-
taneously in dreams, and such dreams look very banal from the
outside. There is nothing at all of the myth or fairytale about
them, much less anything religious. Mostly it is three men and a
woman, either sitting at a table or driving in a car, or three men
and a dog, a huntsman with three hounds, three chickens in a
coop from which the fourth has escaped, and suchlike. These
things are indeed so banal that one is apt to overlook them.
Nor do they wish to say anything more specific, at first, than that
they refer to functions and aspects of the dreamer's personality,
as can easily be ascertained when they appear as three or four
known persons with well-marked characteristics, or as the four
principal colours, red, blue, green, and yellow. It happens with
some regularity that these colours are correlated with the four
orienting functions of consciousness. Only when the dreamer
begins to reflect that the four are an allusion to his total per-
sonality does he realize that these banal dream-motifs are like
shadow pictures of more important things. The fourth figure is,
as a rule, particularly instructive: it soon becomes incompatible,
disagreeable, frightening, or in some way odd, with a different
sense of good and bad, rather like a Tom Thumb beside his
three normal brothers. Naturally the situation can be reversed,
with three odd figures and one normal one. Anybody with a
little knowledge of fairytales will know that the seemingly
enormous gulf that separates the Trinity from these trivial hap-
penings is by no means unbridgeable. But this is not to say that
the Trinity can be reduced to this level. On the contrary, the
Trinity represents the most perfect form of the archetype in

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

question. The empirical material merely shows, in the smallest
and most insignificant psychic detail, how the archetype works.
This is what makes the archetype so important, firstly as an
organizing schema and a criterion for judging the quality of
an individual psychic structure, and secondly as a vehicle of the
synthesis in which the individuation process culminates. This
goal is symbolized by the putting together of the four; hence the
quaternity is a symbol of the self, which is of central im-
portance in Indian philosophy and takes the place of the Deity.
In the West, any amount of quaternities were developed during
the Middle Ages; here I would mention only the Rex gloriae
with the four symbols of the evangelists (three theriomorphic,
one anthropomorphic). In Gnosticism there is the figure of
Barbelo ("God is four"). These examples and many others like
them bring the quaternity into closest relationship with the
Deity, so that, as I said earlier, it is impossible to distinguish
the self from a God-image. At any rate, I personally have found
it impossible to discover a criterion of distinction. Here faith
or philosophy alone can decide, neither of which has anything
to do with the empiricism of the scientist.

282 One can, then, explain the God-image aspect of the quater-
nity as a reflection of the self, or, conversely, explain the self as
an imago Dei in man. Both propositions are psychologically
true, since the self, which can only be perceived subjectively as
a most intimate and unique thing, requires universality as a
background, for without this it could not manifest itself in its
absolute separateness. Strictly speaking, the self must be re-
garded as the extreme opposite of God. Nevertheless we must
say with Angelus Silesius: "He cannot live without me, nor I
without him." So although the empirical symbol requires two
diametrically opposite interpretations, neither of them can be
proved valid. The symbol means both and is therefore a para-
dox. This is not the place to say anything more about the role
these number symbols play in practice; for this I must refer the
reader to the dream material in Psychology and Alchemy, Part I.

283 In view of the special importance of quaternity symbolism
one is driven to ask how it came about that a highly differenti-
ated form of religion like Christianity reverted to the archaic

190

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

triad in order to construct its trinitarian God-image. 1 With
equal justification one could also ask (as has, in fact, been done)
with what right Christ is presumed to be a symbol of the self,
since the self is by definition a complexio oppositorum, whereas
the Christ figure wholly lacks a dark side? (In dogma, Christ is
sine macula peccati 'unspotted by sin/)

284 Both questions touch on the same problem, I always seek
the answer to such questions on empirical territory, for which
reason I must now cite the concrete facts. It is a general rule
that most geometrical or numerical symbols have a quaternary
character. There are also ternary or trinitarian symbols, but in
my experience they are rather rare. On investigating such cases
carefully, I have found that they were distinguished by some-
thing that can only be called a "medieval psychology." This does
not imply any backwardness and is not meant as a value judg-
ment, but only as denoting a special problem. That is to say,
in all these cases there is so much unconsciousness, and such a
large degree of primitivity to match it, that a spiritualization
appears necessary as a compensation. The saving symbol is
then a triad in which the fourth is lacking because it has to be
unconditionally rejected.

285 In my experience it is of considerable practical importance
that the symbols aiming at wholeness should be correctly under-
stood by the doctor. They are the remedy with whose help
neurotic dissociations can be repaired, by restoring to the con-
scious mind a spirit and an attitude which from time immemo-
rial have been felt as solving and healing in their effects. They
are "representations collectives" which facilitate the much-
needed union of conscious and unconscious. This union cannot
be accomplished either intellectually or in a purely practical
sense, because in the former case the instincts rebel and in the
latter case reason and morality. Every dissociation that falls
within the category of the psychogenic neuroses is due to a con-
flict of this kind, and the conflict can only be resolved through
the symbol. For this purpose the dreams produce symbols which
in the last analysis coincide with those recorded throughout his-
tory. But the dream-images can be taken up into the dreamer's
consciousness, and grasped by his reason and feeling, only if his
conscious mind possesses the intellectual categories and moral

l In the Greek Church the Trinity is called

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

feelings necessary for their assimilation. And this is where the
psychotherapist often has to perform feats that tax his patience
to the utmost. The synthesis of conscious and unconscious can
only be implemented by a conscious confrontation with the lat-
ter, and this is not possible unless one understands what the
unconscious is saying. During this process we come upon the
symbols investigated in the present study, and in coming to
terms with them we re-establish the lost connection with ideas
and feelings which make a synthesis of the personality possible.
The loss of gnosis, i.e., knowledge of the ultimate things, weighs
much more heavily than is generally admitted. Faith alone would
suffice too, did it not happen to be a charisma whose true posses-
sion is something of a rarity, except in spasmodic form. Were
it otherwise, we doctors could spare ourselves much thankless
work. Theology regards our efforts in this respect with mistrust-
ful mien, while pointedly declining to tackle this very necessary
task itself. It proclaims doctrines which nobody understands,
and demands a faith which nobody can manufacture. This is
how things stand in the Protestant camp. The situation in the
Catholic camp is more subtle. Of especial importance here is
the ritual with its sacral action, which dramatizes the living
occurrence of archetypal meaning and thus makes a direct im-
pact on the unconscious. Can any one, for instance, deny the
impression made upon him by the sacrament of the Mass, if
he has followed it with even a minimum of understanding?
Then again, the Catholic Church has the institution of confes-
sion and of the director of conscience, which are of the greatest
practical value when these activities devolve upon suitable per-
sons. The fact that this is not always so proves, unfortunately,
to be an equally great disadvantage. Thirdly, the Catholic
Church possesses a richly developed and undamaged world of
dogmatic ideas, which provide a worthy receptacle for the
plethora of figures in the unconscious and in this way give visi-
ble expression to certain vitally important truths with which
the conscious mind should keep in touch. The faith of a Catho-
lic is not better or stronger than the faith of a Protestant, but a
person's unconscious is gripped by the Catholic form no matter
how weak his faith may be. That is why, once he slips out of
this form, he may easily fall into a fanatical atheism, of a kind
that is particularly to be met with in Latin countries.

192

6. CONCLUSION

286 Because of its noetic character, the Trinity expresses the
need for a spiritual development that demands independence
of thought. Historically we can see this striving at work above
all in scholastic philosophy, and it was these preliminary exer-
cises that made the scientific thinking of modern man possible.
Also, the Trinity is an archetype whose dominating power not
only fosters spiritual development but may, on occasion, actu-
ally enforce it. But as soon as the spiritualization of the mind
threatens to become so one-sided as to be deleterious to health,
the compensatory significance of the Trinity necessarily recedes
into the background. Good does not become better by being
exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one
through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very
much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no
shadows exist.

287 As a psychological symbol the Trinity denotes, first, the
homoousia or essential unity of a three-part process, to be
thought of as a process of unconscious maturation taking place
within the individual. To that extent the three Persons are
personifications of the three phases of a regular, instinctive
psychic occurrence that always tends to express itself in the form
of mythologems and ritualistic customs (for instance, the initia-
tions at puberty, and the various rites for birth, marriage,

193

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

sickness, war, and death). As the medical lore of the ancient
Egyptians shows, myths as well as rites have a psychotherapeutic
value, and they still have today.

288 Second, the Trinity denotes a process of conscious realiza-
tion continuing over the centuries.

289 Third, the Trinity lays claim not only to represent a per-
sonification of psychic processes in three roles, but to be the
one God in three Persons, who all share the same divine nature.
In God there is no advance from the potential to the actual,
from the possible to the real, because God is pure reality, the
"actus purus" itself. The three Persons differ from one another
by reason of the different manner of their origin, or their pro-
cession (the Son begotten by the Father and the Holy Ghost
proceeding from both procedit a patre filioque). The ho-
moousia, whose general recognition was the cause of so many
controversies, is absolutely necessary from a psychological stand-
point, because, regarded as a psychological symbol, the Trinity
represents the progressive transformation of one and the same
substance, namely the psyche as a whole. The homoousia to-
gether with the filioque assert that Christ and the Holy Ghost
are both of the same substance as the Father. But since, psycho-
logically, Christ must be understood as a symbol of the self,
and the descent of the Holy Ghost as the self's actualization in
man, it follows that the self must represent something that is
of the substance of the Father too. This formulation is in agree-
ment with the psychological statement that the symbols of the
self cannot be distinguished empirically from a God-image.
Psychology, certainly, can do no more than establish the fact
that they are indistinguishable. This makes it all the more re-
markable that the ''metaphysical" statement should go so much
further than the psychological one. Indistinguishability is a
negative constatation merely; it does not rule out the possibility
that a distinction may exist. It may be that the distinction is
simply not perceived. The dogmatic assertion, on the other
hand, speaks of the Holy Ghost making us "children of God,"
and this filial relationship is indistinguishable in meaning from
the uterus (sonship) or filiatio of Christ. We can see from this how
important it was that the homoousia should triumph over the
homoiousia (similarity of substance); for, through the descent
of the Holy Ghost, the self of man enters into a relationship of

194

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

unity with the substance o God. As ecclesiastical history shows,
this conclusion is of immense danger to the Church it was, in-
deed, the main reason why the Church did not insist on any
further elaboration of the doctrine o the Holy Ghost. Its con-
tinued development would lead, on a negative estimate, to ex-
plosive schisms, and on a positive estimate straight into psy-
chology. Moreover, the gifts of the Holy Ghost are somewhat
mixed: not all of them are unreservedly welcome, as St. Paul
has already pointed out. Also, St. Thomas Aquinas observes that
revelation is a gift of the spirit that does not stand in any clearly
definable relationship to moral endowment. 1 The Church must
reserve the right to decide what is a working of the Holy Ghost
and what is not, thereby taking an exceedingly important and
possibly disagreeable decision right out of the layman's hands.
That the spirit, like the wind, "bloweth where it listeth" is
something that alarmed even the Reformers. The third as well
as the first Person of the Trinity can wear the aspect of a deus
absconditus, and its action, like that of fire, may be no less de-
structive than beneficial when regarded from a purely human
standpoint.

290 "Creation" in the sense of "matter" is not included in the
Trinity formula, at any rate not explicitly. In these circum-
stances there are only two possibilities: either the material world
is real, in which case it is an intrinsic part of the divine "actus
purus," or it is unreal, a mere illusion, because outside the
divine reality. The latter conclusion is contradicted firstly by
God's incarnation and by his whole work of salvation, secondly
by the autonomy and eternality of the "Prince of this world,"
the devil, who has merely been "overcome" but is by no means
destroyed and cannot be destroyed because he is eternal. But
if the reality of the created world is included in the "actus
purus," then the devil is there too Q.E.D. This situation gives
rise to a quaternity, albeit a very different quaternity from the
one anathematized by the fourth Lateran Council. The question
there debated was whether God's essence could claim a place

i "St. Thomas emphasizes that prophetic revelation is, as such, independent of
good morals not to speak of personal sanctity (De veritate, xii, 5; Summa theoL,
II-II, p. 172). I take this remark from the MS. of an essay on "St. Thomas's Con-
ception of Revelation," by Fr. Victor White, O.P., with the kind permission
of the author.

195

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

alongside the three Persons or not. But the question we are con-
fronted with here is the independent position of a creature
endowed with autonomy and eternality: the fallen angel. He is
the fourth, "recalcitrant" figure in our symbolical series, the
intervals between which correspond to the three phases of the
trinitarian process. Just as, in the Timaeus y the adversary is
the second half of the second pair of opposites, without whom
the world-soul would not be whole and complete, so, too, the
devil must be added to the trios as TO lv Tfraprov (the One as the
Fourth), 2 in order to make it a totality. If the Trinity is under-
stood as a process^ as I have tried to do all along, then, by the
addition of the Fourth, this process would culminate in a condi-
tion of absolute totality. Through the intervention of the Holy
Ghost, however, man is included in the divine process, and this
means that the principle of separateness and autonomy over
against God which is personified in Lucifer as the God-oppos-
ing will is included in it too. But for this will there would have
been no creation and no work of salvation either. The shadow
and the opposing will are the necessary conditions for all actual-
ization. An object that has no will of its own, capable, if need be,
of opposing its creator, and with no qualities other than its crea-
tor's, such an object has no independent existence and is in-
capable of ethical decision. At best it is just a piece of clock-
work which the Creator has to wind up to make it function.
Therefore Lucifer was perhaps the one who best understood the
divine will struggling to create a world and who carried out that
will most faithfully. For, by rebelling against God, he became
the active principle of a creation which opposed to God a coun-
ter-will of its own. Because God willed this, we are told in Gene-
sis 3 that he gave man the power to will otherwise. Had he not
done so, he would have created nothing but a machine, and then
the incarnation and the redemption would never have come
about. Nor would there have been any revelation of the Trinity,
because everything would have been one for ever.

The Lucifer legend is in no sense an absurd fairytale; like
the story of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it is a " thera-
peutic" myth. We naturally boggle at the thought that good and
evil are both contained in God, and we think God could not pos^
sibly want such a thing. We should be careful, though, not td

2 The Axiom of Maria. C. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. sogf.

196

A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

pare down God's omnipotence to the level of our human opin-
ions; but that is just how we do think, despite everything. Even
so, it would not do to impute all evil to God: thanks to his moral
autonomy, man can put down a sizable portion of it to his own
account. Evil is a relative thing, partly avoidable, partly fate-
just as virtue is, and often one does not know which is worse.
Think of the fate of a woman married to a recognized saint!
What sins must not the children commit in order to feel their
lives their own under the overwhelming influence of such a
father! Life, being an energic process, needs the opposites, for
without opposition there is, as we know, no energy. Good and
evil are simply the moral aspects of this natural polarity. The
fact that we have to feel this polarity so excruciatingly makes
human existence all the more complicated. Yet the suffering that
necessarily attaches to life cannot be evaded. The tension of
opposites that makes energy possible is a universal law, fittingly
expressed in the yang and yin of Chinese philosophy. Good and
evil are feeling-values of human provenance, and we cannot ex-
tend them beyond the human realm. What happens beyond this
is beyond our judgment: God is not to be caught with human
attributes. Besides, where would the fear of God be if only good
i.e., what seems good to us were to be expected from him?
After all, eternal damnation doesn't bear much resemblance to
goodness as we understand it! Although good and evil are un-
shakable as moral values, they still need to be subjected to a bit
of psychological revision. Much, that is to say, that proves to be
abysmally evil in its ultimate effects does not come from man's
wickedness but from his stupidity and unconsciousness. One has
only to think of the devastating effects of Prohibition in Amer-
ica or of the hundred thousand autos-da-fe in Spain, which were
all caused by a praiseworthy zeal to save people's souls. One of
the toughest roots of all evil is unconsciousness, and I could
wish that the saying of Jesus, "Man, if thou knowest what thou
doest, thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not, thou art ac-
cursed, and a transgressor of the law," 3 were still in the gospels,
even though it has only one authentic source. It might well be
the motto for a new morality.

29* The individuation process is invariably started off by the
patient's becoming conscious of the shadow, a personality

3 Cf. James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 33.

197

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

component usually with a negative sign. This "inferior" person-
ality is made up of everything that will not fit in with, and adapt
to, the laws and regulations of conscious life. It is compounded
of "disobedience" and is therefore rejected not on moral grounds
only, but also for reasons of expediency. Closer investigation
shows that there is at least one function in it which ought to
collaborate in orienting consciousness. Or rather, this function
does collaborate, not for the benefit of conscious, purposive in-
tentions, but in the interests of unconscious tendencies pursuing
a different goal. It is this fourth, "inferior" function which acts
autonomously towards consciousness and cannot be harnessed
to the latter's intentions. It lurks behind every neurotic dissocia-
tion and can only be annexed to consciousness if the correspond-
ing unconscious contents are made conscious at the same time.
But this integration cannot take place and be put to a useful
purpose unless one can admit the tendencies bound up with the
shadow and allow them some measure of realization tempered,
of course, with the necessary criticism. This leads to disobedi-
ence and self-disgust, but also to self-reliance, without which
individuation is unthinkable. The ability to "will otherwise"
must, unfortunately, be real if ethics are to make any sense at
all. Anyone who submits to the law from the start, or to what is
generally expected, acts like the man in the parable who buried
his talent in the earth. Individuation is an exceedingly difficult
task: it always involves a conflict of duties, whose solution re-
quires us to understand that our "counter-will" is also an aspect
of God's will. One cannot individuate with mere words and con-
venient self-deceptions, because there are too many destructive
possibilities in the offing. One almost unavoidable danger is that
of getting stuck in the conflict and hence in the neurotic dissoci-
ation. Here the therapeutic myth has a helpful and loosening
effect, even when the patient shows not a trace of conscious
understanding. The felt presence of the archetype is enough; it
only fails to work when the possibility of conscious understand-
ing is there, within the patient's reach. In those circumstances it
is positively deleterious for him to remain unconscious, though
this happens frequently enough in our Christian civilization
today. So much of what Christian symbolism taught has gone by
the board for large numbers of people, without their ever having
understood what they have lost. Civilization does not consist in

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE TRINITY

progress as such and in mindless destruction of the old values,
but in developing and refining the good that has been won.

293 Religion is a "revealed" way of salvation. Its ideas are prod-
ucts of a pre-conscious knowledge which, always and everywhere,
expresses itself in symbols. Even if our intellect does not grasp
them, they still work, because our unconscious acknowledges
them as exponents of universal psychic facts. For this reason
faith is enough if it is there. Every extension and intensification
of rational consciousness, however, leads us further away from
the sources of the symbols and, by its ascendency, prevents us
from understanding them. That is the situation today. One can-
not turn the clock back and force oneself to believe "what one
knows is not true." But one could give a little thought to what
the symbols really mean. In this way not only would the incom-
parable treasures of our civilization be conserved, but we should
also gain new access to the old truths which have vanished from
our "rational" purview because of the strangeness of their sym-
bolism. How can a man be God's Son and be born of a virgin?
That is a slap in the face of reason. But did not Justin Martyr
point out to his contemporaries that exactly the same thing was
said of their heroes, and get himself listened to? That was be-
cause man's consciousness in those days did not find the symbols
as outlandish as they are for us. Today such dogmas fall on deaf
ears, because nothing in our known world responds to such asser-
tions. But if we understand these things for what they are, as
symbols, then we can only marvel at the unfathomable wisdom
that is in them and be grateful to the institution which has not
only conserved them, but developed them dogmatically. The
man of today lacks the very understanding that would help him
to believe.

294 If I have ventured to submit old dogmas, now grown stale, to
psychological scrutiny, I have certainly not done so in the prig-
gish conceit that I knew better than others, but in the sincere
conviction that a dogma which has been such a bone of conten-
tion for so many centuries cannot possibly be an empty fantasy.
I felt it was too much in line with the consensus omnium, with
the archetype, for that. It was only when I realized this that I
was able to establish any relationship with the dogma at all. As
a metaphysical "truth" it remained wholly inaccessible to me,
and I suspect that I am by no means the only one to find himself

199

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

in that position. A knowledge of the universal archetypal back-
ground was, in itself, sufficient to give me the courage to treat
"that which is believed always, everywhere, by everybody" as a
psychological fact which extends far beyond the confines of
Christianity, and to approach it as an object of scientific study,
as a phenomenon pure and simple, regardless of the "metaphysi-
cal" significance that may have been attached to it. I know from
my own experience that this latter aspect has never contributed
in the slightest to my belief or to my understanding. It told me
absolutely nothing. However, I was forced to admit that the
"symbolum" possesses the highest degree of actuality inasmuch
as it was regarded by countless millions of people, for close on
two thousand years, as a valid statement concerning those things
which one cannot see with the eyes or touch with the hands. It is
this fact that needs to be understood, for of "metaphysical truth"
we know only that part which man has made, unless the unbid-
dable gift of faith lifts us beyond all dubiety and all uneasy in-
vestigation. It is dangerous if these matters are only objects of
belief; 4 for where there is belief there is doubt, and the fiercer
and nai'ver the belief the more devastating the doubt once it
begins to dawn. One is then infinitely cleverer than all the be-
nighted heads of the Middle Ages.

295 These considerations have made me extremely cautious in
my approach to the further metaphysical significance that may
possibly underlie archetypal statements. There is nothing to
stop their ultimate ramifications from penetrating to the very
ground of the universe. We alone are the dumb ones if we fail to
notice it. Such being the case, I cannot pretend to myself that
the object of archetypal statements has been explained and dis-
posed of merely by our investigation of its psychological aspects.
What I have put forward can only be, at best, a more or less
successful or unsuccessful attempt to give the inquiring mind
some access to one side of the problemthe side that can be
approached. It would be presumptuous to expect more than this.
If I have merely succeeded in stimulating discussion, then my
purpose is more than fulfilled. For it seems to me that the world,
if it should lose sight of these archetypal statements, would be
threatened with unspeakable impoverishment of mind and soul.

4 1 am thinking here of the sola fide standpoint of the Protestants.

200

Ill

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM
IN THE MASS

[First published as a lecture in Eranos Jahrbuch 1940/41; later published in re-
vised and expanded form in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954).
The present translation is made from the 1954 version. It was published in
slightly different form in The Mysteries (Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 2;
New York, 1955; London, 1956). EDITORS.]

i. INTRODUCTION 1

*96 The Mass is a still-living mystery, the origins of which go
back to early Christian times. It is hardly necessary to point out
that it owes its vitality partly to its undoubted psychological
efficacy, and that it is therefore a fit subject for psychological
study. But it should be equally obvious that psychology can only
approach the subject from the phenomenological angle, for the
realities of faith lie outside the realm of psychology.

2 97 My exposition falls into four parts: in this introduction I
indicate some of the New Testament sources of the Mass, with
notes on its structure and significance. In section 2, I recapitu-
late the sequence of events in the rite. In 3, I cite a parallel
from pagan antiquity to the Christian symbolism of sacrifice and
transformation: the visions of Zosimos. Finally, in 4, I attempt
a psychological discussion of the sacrifice and transformation.

298 The oldest account of the sacrament of the Mass is to be
found in I Corinthians 11 : agff.:

1 The following account and examination of the principal symbol in the Mass is
not concerned either with the Mass as a whole, or with its liturgy in particular,
but solely with the ritual actions and texts which relate to the transformation
process in the strict sense. In order to give the reader an adequate account of this,
I had to seek professional help. I am especially indebted to the theologian Dr,
Callus Jud for reading through and correcting the first two sections.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

For the tradition which I have received of the Lord and handed
down to you is that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed,
took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said: This is my body for you;
do this in remembrance of me. And after he had supped, he took the
chalice also, and said: This chalice is the new testament in my blood.
As often as you drink, do this in remembrance of me. For as often as
you eat this bread and drink the chalice, you declare the death of
the Lord, until he comes. 2

*99 Similar accounts are to be found in Matthew, Mark, and
Luke. In John the corresponding passage speaks of a "supper/ 5 3
but there it is connected with the washing of the disciples' feet.
At this supper Christ utters the words which characterize the
meaning and substance of the Mass (John 15 : i, 4, 5). "I am the
true vine." "Abide in me, and I in you." "I ain the vine, ye are
the branches." The correspondence between the liturgical ac-
counts points to a traditional source outside the Bible. There is
no evidence of an actual feast of the Eucharist until after
A.D. 150.

3 The Mass is a Eucharistic feast with an elaborately developed
liturgy. It has the following structure:

CONSECRATION

7< \

OBLATION COMMUNION

x* \

PRELIMINARIES CONCLUSION

3i As this investigation is concerned essentially with the symbol
of transformation, I must refrain from discussing the Mass as a
whole.

302 In the sacrifice of the Mass two distinct ideas are blended
together: the ideas of deipnon and thysia. Thysia comes from the
verb 0fcw, 'to sacrifice' or 'to slaughter'; but it also has the mean-

2 [This is a translation of the Karl von Weizsacker version (1875) use( * here by
the author. Elsewhere the Biblical quotations are taken from the AV and
occasionally from the RSV and the DV. Following are the Greek and Latin
(Vulgate) versions of the italicized portion of this passage. TRANS.]

. . . TOUTO /ZO6 <TTW T& (TtO/m TO VTTfp VJA&V. TOUTO 7TOtlr6 6tS T"f]V kfJt^V CLVafJ,V7)(riV.

&crauTcos Kal TO iror'fjpLov jucra TO deLTrvrjo-ai \kyuv' TOUTO rb voriipiov 17 Kaivf} 8ia97]Kri
karlv kv r<3 kfj,& atjuart."

"... hoc est corpus meum, quod pro vobis tradetur: hoc facite in meam
commemorationem. Similiter et calicem, postquam coenavit, dicens: Hie calix
novum testamentum est in meo sanguine/' 3 $ct7n>oj>, 'coena.'

204

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

ing of 'blazing' or 'flaring up.' This refers to the leaping sacrifi-
cial fire by which the gift offered to the gods was consumed.
Originally the food-offering was intended for the nourishment
of the gods; the smoke of the burnt sacrifice carried the food up
to their heavenly abode. At a later stage the smoke was conceived
as a spiritualized form of food-offering; indeed, all through the
Christian era up to the Middle Ages, spirit (or pneuma) contin-
ued to be thought of as a fine, vaporous substance. 4

303 Deipnon means 'meal.' In the first place it is a meal shared by
those taking part in the sacrifice, at which the god was believed
to be present. It is also a "sacred" meal at which "consecrated"
food is eaten, and hence a sacrifice (from sacriftcare, 'to make
sacred/ 'to consecrate').

304 The dual meaning of deipnon and thysia is implicitly con-
tained in the words of the sacrament: "the body which (was
given) for you." 5 This may mean either "which was given to you
to eat" or, indirectly, "which was given for you to God." The
idea of a meal immediately invests the word 'body 5 with the
meaning of <r&p, 'flesh' (as an edible substance). In Paul, ao^a
and o-dp are practically identical. 6

305 Besides the authentic accounts of the institution of the sacra-
ment, we must also consider Hebrews 13:10-15 as a possible
source for the Mass:

We have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve the
tabernacle. For the bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought
into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the
camp. Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with
his own blood, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore
unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. For here have we
no continuing city, but we seek one to come. By him therefore let us
offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually. . . .

306 As a further source we might mention Hebrews 7 : 17: "Thou
art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec." 7 The idea
4 This of course has nothing to do with the official conception of spirit by the
Church. 5 'V6 cr5/xa TO forep vpuv."

6 Kasemann, Leib und Leib Christi, p. 120.

7 Dr. Jud kindly drew my attention to the equally relevant passage in Malachi
i: 10-11 : "Who is there even among you that would shut the doors for nought?
neither do ye kindle fire on mine altar for nought. . . . And in every place
incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering . . ."

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

of perpetual sacrifice and of an eternal priesthood is an essential
component of the Mass. Melchisedec, who according to Hebrews
7 : 3 was " without father, without mother, without descent, hav-
ing neither beginning of days, nor end of life, but made like
unto the Son of God," was believed to be a pre-Christian incar-
nation of the Logos.

307 The idea of an eternal priesthood and of a sacrifice offered to
God ' 'continually " brings us to the true mysterium fidei, the
transformation of the substances, which is the third aspect of the
Mass. The ideas of deipnon and thysia do not in themselves
imply or contain a mystery, although, in the burnt offering
which is reduced to smoke and ashes by the fire, there is a primi-
tive allusion to a transformation of substance in the sense of its
spiritualization. But this aspect is of no practical importance in
the Mass, where it only appears in subsidiary form in the cens-
ing, as an incense-offering. The mysterium, on the other hand,
manifests itself clearly enough in the eternal priest "after the
order of Melchisedec" and in the sacrifice which he offers to God
"continually." The manifestation of an order outside time in-
volves the idea of a miracle which takes place "vere, realiter,
subs tan tialiter" at the moment of transubstantiation, for the
substances offered are no different from natural objects, and
must in fact be definite commodities whose nature is known to
everybody, namely pure wheaten bread and wine. Furthermore,
the officiating priest is an ordinary human being who, although
he bears the indelible mark of the priesthood upon him and is
thus empowered to offer sacrifice, is nevertheless not yet in a
position to be the instrument of the divine self-sacrifice enacted
in the Mass. 8 Nor is the congregation standing behind him yet
purged from sin, consecrated, and itself transformed into a sac-
rificial gift. The. ritual of the Mass takes this situation and
transforms it step by step until the climax is reached the Conse-

8 That is to say, not before he has accomplished the preparatory part of the serv-
ice. In offering these gifts the priest is not the "master" of the sacrifice. "Rather
that which causes them to be sacrificed in the first place is sanctifying grace. For
that is what their sacrifice means: their sanctification. The man who each time
performs the sacred act is the servant of grace, and that is why the gifts and their
sacrifice are always pleasing to God. The fact that the servant may be bad does
not affect them in any way. The priest is only the servant, and even this he has
from grace, not from himself." Joseph Kramp, S.J., Die Opferanschauungen der
romischen Messliturgie, p. 148.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

cration, when Christ himself, as sacrificer and sacrificed, speaks
the decisive words through the mouth of the priest. At that
moment Christ is present in time and space. Yet his presence is
not a reappearance, and therefore the inner meaning of the con-
secration is not a repetition of an event which occurred once in
history, but the revelation of something existing in eternity, a
rending of the evil of temporal and spatial limitations which
separates the human spirit from the sight of the eternal. This
event is necessarily a mystery, because it is beyond the power of
man to conceive or describe. In other words, the rite is neces-
sarily and in every one of its parts a symbol. Now a symbol is not
an arbitrary or intentional sign standing for a known and
conceivable fact, but an admittedly anthropomorphic hence
limited and only partly valid expression for something supra-
human and only partly conceivable. It may be the best expres-
sion possible, yet it ranks below the level of the mystery it seeks
to describe. The Mass is a symbol in this sense. Here I would
like to quote the words of Father Kramp: "It -is generally ad-
mitted that the sacrifice is a symbolic act, by which I mean that
the offering of a material gift to God has no purpose in itself,
but merely serves as a means to express an idea. And the choice
of this means of expression brings a wide range of anthropo-
morphism into play: man confronts God as he confronts his
own kind, almost as if God were a human being. We offer a gift
to God as we offer it to a good friend or to an earthly ruler." 9
308 in so far, then, as the Mass is an anthropomorphic symbol
standing for something otherworldly and beyond our power to
conceive, its symbolism is a legitimate subject for comparative
psychology and analytical research. My psychological explana-
tions are, of course, exclusively concerned with the symbolical
expression.

s Ibid., p. 17.

2. THE SEQUENCE OF THE TRANSFORMATION

RITE

509 The rite of transformation may be said to begin with the
Offertory, an antiphon recited during the offering of the sacrifi-
cial gifts. Here we encounter the first ritual act relating to the
transformation. 1

I. OBLATION OF THE BREAD

3 10 The Host is lifted up towards the cross on the altar, and the
priest makes the sign of the cross over it with the paten. The
bread is thus brought into relation with Christ and his death on
the cross; it is marked as a "sacrifice" and thereby becomes
sacred. The elevation exalts it into the realm of the spiritual:
it is a preliminary act of spiritualization. Justin makes the inter-
esting remark that the presentation of the cleansed lepers in the
temple was an image of the Eucharistic bread. 2 This links up
with the later alchemical idea of the imperfect or "leprous" sub-
stance which is made perfect by the opus. (Quod natura relin-
quit imperfectum,, arte perftcitur.' l What nature leaves imper-
fect is perfected by the art.")

1 In the account that follows I have made extensive use of Brinktrine, Die Heilige
Messe in ihrem Werden und Wesen.

2 "Tiwos TOU aprov rijs i>xapt<mas."

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

II. PREPARATION OF THE CHALICE

This is still more solemn than that of the bread, correspond-
ing to the "spiritual" nature of the wine, which is reserved for
the priest. 3 Some water is mingled with the wine.

The mixing of water with the wine originally referred to the
ancient custom of not drinking wine unless mixed with water.
A drunkard was therefore called akratopotes, an 'unmixed
drinker/ In modern Greek, wine is still called K paal (mixture).
From the custom of the Monophysite Armenians, who did not
add any water to the Eucharistic wine (so as to preserve the
exclusively divine nature of Christ), it may be inferred that
water has a hylical, or physical, significance and represents man's
material nature. The mixing of water and wine in the Roman
rite would accordingly signify that divinity is mingled with
humanity as indivisibly as the wine with the water. 4 St. Cyprian
(bishop of Carthage, d. 258) says that the wine refers to Christ,
and the water to the congregation as the body of Christ. The
significance of the water is explained by an allusion to the Book
of Revelation 17:15: "The waters which thou sawest, where the
whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and
tongues." (In alchemy, meretrix the whore is a synonym for the
prima materia^ the corpus imperfectum which is sunk in dark-
ness, like the man who wanders in darkness, unconscious and
unredeemed. This idea is foreshadowed in the Gnostic image of
Physis, who with passionate arms draws the Nous down from
heaven and wraps him in her dark embrace.) As the water is an
imperfect or even leprous substance, it has to be blessed and
consecrated before being mixed, so that only a purified body
may be joined to the wine of the spirit, just as Christ is to be
united only with a pure and sanctified congregation. Thus this
part of the rite has the special significance of preparing a perfect
body the glorified body of resurrection.

At the time of St. Cyprian the communion was generally cele-
brated with water. 5 And, still later, St. Ambrose (bishop of

3 That is, in the Roman rite. In the Greek Uniate rites, communion is received
in bread and wine.

4 This is the interpretation of Yves, bishop of Chartres (d. 1116).

5 Cyprian attacks this heretical custom in his letter to Caecilius. Letter 6 to
Caecilius, Migne, PX V vol. 4, cols. 3728:. (trans, by Carey, pp. i8iff.).

209

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

Milan, d. 397) says: "In the shadow there was water from the
rock, as it were the blood of Christ." 6 The water communion
is prefigured in John 7:37-39: "If any man thirst, let him come
unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture
hath said, out of his belly flow rivers of living water. (But this
he spake of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should
receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus
was not yet glorified.)" And also in John 4: 14: "But whosoever
drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but
the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life." The words "as the scripture
hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" do
not occur anywhere in the Old Testament. They must therefore
come from a writing which the author of the Johannine gospel
obviously regarded as holy, but which is not known to us. It is
just possible that they are based on Isaiah 58:11: "And the Lord
shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and
make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and
like a spring of water, whose waters fail not." Another possibil-
ity is Ezekiel 47 : i : "Afterward he brought me again unto the
door of the house; and, behold, waters issued out from under the
threshold of the house eastward . . . and the waters came down
from under from the right side of the house, at the south side of
the altar." In the Church Order of Hippolytus (d. c. 235) the
water chalice is associated with the baptismal font, where the
inner man is renewed as well as the body. 7 This interpretation
comes very close to the baptismal krater of Poimandres 8 and
to the Hermetic basin filled with nous which God gave to those
seeking cpyoia. 9 Here the water signifies the pneuma, i.e., the
spirit of prophecy, and also the doctrine which a man receives

6 "In umbra erat aqua de petra quasi sanguis ex Christo." The umbra, 'shadow/
refers to the foreshadowing in the Old Testament, in accordance with the saying:
"Umbra in lege, imago in evangelic, veritas in coelestibus" (The shadow in the
Law, the image in the Gospel, the truth in Heaven). Note that this remark of
Ambrose does not refer to the Eucharist but to the water symbolism of early
Christianity in general; and the same is true of the passages from John. St.
Augustine himself says: "There the rock was Christ; for to us that is Christ which
is placed on the altar of God." Tractatus in Joannem, XLV, 9 (trans, by Innes).

7 Connolly, ed., The So-called Egyptian Church Order and Derived Documents.

8 Berthelot, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, III, li. 8.

9 Corpus Hermeticum, Lib. IV, 4, in Hermetica, I, p. 151.

21O

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

and passes on to others. 10 The same image of the spiritual water
occurs in the "Odes of Solomon": n

For there went forth a stream, and became a river great and broad;
. . . and all the thirsty upon earth were given to drink of it; and
thirst was relieved and quenched; for from the Most High the
draught was given. Blessed then are the ministers of that draught
who are entrusted with that water of His; they have assuaged the
dry lips, and the will that had fainted they have raised up; and souls
that were near departing they have caught back from death; and
limbs that had fallen they straightened and set up; they gave strength
for their feebleness and light to their eyes. For everyone knew them
in the Lord, and they lived by the water of life for ever. 12

314 The fact that the Eucharist was also celebrated with water
shows that the early Christians were mainly interested in the
symbolism of the mysteries and not in the literal observance of
the sacrament. (There were several other variants "galactoph-
agy/' for instance- which all bear out this view.)

315 Another, very graphic, interpretation of the wine and water
is the reference to John 19:34: "And forthwith came there out
blood and water/' Deserving of special emphasis is the remark
of St. John Chrysostom (patriarch of Constantinople, d. 407),
that in drinking the wine Christ drank his own blood. (See Sec-
tion in, on Zosimos.)

316 In this section of the Mass we meet the important prayer:

O God, who in creating human nature, didst wonderfully dignify it,
and hast still more wonderfully renewed it; grant that, by the mys-
tery of this water and wine, we may be made partakers of his divin-
ity who vouchsafed to become partaker of our humanity, Jesus
Christ. . . . 13

lOStrack and Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aits Talmud und
Midrasch, II, p. 492. n A collection of Gnostic hymns from the and cent.

12 Ode VI in The Odes of Solomon, ed. Bernard, p. 55, after the J. Rendel Harris
version. Cf. the vSajp Beiov, the aqua permanent of early alchemy, also the treatise
of Komarius (Berthelot, IV, xx).

13 "Deus, qui humanae substantiae dignitatem mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius
reformasti; da nobis per huius aquae et vini mysterium, eius divinitatis esse
consortes, qui humanitatis nostrae fieri dignatus est particeps, Jesus Christus . . ."
[Here and throughout this essay the English translation is taken from The Small
Missal, London, 1924. TRANS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

III. ELEVATION OF THE CHALICE

3*7 The lifting up of the chalice in the air prepares the spiritual-
ization (i.e., volatilization) of the wine