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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.

206

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."

208

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.]

211

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. 14 This is confirmed by
the invocation to the Holy Ghost which immediately follows
(Veni sanctificator), and it is even more evident in the Mozara-
bic liturgy, which has "Veni spiritus sanctificator." 15 The invo-
cation serves to infuse the wine with holy spirit, for it is the
Holy Ghost who begets, fulfils, and transforms (cf. the "Obum-
bratio Mariae/' Pentecostal fire). After the elevation, the chalice
was, in former times, set down to the right of the Host, to corre-
spond with the blood that flowed from the right side of Christ.

IV. CENSING OF THE SUBSTANCES AND THE ALTAR

3*8 The priest makes the sign of the cross three times over the
substances with the thurible, twice from right to left and once
from left to right. 16 The counterclockwise movement (from right
to left) corresponds psychologically to a circumambnlation
downwards, in the direction of the unconscious, while the clock-
wise (left-to-right) movement goes in the direction of conscious-
ness. There is also a complicated censing of the altar. 17

3*9 The censing has the significance of an incense offering and is
therefore a relic of the original thysia. At the same time it signi-
fies a transformation of the sacrificial gifts and of the altar, a
spiritualization of all the physical substances subserving the rite.
Finally, it is an apotropaic ceremony to drive away any demonic
forces that may be present, for it fills the air with the fragrance
of the pneuma and renders it uninhabitable by evil spirits. The
vapour also suggests the sublimated body, the corpus volatile sive
spirituale, or wraithlike "subtle body." Rising up as a "spiritual"
substance, the incense implements and represents the ascent of

14 This is my interpretation and not that of the Church, which sees in this only
an act of devotion.

is "Mozarabic" from Arabic musta'rib, 'Arabianized/ with reference to the Visi-
gothic-Spanish form of ritual. [The Latin phrases: "Come, O sanctifying one.
"Come, O sanctifying spirit." -EDITORS.]

16 The circumamhulation from left to right is strictly observed in Buddhism.

17 The censing is only performed at High Mass.

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

prayer hence the Dirigatur, Domine, oratio mea, sicut incen-
sum 3 in conspectu tuo. ls

320 The censing brings the preparatory, spiritualizing rites to an
end. The gifts have been sanctified and prepared for the actual
transubstantiation. Priest and congregation are likewise purified
by the prayers Accendat in nobis Dominus ignem sui amoris and
Lavabo inter innocentes^ and are made ready to enter into the
mystic union of the sacrificial act which now follows.

V. THE EPICLESIS

321 The Suscipe, sancta Trinitas, like the Orate 3 fratres, the Sane-
tits, and the Te igitur, is a propitiatory prayer which seeks to
insure the acceptance of the sacrifice. Hence the Preface that
comes after the Secret is called Illatio in the Mozarabic rite (the
equivalent of the Greek avafapa), and in the old Gallican liturgy
is known as Immolatio (in the sense of oblatio), with reference
to the presentation of the gifts. The words of the Sanctus, "Bene-
dictus qui venit in nomine Domini," 20 point to the expected
appearance of the Lord which has already been prepared, on the
ancient principle that a "naming" has the force of a "summons."
After the Canon there follows the "Commemoration of the Liv-
ing/' together with the prayers Hanc igitur and Quam oblatio-
nem. In the Mozarabic Mass these are followed by the Epiclesis
(invocation): "Adesto, adesto Jesu, bone Pontifix, in medio nos-
tri: sicut fuisti in medio disdpulorum tuorum." 21 This naming
likewise has the original force of a summons. It is an intensifica-
tion of the Benedictus qui venit, and it may be, and sometimes
was, regarded as the actual manifestation of the Lord, and hence
as the culminating point of the Mass.

18 ["Let my prayer, O Lord, ascend like incense in thy sight."]

19 ["May the Lord enkindle in us the fire of his love." / "I will wash my hands
among the innocent."]

20 ["Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."]

21 ["Be present, be present in our midst, O Jesus, great High Priest: as thou wert
in the midst of thy disciples."]

213

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

VI. THE CONSECRATION

322 This, in the Roman Mass, is the climax, the transubstantia-
tion of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
The formula for the consecration of the bread runs: 22
Qui pridie quam pateretur, accepit panem in sanctas ac venerabiles
mamis suas, et elevatis oculis in caelum ad te Deum, Patrem suum
omnipotentem, tibi gratias agens, benedixit, fregit, deditque
discipulis suis, dicens: Accipite, et manducate ex hoc omnes. Hoc
est enim Corpus meum.
And for the consecration of the chalice:

Simili modo postquam coenatum est, accipiens et hunc praeclarum
Calicem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas, item tibi gratias agens,
benedixit, deditque discipulis suis, dicens: Accipite, et bibite ex eo
omnes. Hie est enim Calix Sanguinis mei, novi et aeterni testamenti:
mysterium fidei: qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remis-
sionem peccatorum. Haec quotiescumque feceritis, in mei memoriam
facietis.

323 The priest and congregation, as well as the substances and
the altar, have now been progressively purified, consecrated, ex-
alted, and spiritualized by means of the prayers and rites which
began with the Preliminaries and ended with the Canon, and
are thus prepared as a mystical unity for the divine epiphany.
Hence the uttering of the words of the consecration signifies
Christ himself speaking in the first person, his living presence in
the corpus mysticum of priest, congregation, bread, wine, and
incense, which together form the mystical unity offered for sacri-
fice. At this moment the eternal character of the one divine
sacrifice is made evident: it is experienced at a particular time
and a particular place, as if a window or a door had been opened
upon that which lies beyond space and time. It is in this sense
that we have to understand the words of St. Chrysostom: "And
this word once uttered in any church, at any altar, makes perfect
the sacrifice from that day to this, and till his Second Coming/'
It is clear that only by our Lord's presence in his words, and by
their virtue, is the imperfect body of the sacrifice made perfect,

22 According to the edict of the Church these words ought not, on account of their
sacredness, to be translated into any profane tongue. Although there are missals
that sin against this wise edict, I would prefer the Latin text to stand untrans-
lated,

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

and not by the preparatory action of the priest. Were this the
efficient cause, the rite would be no different from common
magic. The priest is only the causa ministerialis of the transub-
stantiation. The real cause is the living presence of Christ which
operates spontaneously, as an act of divine grace.
324 Accordingly, John of Damascus (d. 754) says that the words
have a consecrating effect no matter by what priest they be
spoken, as if Christ were present and uttering them himself. And
Duns Scotus (d. 1308) remarks that, in the sacrament of the Last
Supper, Christ, by an act of will, offers himself as a sacrifice in
every Mass, through the agency of the priest. 23 This tells us
plainly enough that the sacrificial act is not performed by the
priest, but by Christ himself. The agent of transformation is
nothing less than the divine will working through Christ. The
Council of Trent declared that in the sacrifice of the Mass "the
selfsame Christ is contained and bloodlessly sacrificed/' 24 al-
though this is not a repetition of the historical sacrifice but a
bloodless renewal of it. As the sacramental words have the power
to accomplish the sacrifice, being an expression of God's will,
they can be described metaphorically as the sacrificial knife or
sword which, guided by his will, consummates the thysia. This
comparison was first drawn by the Jesuit father Lessius (d, 1623),
and has since gained acceptance as an ecclesiastical figure of
speech. It is based on Hebrews 4:12: "For the word of God is
quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword/'
and perhaps even more on the Book of Revelation 1:16: "And
out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword/' The "macta-
tion theory" first appeared in the sixteenth century. Its origina-
tor, Cuesta, bishop of Leon (d. 1560), declared that Christ was
slaughtered by the priest. So the sword metaphor followed quite
naturally. 25 Nicholas Cabasilas, archbishop of Thessalonica (d.

23 Klug, in Theologie und Glaube, XVIII (1926), 335!:. Cited by Brinktrine, p. 192.

24 "idem ille Christus continetur et incruente immolatur." Sessio XXII. Denzinger
and Bannwart, Enchiridion Syrribolorum, p. 312.

25"Missa est sacrificium hac ratione quia Christus aliquo modo moritur et a
sacerdote mactatur" (The Mass is a sacrifice for the reason that in it Christ dies
after a certain manner, and is slain by the priest). Hauck, Realenzyktopadie, XII,
p. 693. The question of the mactatio had already been raised by Nicholas
Cabasilas of Thessalonica: "De divino altaris sacrificio," in Migne, P.O., vol. 150, ,
cols. 363!!. The sword as a sacrificial instrument also occurs in the Zosimos
visions (see section m).

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

c. 1363), gives a vivid description of the corresponding rite in the
Greek Orthodox Church:

The priest cuts a piece of bread from the loaf, reciting the text: "As
a lamb he was led to the slaughter." Laying it on the table he says:
"The lamb of God is slain." Then a sign of the cross is imprinted
on the bread and a small lance is stabbed into its side, to the text:
"And one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith
came there out blood and water/' With these words water and wine
are mixed in the chalice, which is placed beside the bread.

The d&pw (gift) also represents the giver; that is to say, Christ is
both the sacrificer and the sacrificed.

325 Kramp writes: "Sometimes the fractio and sometimes the
elevatio which precedes the Pater noster was taken as symboliz-
ing the death of Christ, sometimes the sign of the cross at the end
of the Supplices, and sometimes the consecratio; but no one ever
thought of taking a symbol like the 'mystical slaughter' as a
sacrifice which constitutes the essence of the Mass. So it is not
surprising that there is no mention of any 'slaughter' in the
liturgy." 26

VII. THE GREATER ELEVATION

326 The consecrated substances are lifted up and shown to the
congregation. The Host in particular represents a beatific vision
of heaven, in fulfilment of Psalm 27:8: "Thy face, Lord, will I
seek," for in it the Divine Man is present.

VIII. THE POST-CONSECRATION

327 There now follows the significant prayer Unde et memores,
which I give in full together with the Supra quae and Supplices:

Wherefore, O Lord, we thy servants, as also thy holy people, call-
ing to mind the blessed passion of the same Christ thy Son our Lord,
his resurrection from hell, and glorious ascension into heaven, offer
unto thy most excellent majesty, of thy gifts and grants, a pure Host,
a holy Host, an immaculate Host, the holy bread of eternal life, and
the chalice of everlasting salvation.
26 Kramp, p. 56.

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

Upon which vouchsafe to look down with a propitious and serene
countenance, and to accept them, as thou wert graciously pleased
to accept the gifts of thy just servant Abel, and the sacrifice of our
patriarch Abraham, and that which thy high priest Melchisedec
offered to thee, a holy sacrifice, an immaculate Host.

We most humbly beseech thee, almighty God, command these
things to be carried by the hands of thy holy angel to thy altar on
high, in the sight of thy divine majesty, that as many of us as, by
participation at this altar, shall receive the most sacred body and
blood of thy Son, may be filled with all heavenly benediction and
grace. Through the same Christ, our Lord. Amen. 27

The first prayer shows that in the transformed substances
there is an allusion to the resurrection and glorification of our
Lord, and the second prayer recalls the sacrifices prefigured in
the Old Testament. Abel sacrificed a lamb; Abraham was to sac-
rifice his son, but a ram was substituted at the last moment.
Melchisedec offers no sacrifice, but comes to meet Abraham with
bread and wine. This sequence is probably not accidental it
forms a sort of crescendo. Abel is essentially the son, and sacri-
fices an animal; Abraham is essentially the father indeed, the
"tribal father" and therefore on a higher level. He does not
offer a choice possession merely, but is ready to sacrifice the best
and dearest thing he has his only son. Melchisedec ("teacher of
righteousness"), is, according to Hebrews 7:1, king of Salem and
"priest of the most high God," El 'Elyon. Philo Byblius men-
tions a 'EXtow 6 WIO-TOS as a Canaanite deity, 28 but he cannot be
identical with Yahweh. Abraham nevertheless acknowledges the

27 "Unde et memores, Domine, nos servi tui, sed et plebs tua sancta, eiusdem
Christ! Filii tui, Domini nostri, tarn beatae passionis, nee non et ab inferis resur-
rectionis, sed et in caelos gloriosae ascensionis: offerimus praeclarae majestati tuae
de tuis donis ac datis, hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam,
Panem sanctum vitae aeternae, et Calicem salutis perpetuae.

"Supra quae propitio ac sereno vultu respicere digneris: et accepta habere,
sicuti accepta habere dignatus es munera pueri tui justi Abel, et sacrificium
Patriarchae nostri Abrahae: et quod tibi obtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchise-
dech, sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam.

"Supplices te rogamus, omnipotens Deus: jube haec perferri per manus sancti
Angeli tui in sublime altare tuum, in conspectu divinae majestatis tuae: ut,
quotquot ex hac altaris participatione sacrosanctum Filii tui corpus, et san-
guinem sumpserimus, omni benedictione caelesti et gratia repleamur. Per
eundem Christum, Dominum nostrum. Amen."
28Eusebius, Evangelica praeparatio, I, 10, u (Migne, P.O., vol. 21, col. 30).

217

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

priesthood of Melchisedec 29 by paying him "a tenth part of all."
By virtue of his priesthood, Melchisedec stands above the patri-
arch, and his feasting of Abraham has the significance of a
priestly act. We must therefore attach a symbolical meaning to
it, as is in fact suggested by the bread and wine. Consequently
the symbolical offering ranks even higher than the sacrifice of a
son, which is still the sacrifice of somebody else. Melchisedec's
offering is thus a prefiguration of Christ's sacrifice of himself.
329 In the prayer Supplices te rogamus we beseech God to bring
the gifts "by the hands of thy holy angel to thy altar on high."
This singular request derives from the apocryphal Epistolae
Apostolorum> where there is a legend that Christ, before he be-
came incarnate, bade the archangels take his place at God's altar
during his absence. 80 This brings out the idea of the eternal
priesthood which links Christ with Melchisedec.

IX. END OF THE CANON

33 Taking up the Host, the priest makes the sign of the cross
three times over the chalice, and says: "Through Him, and with
Him, and in Him." Then he makes the sign of the cross twice
between himself and the chalice. This establishes the identity of
Host, chalice, and priest, thus affirming once more the unity of
all parts of the sacrifice. The union of Host and chalice signifies
the union of the body and blood, i.e., the quickening of the body
with a soul, for blood is equivalent to soul. Then follows the
Pater noster.

X. BREAKING OF THE HOST ("FRACTIO")

331 The prayer "Deliver us, O Lord, we beseech thee, from all
evils, past, present, and to come" lays renewed emphasis on the
petition made in the preceding Pater noster: "but deliver us
from evil." The connection between this and the sacrificial death
of Christ lies in the descent into hell and the breaking of the

29 "Sidik" is a Phoenician name for God. Sir Leonard Woolley gives a very inter-
esting explanation of this in his report on the excavations at Ur: Abraham: Re-
cent Discoveries and Hebrew Origins. 30 Kramp, p. 98.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

infernal power. The breaking of the bread that now follows is
symbolic of Christ's death. The Host is broken in two over the
chalice. A small piece, the particula, is broken off from the left
half and used for the rite of consignatio and commixtio. In the
Byzantine rite the bread is divided into four, the four pieces
being marked with letters as follows:

NI KA

This means " 'lyaovs Xptoros wet"' Jesus Christ is victorious/
The peculiar arrangement of the letters obviously represents a
quaternity, which as we know always has the character of whole-
ness. This quaternity, as the letters show, refers to Christ glori-
fied, king of glory and Pantokrator.

332 Still more complicated is the Mozarabic f radio: the Host is
first broken into two, then the left half into five parts, and the
right into four. The five are named corporatio (incarnatio),
nativitas, circumcisio, apparitio, and passio; and the four mors,
resurrectio, gloria, regnum. The first group refers exclusively to
the human life of our Lord, the second to his existence beyond
this world. According to the old view, five is the number of the
natural ("hylical") man, whose outstretched arms and legs form,
with the head, a pentagram. Four, on the other hand, signifies
eternity and totality (as shown for instance by the Gnostic name
"Barbelo," which is translated as "fourness is God"). This sym-
bol, I would add in passing, seems to indicate that extension in
space signifies God's suffering (on the cross) and, on the other
hand, his dominion over the universe.

XI. CONSIGNATIO

333 The sign of the cross is made over the chalioe with the par-
ticula, and then the priest drops it into the wine.

XIL COMMIXTIO

334 This is the mingling of bread and wine, as explained by
Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428?): ". . . he combines them into
one, whereby it is made manifest to everybody that although

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

they are two they are virtually one/' 31 The text at this point
says: "May this mixture and consecration [commixtio et conse-
cratio] of the body and blood of our Lord help us/' etc. The
word 'consecration' may be an allusion to an original consecra-
tion by contact, though that would not clear up the contradic-
tion since a consecration of both substances has already taken
place. Attention has therefore been drawn to the old custom of
holding over the sacrament from one Mass to another, the Host
being dipped in wine and then preserved in softened, or mixed,
form. There are numerous rites that end with minglings of this
kind. Here I would only mention the consecration by water, or
the mixed drink of honey and milk which the neophytes were
given after communion in the Church Order of Hippolytus.
335 The Leonine Sacramentary (seventh century) interprets the
commixtio as a mingling of the heavenly and earthly nature of
Christ. The later view was that it symbolizes the resurrection,
since in it the blood (or soul) of our Lord is reunited with the
body lying in the sepulchre. There is a significant reversal here
of the original rite of baptism. In baptism, the body is immersed
in water for the purpose of transformation; in the commixtio,
on the other hand, the body, or particula, is steeped in wine,
symbolizing spirit, and this amounts to a glorification of the
body. Hence the justification for regarding the commixtio as a
symbol of the resurrection.

XIII. CONCLUSION

336 On careful examination we find that the sequence of ritual
actions in the Mass contains, sometimes clearly and sometimes
by subtle allusions, a representation in condensed form of the
life and sufferings of Christ. Certain phases overlap or are so
close together that there can be no question of conscious and
deliberate condensation. It is more likely that the historical evo-
lution of the Mass gradually led to its becoming a concrete pic-
ture of the most important aspects of Christ's life. First of all (in
the Benedictus qui venit and Supra quae) we have an anticipa-
tion and prefiguration of his coming. The uttering of the words

31 Rucker, ed., Ritus baptismi et missae quam descripsit Theodorus ep. Mopsue-
stanus.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

of consecration corresponds to the incarnation of the Logos, and
also to Christ's passion and sacrificial death, which appears again
in the fractio. In the Libera nos there is an allusion to the de-
scent into hell, while the consignatio and commixtio hint at
resurrection.

337 In so far as the offered gift is the sacrificer himself, in so far
as the priest and congregation offer themselves in the sacrificial
gift, and in so far as Christ is both sacrificer and sacrificed, there
is a mystical unity of all parts of the sacrificial act. 32 The combi-
nation of offering and offerer in the single figure of Christ is
implicit in the doctrine that just as bread is composed of many
grains of wheat, and wine of many grapes, so the mystical body
of the Church is made up of a multitude of believers. The mysti-
cal body, moreover, includes both sexes, represented by the
bread and wine. 33 Thus the two substances the masculine wine
and the feminine bread also signify the androgynous nature of
the mystical Christ.

33 8 The Mass thus contains, as its essential core, the mystery and
miracle of God's transformation taking place in the human
sphere, his becoming Man, and his return to his absolute exist-
ence in and for himself. Man, too, by his devotion and self-sacri-
fice as a ministering instrument, is included in the mysterious
process. God's offering of himself is a voluntary act of love, but
the actual sacrifice was an agonizing and bloody death brought
about by men instrumentaliter et ministerialiter. (The words
incruente immolatur 'bloodlessly sacrificed' refer only to the
rite, not to the thing symbolized.) The terrors of death on the
cross are an indispensable condition for the transformation.
This is in the first place a bringing to life of substances which
are in themselves lifeless, and, in the second, a substantial altera-
tion of them, a spiritualization, in accordance with the ancient
conception of pneuma as a subtle material entity (the corpus
glorificationis). This idea is expressed in the concrete participa-
tion in the body and blood of Christ in the Communion.

32 This unity is a good example of participation mystique, which LeVy-Bruhl
stressed as being one of the main characteristics of primitive psychology a view
that has recently been contested by ethnologists in a very short-sighted manner.
The idea of unity should not, however, be regarded as "primitive" but rather
as showing that participation mystique is a characteristic of symbols in general.
The symbol always includes the unconscious, hence man too is contained in it.
The numinosity of the symbol is an expression of this fact. 33 Kramp, p. 55.

221

j. PARALLELS TO THE TRANSFORMATION
MYSTERY

I. THE AZTEC "TEOQUALO"

339 Although the Mass itself is a unique phenomenon in the his-
tory of comparative religion, its symbolic content would be
profoundly alien to man were it not rooted in the human psyche.
But if it is so rooted, then we may expect to find similar patterns
of symbolism both in the earlier history of mankind and in the
world of pagan thought contemporary with it. As the prayer
Supra quae shows, the liturgy of the Mass contains allusions to
the "prefigurations" in the Old Testament, and thus indirectly
to ancient sacrificial symbolism in general. It is clear, then, that
in Christ's sacrifice and the Communion one of the deepest
chords in the human psyche is struck: human sacrifice and ritual
anthropophagy. Unfortunately I cannot enter into the wealth
of ethnological material in question here, so must content my-
self with mentioning the ritual slaying of the king to promote
the fertility of the land and the prosperity of his people, the
renewal and revivification of the gods through human sacrifice,
and the totem meal, the purpose of which was to reunite the
participants with the life of their ancestors. These hints will
suffice to show how the symbols of the Mass penetrate into the
deepest layers of the psyche and its history. They are evidently

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

among the most ancient and most central of religious concep-
tions. Now with regard to these conceptions there is still a wide-
spread prejudice, not only among laymen, but in scientific
circles too, that beliefs and customs of this kind must have been
"invented" at some time or other, and were then handed down
and imitated, so that they would not exist at all in most places
unless they had got there in the manner suggested. It is, how-
ever, always precarious to draw conclusions from our modern,
"civilized" mentality about the primitive state of mind. Primi-
tive consciousness differs from that of the present-day white man
in several very important respects. Thus, in primitive societies,
"inventing" is very different from what it is with us, where one
novelty follows another. With primitives, life goes on in the
same way for generations; nothing alters, except perhaps the
language. But that does not mean that a new one is "invented."
Their language is "alive" and can therefore change, a fact that
has been an unpleasant discovery for many lexicographers of
primitive languages. Similarly, no one "invents" the picturesque
slang spoken in America; it just springs up in inexhaustible
abundance from the fertile soil of colloquial speech. Religious
rites and their stock of symbols must have developed in much
the same way from beginnings now lost to us, and not just in one
place only, but in many places at once, and also at different
periods. They have grown spontaneously out of the basic condi-
tions of human nature, which are never invented but are every-
where the same.

340 So it is not surprising that we find religious rites which come
very close to Christian practices in a field untouched by classical
culture. I mean the rites of the Aztecs, and in particular that of
the teoqualo, 'god-eating,' as recorded by Fray Bernardino de
Sahagiin, who began his missionary work among the Aztecs in
1529, eight years after the conquest of Mexico. In this rite, a
doughlike paste was made out of the crushed and pounded seeds
of the prickly poppy (Argemone mexicand) and moulded into
the figure of the god Huitzilopochtli:

And upon the next day the body of Huitzilopochtli died.

And he who slew him was the priest known as Quetzalcoatl. And
that with which he slew him was a dart, pointed with flint, which
he shot into his heart.

He died in the presence of Moctezuma and of the keeper of the

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

god, who verily spoke to Huitzilopochtli who verily appeared
before him, who indeed could make him offerings; and of four
masters of the youths, front rank leaders. Before all of them died
Huitzilopochtli.

And when he had died, thereupon they broke up his body of ...
dough. His heart was apportioned to Moctezuma.

And as for the rest of his members, which were made, as it were,
to be his bones, they were distributed and divided up among all.
. . . Each year . . . they ate it. ... And when they divided up
among themselves his body made of ... dough, it was broken up
exceeding small, very fine, as small as seeds. The youths ate it.

And of this which they ate, it was said: "The god is eaten/* And
of those who ate it, it was said: "They guard the god." x

34* The idea of a divine body, its sacrifice in the presence of the
high priest to whom the god appears and with whom he speaks,
the piercing with the spear, the god's death followed by ritual
dismemberment, and the eating (communio) of a small piece
of his body, are all parallels which cannot be overlooked and
which caused much consternation among the worthy Spanish
Fathers at the time.

342 In Mithraism, a religion that sprang up not long before
Christianity, we find a special set of sacrificial symbols and, it
would seem, a corresponding ritual which unfortunately is
known to us only from dumb monuments. There is a transitus,
with Mithras carrying the bull; a bull-sacrifice for seasonal fer-
tility; a stereotyped representation of the sacrificial act, flanked
on either side by dadophors carrying raised and lowered torches;
and a meal at which pieces of bread marked with crosses were
laid on the table. Even small bells have been found, and these
probably have some connection with the bell which is sounded
at Mass. The Mithraic sacrifice is essentially a self-sacrifice, since
the bull is a world bull and was originally identical with Mithras
himself. This may account for the singularly agonized expres-
sion on the face of the tauroktonos, 2 which bears comparison
with Guido Reni's Crucifixion. The Mithraic transitus is a
motif that corresponds to Christ carrying the cross, just as the

1 Bernardino de Sahagun, General History of the Things of New Spain, Book 3:
The Origin of the Gods, trans, by Anderson and Dibble, pp. 5! (slightly modified).

2 Cumont, Textes et monuments, I, p. 182. [And cf. Jung, Symbols of Transforma-
tion, p. 428 and frontispiece. EDITORS.]

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

transformation o the beast of sacrifice corresponds to the resur-
rection of the Christian God in the form of food and drink.
The representations of the sacrificial act, the tauroctony (bull-
slaying), recall the crucifixion between two thieves, one of whom
is raised up to paradise while the other goes down to hell.
343 These few references to the Mithras cult are but one example
of the wealth of parallels offered by the legends and rites of the
various Near Eastern gods who die young, are mourned, and
rise again. For anyone who knows these religions at all, there
can be no doubt as to the basic affinity of the symbolic types and
ideas. 3 At the time of primitive Christianity and in the early
days of the Church, the pagan world was saturated with con-
ceptions of this kind and with philosophical speculations based
upon them, and it was against this background that the thought
and visionary ideas of the Gnostic philosophers were unfolded.

II. THE VISION OF ZOSIMOS

344 A characteristic representative of this school of thought was
Zosimos of Panopolis, a natural philosopher and alchemist of
the third century A.D., whose works have been preserved, though
in corrupt state, in the famous alchemical Codex Marcianus,
and were published in 1887 by Berthelot in his Collection des
anciens alchimistes grecs. In various portions of his treatises 4
Zosimos relates a number of dream-visions, all of which appear
to go back to one and the same dream. 5 He was clearly a non-
Christian Gnostic, and in particular so one gathers from the
famous passage about the krater 6 an adherent of the Poiman-
dres sect, and therefore a follower of Hermes. Although al-
chemical literature abounds in parables, I would hesitate to
class these dream-visions among them. Anyone acquainted with
the language of the alchemists will recognize that their parables
are mere allegories of ideas that were common knowledge. In
the allegorical figures and actions, one can usually see at once

3 Cf. Frazer's The Golden Bough, Part III: "The Dying GoU" For the Eu-
charlstic meal of fish, see my Awn, Ch. VIII.

4 Alchimistes, III, i, 2, 3; III, v; III, vi.

5 Cf. my paper "Some Observations on the Visions o Zosimos," which quotes the
relevant passages. 6 Alchimistes, III, li. 8.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

what substances and what procedures are being referred to
under a deliberately theatrical disguise. There is nothing of this
kind in the Zosimos visions. Indeed, it comes almost as a sur-
prise to find the alchemical interpretation, namely that the
dream and its impressive machinery are simply an illustration
of the means for producing the "divine water." Moreover, a
parable is a self-contained whole, whereas our vision varies and
amplifies a single theme as a dream does. So far as one can
assess the nature of these visions at all, I should say that even
in the original text the contents of an imaginative meditation
have grouped themselves round the kernel of an actual dream
and been woven into it. That there really was such a meditation
is evident from the fragments of it that accompany the visions
in the form of a commentary. As we know, meditations of this
kind are often vividly pictorial, as if the dream were being
continued on a level nearer to consciousness. In his Lexicon
alchemiae, Martin Ruland, writing in Frankfort in 1612, defines
the meditation that plays such an important part in alchemy
as an "internal colloquy with someone else, who is nevertheless
not seen, it may be with God, with oneself, or with one's good
angel." The latter is a milder and less obnoxious form of the
paredros, the familiar spirit of ancient alchemy, who was gen-
erally a planetary demon conjured up by magic. It can hardly
be doubted that real visionary experiences originally lay at the
root of these practices, and a vision is in the last resort nothing
less than a dream which has broken through into the waking
state. We know from numerous witnesses all through the ages
that the alchemist, in the course of his imaginative work, was
beset by visions of all kinds, 7 and was sometimes even threatened
with madness. 8 So the visions of Zosimos are not something un-
usual or unknown in alchemical experience, though they are
perhaps the most important self-revelations ever bequeathed to
us by an alchemist.

345 I cannot reproduce here the text of the visions in full, but
will give as an example the first vision, in Zosimos' own words:

And while I said this I fell asleep, and I saw a sacrificial priest stand-
ing before me, high up on an altar, which was in the shape of a

7Cf. the examples given in Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 347!
8 Olympiodorus says this is particularly the effect of lead. Cf. Berthelot, II, iv, 43.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

shallow bowl. There were fifteen steps leading up to the altar. And
the priest stood there, and I heard a voice from above say to me:
"Behold, I have completed the descent down the fifteen steps of
darkness and I have completed the ascent up the steps of light. And
he who renews me is the priest, for he cast away the density of the
body, and by compelling necessity I am sanctified and now stand in
perfection as a spirit [pneuma]" And I perceived the voice of him
who stood upon the altar, and I inquired of him who he was. And he
answered me in a fine voice, saying: "I am Ion, priest of the inner-
most hidden sanctuary, and I submit myself to an unendurable
torment. For there came one in haste at early morning, who over-
powered me and pierced me through with the sword and cut me in
pieces, yet in such a way that the order of my limbs was preserved.
And he drew off the scalp of my head with the sword, which he
wielded with strength, and he put the bones and the pieces of flesh
together and with his own hand burned them in the fire, until I
perceived that I was transformed and had become spirit. And that
is my unendurable torment." And even as he spoke this, and I held
him by force to converse with me, his eyes became as blood. And he
spewed out all his own flesh. And I saw how he changed into a
manikin [avBpwiraptov, i-e., an homunculus] who had lost a part of him-
self. And he tore his flesh with his own teeth, and sank into himself.

346 In the course of the visions the Hiereus (priest) appears in
various forms. At first he is split into the figures of the Hiereus
and the Hierourgon (sacrificer), who is charged with the per-
formance of the sacrifice. But these figures blend into one in so
far as both suffer the same fate. The sacrificial priest submits
voluntarily to the torture by which he is transformed. But he
is also the sacrificer who is sacrificed, since he is pierced through
with the sword and ritually dismembered. 9 The deipnon con-
sists in his tearing himself to pieces with his own teeth and eat-
ing himself; the thysia, in his flesh being sacrificially burned on
the altar.

347 He is the Hiereus in so far as he rules over the sacrificial rite
as a whole, and over the human beings who are transformed
during the thysia. He calls himself a guardian of spirits. He is
also known as the "Brazen Man" and as Xyrourgos, the barber.

9 The dismemberment motif belongs in the wider context of rebirth symbolism.
Consequently it plays an important part in the initiation experiences of shamans
and medicine men, who are dismembered and then put together again. For de-
tails, see Eliade, Le Ghamanisme, pp. 476:.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

The brazen or leaden man is an allusion to the spirits of the
metals, or planetary demons, as protagonists of the sacrificial
drama. In all probability they are paredroi who were conjured
up by magic, as may be deduced from Zosimos' remark that he
"held him by force" to converse with him. The planetary
demons are none other than the old gods of Olympus who finally
expired only in the eighteenth century, as the "souls of the
metals" or rather, assumed a new shape, since it was in this
same century that paganism openly arose for the first time (in
the French Revolution).

Somewhat more curious is the term 'barber/ which we find
in other parts of the visions, 10 for there is no mention of cutting
the hair or shaving. There is, however, a scalping, which in our
context is closely connected with the ancient rites of flaying and
their magical significance. 11 I need hardly mention the flaying
of Marsyas, who is an unmistakable parallel to the son-lover of
Cybele, namely Attis, the dying god who rises again. In one of
the old Attic fertility rites an ox was flayed, stuffed, and set up
on its feet. Herodotus (IV, 60) reports a number of flaying cere-
monies among the Scythians, and especially scalpings. In gen-
eral, flaying signifies transformation from a worse state to a
better, and hence renewal and rebirth. The best examples are
to be found in the religion of ancient Mexico. 12 Thus, in order
to renew the moon-goddess a young woman was decapitated and
skinned, and a youth then put the skin round him to represent
the risen goddess. The prototype of this renewal is the snake
casting its skin every year, a phenomenon round which primi-
tive fantasy has always played. In our vision the skinning is
restricted to the head, and this can probably be explained by
the underlying idea of spiritual transformation. Since olden
times shaving the head has been associated with consecration,

10 [Cf. Berthelot, III, i, 3 and v, 1-3; and Jung, "Visions of Zosimos" (Swiss edn.,
pp. 141-47). EDITORS.]

11 Cf. Frazer's The Golden Bough, Part IV: Adonis, Attis, Osiris, pp. 242ff. and
p. 405, and my Symbols of Transformation, pars. 594! Cf. also Colin Campbell,
The Miraculous Birth of King Amon-Hotep III, p. 142, concerning the presenta-
tion of the dead man, Sen-nezem, before Osiris, Lord of Amentet: "In this scene
the god is usually represented enthroned. Before and behind him, hanging from
a pole, is the dripping skin of a slain bull that was slaughtered to yield up the
soul of Osiris at his reconstruction, with the vase underneath to catch the blood."

12 Cf. Eduard Seler's account in Hastings, Encyclopedia, VIII, pp. 6i5f.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

that is, with spiritual transformation or initiation. The priests
of Isis had their heads shaved quite bald, and the tonsure, as we
know, is still in use at the present day. This "symptom" of trans-
formation goes back to the old idea that the transformed one
becomes like a new-born babe (neophyte, quasimodogenitus)
with a hairless head. In the myth of the night sea journey, the
hero loses all his hair during his incubation in the belly of the
monster, because of the terrific heat. 13 The custom of tonsure,
which is derived from these primitive ideas, naturally presup-
poses the presence of a ritual barber. 14 Curiously enough, we
come across the barber in that old alchemical "mystery," the
Chymical Wedding of 16 16. 15 There the hero, on entering the
mysterious castle, is pounced on by invisible barbers, who give
him something very like a tonsure. 16 Here again the initiation
and transformation process is accompanied by a shaving. 17

349 In one variant of these visions there is a dragon who is killed
and sacrificed in the same manner as the priest and therefore
seems to be identical with him. This makes one think of those
far from uncommon medieval pictures, not necessarily alchem-
ical, in which a serpent is shown hanging on the Cross in place
of Christ. (Note the comparison of Christ with the serpent of
Moses in John 3:14.)

35 A notable aspect of the priest is the leaden homunculus, and
this is none other than the leaden spirit or planetary demon
Saturn. In Zosimos' day Saturn was regarded as a Hebrew god,

13 Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, p. 30.

14 Barbers were comparatively well-to-do people in ancient Egypt, and evidently
did a flourishing trade. Cf. Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 304: "Barbers, all
of whom must . . . have lived in easy circumstances."

15 [The Chymische Hochzeit, dated 1459, actually published at Strasbourg, 1616.
Signed "Christian Rosencreutz," but really written by Johann Valentin Andreae,
as Professor Jung states elsewhere. EDITORS.]

16 As Andreae must have been a learned alchemist, he might very well have got
hold of a copy of the Codex Marcianus and seen the writings of Zosimos. Manu-
script copies exist in Gotha, Leipzig, Munich, and Weimar. I know of only one
printed edition, published in Italy in the i6th cent., which is very rare.

17 Hence the "shaving of a man" and the "plucking of a fowl," mentioned further
on among the magical sacrificial recipes. A similar motif is suggested by the
"changing of wigs" at the Egyptian judgment of the dead. Cf. the picture in the
tomb of Sennezem (Campbell, p. 143). When the dead man is led before Osiris his
wig is black; immediately afterwards (at the sacrifice in the Papyrus of Ani) it
is white.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

presumably on account of the keeping holy of the Sabbath-
Saturday means 'Saturn's Day' 18 and also on account of the
Gnostic parallel with the supreme archon laldabaoth ('child of
chaos') who, as Xwroei5fc, may be grouped together with Baal,
Kronos, and Saturn. 19 The later Arabic designation of Zosimos
as al-'Ibri (the Hebrew) does not of course prove that he himself
was a Jew, but it is clear from his writings that he was ac-
quainted with Jewish traditions. 20 The parallel between the
Hebrew god and Saturn is of considerable importance as regards
the alchemical idea of the transformation of the God of the
Old Testament into the God of the New. The alchemists natu-
rally attached great significance to Saturn, 21 for, besides being
the outermost planet, the supreme archon (the Harranites
named him "Primas"), and the demiurge laldabaoth, he was also
the spiritus niger who lies captive in the darkness of matter, the
deity or that part of the deity which has been swallowed up in
his own creation. He is the dark god who reverts to his original
luminous state in the mystery of alchemical transmutation. As
the Aurora consurgens (Part I) says: "Blessed is he who has dis-
covered this science and on whom the providence of Saturn
flows." 22

351 The later alchemists were familiar not only with the ritual
slaying of a dragon but also with the slaying of a lion, which
took the form of his having all four paws cut off. Like the
dragon, the lion devours himself, and so is probably only a
variant. 23

18 Plutarch, Quaestiones convivales, IV, 5, and Diogenes Laertius, II, 112;
Reitzenstein, Poimandres, pp. 75!:. and 112. In a text named "Ghaya al-hakiim,"
ascribed to Maslama al-Madjriti, the following instructions are given when in-
voking Saturn: "Arrive vtu a la maniere des Juifs, car il est leur patron." Dozy
and de Goeje, "Nouveaux documents pour l'e"tude de la religion des Harraniens,"

P*35<>.

l9Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 31. Mead, Pistis Sophia, ch. 45. Bousset, Haupt-

probleme der Gnosis, pp. 35 iff. Roscher, Lexikon, s.v. Kronos, II, col. 1496. The

dragon (Kp6vos) and Kronos are often confused.

20Lippmann, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie, II, p. 229.

21 Cf. Aion, par. 128 (Swiss edn., pp. 1148:.).

22 "Beatus homo qui invenerit hanc scientiam et cui affluit providentia Saturni."

23 See the illustration in Reusner, Pandora (1588), and in the frontispiece to Le
Songe de Poliphile, trans, by Broalde de Verville (1600). Generally the pictures
show two lions eating one another. The uroboros, too, is often pictured in the
form of two dragons engaged in the same process (Viridarium chymicum, 1624).

230

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

352 The vision itself indicates that the main purpose o the trans-
formation process is the spiritualization of the sacrificing priest:
he is to be changed into pneuma. We are also told that he would
"change the bodies into blood, make the eyes to see and the dead
to rise again." Later in the visions he appears in glorified form,
shining white like the midday sun.

353 Throughout the visions it is clear that sacrificer and sacri-
ficed are one and the same. This idea of the unity of the prima
and ultima materia., of that which redeems and that which is to
be redeemed, pervades the whole of alchemy from beginning
to end. "Unus est lapis, una medicina, unum vas, unum regimen,
unaque dispositio" is the key formula to its enigmatic lan-
guage. 24 Greek alchemy expresses the same idea in the formula
IP TO TCLV. Its symbol is the uroboros, the tail-eating serpent. In
our vision it is the priest as sacrificer who devours himself as the
sacrifice. This recalls the saying of St. John Chrysostom that in
the Eucharist Christ drinks his own blood. By the same token,
one might add, he eats his own flesh. The grisly repast in the
dream of Zosiinos reminds us of the orgiastic meals in the Dion-
ysus cult, when sacrificial animals were torn to pieces and eaten.
They represent Dionysus Zagreus being torn to pieces by the
Titans, from whose mangled remains the &>$ Ai&wos arises. 25

354 Zosimos tells us that the vision represents or explains the
"production of the waters." 26 The visions themselves only show
the transformation into pneuma. In the language of the alche-
mists, however, spirit and water are synonymous, 27 as they are

24 Cf. the Rosarium philosophorum, in the Artis auriferae (1593), II, p. 206.

25 Cf. the Cretan fragment of Euripides (Dieterich, Erne Mithrasliturgie, p. 105):

ayvov fe j3oi> rdvwv t% o5

Aids 'ISatou ju&crr^s

Kol vvK.rnr6\ov Zaypfeos

rods &no(f>ayovs SaZras
(living a holy life, since I have been initiated into the mysteries of the Idaean
Zeus, and eaten raw the flesh of Zagreus, the night-wandering shepherd).

26 [Cf. Berthelot, III, i, 2, and Jung's "Visions of Zosimos" (Swiss edn., p. 141, and
for the reference lower down to "blood" p. 147). EDITORS.]

27 "Est et coelestis aqua sive potius divina Chymistarum . . . pneuma, ex aetheris
natura et essentia rerum quinta" (There is also the celestial, or rather the divine,
water of the alchemists ... the pneuma, having the nature of the pneuma and
the quintessence of things) .-Hermolaus Barbaras, CorolL in Dioscoridem, cited
in M. Maier, Symbola aureae mensae (1617), p. 174.

"Spiritus autem in hac arte nihil aliud quam aquam indicari . . ." (In this art,

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

in the language of the early Christians, for whom water meant
the spiritus veritatis. In the "Book of Krates" we read: "You
make the bodies to liquefy, so that they mingle and become an
homogeneous liquid; this is then named the 'divine water.' " 28
The passage corresponds to the Zosimos text, which says that the
priest would "change the bodies into blood." For the alchemists,
water and blood are identical. This transformation is the same
as the solutio or liquefactio^ which is a synonym for the subli-
matio, for "water" is also "fire": "Item ignis . . . est aqua et
ignis noster est ignis et non ignis" (For fire ... is water and
our fire is the fire that is no fire). "Aqua nostra" is said to be
"ignea" (fiery). 29

355 The "secret fire of our philosophy" is said to be "our mystical
water," and the "permanent water" is the "fiery form of the true
water/' 80 The permanent water (the vdup Qelov of the Greeks)
also signifies "spiritualis sanguis," 31 and is identified with the
blood and water that flowed from Christ's side. Heinrich Khun-
rath says of this water: "So there will open for thee an healing
flood which issues from the heart of the son of the great world."
It is a water "which the son of the great world pours forth from
his body and heart, to be for us a true and natural Aqua
vitae." 32 Just as a spiritual water of grace and truth flows from
Christ's sacrifice, so the "divine water" is produced by a sacri-
ficial act in the Zosimos vision. It is mentioned in the ancient

spirit means nothing else but water). Theobaldus de Hoghelande, in the
Theatrum chemicum, I (1602), p. 196. Water is a "spiritus extractus," or a
"spiritus qui in ventre (corporis) occultus est et fiet aqua et corpus absque spiritu:
qui est spiritualis naturae" (spirit which is hidden in the belly [of the substance],
and water will be produced and a substance without spirit, which is of a spiritual
nature). J. D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata (1622), p. 150. This quotation shows
how closely spirit and water were associated in the mind of the alchemist.

"Sed aqua coelestis gloriosa soil, aes nostrum ac argentum nostrum, sericum
nostrum, totaque oratio nostra, quod est unum et idem scil. sapientia, quam Deus
obtulit, quibus voluit" (But the glorious celestial water, namely our copper and
our silver, our silk, and everything we talk about, is one and the same thing,
namely the Wisdom, which God has given to whomsoever he wished). "Con-
silium coniugii," in the Ars chemica (1566), p. 120.

28 Berthelot, La Chimie au moyen age, III, p. 53.

29 Mylius, pp. 121 and 123. For the blood-water-fire equation see George Ripley,
Opera omnia chemica (1649), PP- i%> *97> 295> 427.

30 Ripley, Opera, p. 62; Rosarium, p. 264. 31 Mylius, p. 42.
32 Khunrath, Von hylealischen . . . Chaos (1597), pp. 274^

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

treatise entitled "Isis to Horus," 33 where the angel Amnael
brings it to the prophetess in a drinking vessel. As Zosimos was
probably an adherent of the Poimandres sect, another thing to
be considered here is the krater which God filled with nous for
all those seeking em>ia. 34 But nous is identical with the alchem-
ical Mercurius. This is quite clear from the Ostanes quotation
in Zosimos, which says: "Go to the streams of the Nile and there
thou wilt find a stone which hath a spirit. Take and divide it,
thrust in thy hand and draw out its heart, for its soul is in its
heart/' Commenting on this, Zosimos remarks that "having a
spirit" is a metaphorical expression for the exhydrargyrosis, the
expulsion of the quicksilver. 35

356 During the first centuries after Christ the words nous and
pneuma were used indiscriminately, and the one could easily
stand for the other. Moreover the relation of Mercurius to
"spirit" is an extremely ancient astrological fact. Like Hermes,
Mercurius (or the planetary spirit Mercury) was a god of revela-
tion, who discloses the secret of the art to the adepts. The Liber
quartorum, which being of Harranite origin cannot be dated
later than the tenth century, says of Mercurius: "Ipse enim
aperit clausiones operum cum ingenio et intellectu suo" (For
he opens with his genius and understanding the locked [insolu-
ble] problems of the work). 36 He is also the "soul of the bodies/*
the "anima vitalis/' 37 and Ruland defines him as "spirit which
has become earth." 38 He is a spirit that penetrates into the
depths of the material world and transforms it. Like the nous,
he is symbolized by the serpent. In Michael Maier he points the
way to the earthly paradise. 39 Besides being identified with
Hermes Trismegistus, 40 he is also called the "mediator" 41 and,

33 Berthelot, A Ichimistes, I, xiii.

34 ibid., Ill, li> 8, and Hermetica, ed. Scott, I, p. 151.

35 Berthelot, Alchimistes, III, vi, 5.

36 Of the later authors I will mention only Joannes Christophorus Steeb, Coetum
sephiroticum (1679, p. 138): "Omnis intellectus acuminis auctor ... a coelesti
mercuric omnem ingeniorum vim provenire" (The author of all deeper under-
standing ... all the power of genius comes from the celestial Mercurius). For
the astrological connection see Bouche-Leclercq, L'Astrologie grecque, pp. 312,
321-23. 37 "Aurora consurgens." In Mylius (p. 533) he is a giver of life.

38 Lexicon. 3 Symbola,p. 592. 40 Ibid., p. 600.

4iRipley, Opera, Foreword, and in Khunrath's Chaos. In Plutarch, Mercurius

acts as a kind of world soul.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

as the Original Man, the "Hermaphroditic Adam." 42 From
numerous passages it is clear that Mercurius is as much a fire as
a water, both of which aptly characterize the nature of spirit. 43
357 Killing with the sword is a recurrent theme in alchemical
literature. The "philosophical egg" is divided with the sword,
and with it the "King" is transfixed and the dragon or "corpus"
dismembered, the latter being represented as the body of a man
whose head and limbs are cut off. 44 The lion's paws are likewise
cut off with the sword. For the alchemical sword brings about
the solutio or separatio of the elements, thereby restoring the
original condition of chaos, so that a new and more perfect body
can be produced by a new impressio formae^ or by a "new
imagination." The sword is therefore that which "kills and
vivifies," and the same is said of the permanent water or mercu-
rial water. Mercurius is the giver of life as well as the destroyer
of the old form. In ecclesiastical symbolism the sword which
comes out of the mouth of the Son of Man in the Book of Reve-
lation is, according to Hebrews 4:12, the Logos, the Word of
God, and hence Christ himself. This analogy did not escape the
notice of the alchemists, who were always struggling to give ex-
pression to their fantasies. Mercurius was their mediator and
saviour, their films macrocosmi (contrasted with Christ the filius
microcosmi}^ the solver and separator. So he too is a sword, for
he is a "penetrating spirit" ("more piercing than a two-edged
sword"!). Gerhard Dorn, an alchemist of the sixteenth century,
says that in our world the sword was changed into Christ our
Saviour. He comments as follows:

After a long interval of time the Deus Optimus Maximus immersed
himself in the innermost of his secrets, and he decided, out of the
compassion of his love as well as for the demands of justice, to take
the sword of wrath from the hand of the angel. And having hung the
sword on the tree, he substituted for it a golden trident, and thus
was the wrath of God changed into love. . . . When peace and

42 Gerhard Dorn, "Congeries Paracelsicae chemicae," in the Theatrum chemicum,

I, p. 589.

43 cf. my "The Spirit Mercurius" (Swiss edn., pp. yifL).

44 Illustration in "Splendor solis," Aureum vellus (1598).

45 Cf. Khunrath, Chaos, and Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (1604).

234

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

justice were united, the water of Grace flowed more abundantly
from above, and now it bathes the whole world. 46

46Dorn, "Speculativae philosophiae," in the Theatrum chemicum f I, pp. 284^.
The whole passage runs as follows:

"Post primam hominis inobedientiam, Dominus viam hanc amplissimam in
callem strictissimam difficilimamque (ut videtis) restrinxit, in cuius ostio collocavit
Cherubim angelum, ancipitem gladium manu tenentem, quo quidem arceret
omnes ab introitu felicis patriae: hinc deflectentes Adae filii propter peccatum
primi sui parentis, in sinistram latam sibimet viam construxerunt, quam evitastis.
Longo postea temporis intervallo D. O. M. secreta secretorum suorum introivit,
in quibus amore miserente, accusanteque iustitia, conclusit angelo gladium irae
suae de manibus eripere, cuius loco tridentem hamum substituit aureum, gladio
ad arborem suspense: & sic mutata est ira Dei in amorem, servata iustitia: quod
antequam fieret, fiuvius iste non erat, ut iam, in se collectus, sed ante lapsum per
totum orbem terrarum roris instar expansus aequaliter: post vero rediit unde
processerat tandem, ut pax & iustitia sunt osculatae se, descendit affluentius ab
alto manans aqua gratiae, totum nunc mundum alluens. In sinistram partem qui
deflectunt, partim suspensum in arbore gladium videntes, eiusque noscentes
historiam, quia mundo nimium sunt insiti, praetereunt: nonnulli videntes eius
efficaciam perquirere negligunt, alii nee vident, nee vidisse voluissent: hi recta
peregrinationem suam ad vallem dirigunt omnes, nisi per hamos resipiscentiae,
vel poenitentiae nonnulli retrahantur ad montem Sion. Nostro iarn saeculo (quod
gratiae est) mutatus est gladius in Christum salvatorem nostrum qui crucis
arborem pro peccatis nostris ascendit."

(After man's first disobedience the Lord straitened this wide road into a very
narrow and difficult path, as you see. At its entrance he placed an angel of the
Cherubim, holding in his hand a double-edged sword with which he was to keep
all from entering into Paradise. Turning from thence on account of the sin of
their first parents, the sons of Adam built for themselves a broad left-hand path:
this you have shunned. After a long interval of time the Deus Optimus Maximus
immersed himself in the innermost of his secrets, and he decided, out of the com-
passion of his love as well as for the demands of justice, to take the sword of
wrath from the hand of the angel. And having hung the sword on the tree, he
substituted for it a golden trident, and thus was the wrath of God changed into
love, and justice remained unimpaired. Previous to this, however, the river was
not collected into one as it is now, but before the Fall it was spread equally over
the whole world, like dew. But later it returned to the place of its origin. When
peace and justice were united, the water of Grace flowed more abundantly from
above, and now it bathes the whole world. Some of those who take the left-hand
path, on seeing the sword suspended from the tree, and knowing its history, pass
it by, because they are too entangled in the affairs of this world; some, on seeing
it, do not choose to inquire into its efficacy; others never see it and would not
wish to see it. All these continue their pilgrimage into the valley, except for those
who are drawn back to Mount Zion by the hook of repentance. Now in our age,
which is an age of grace, the sword has become Christ our Saviour, who ascended
the tree of the Cross for our sins.)

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

35 8 This passage, which might well have occurred in an author
like Rabanus Maurus or Honorius of Autun without doing
them discredit, actually occurs in a context which throws light
on certain esoteric alchemical doctrines, namely in a colloquy
between Animus, Anima, and Corpus. There we are told that
it is Sophia, the Sapientia, Scientia, or Philosophia of the alche-
mists, "de cuius fonte scaturiunt aquae" (from whose fount the
waters gush forth). This Wisdom is the nous that lies hidden
and bound in matter, the "serpens mercurialis" or "humidum
radicale" that manifests itself in the "viventis aquae fluvius de
mentis apice" (stream of living water from the summit of the
mountain). 47 That is the water of grace, the "permanent" and
"divine" water which "now bathes the whole world." The ap-
parent transformation of the God of the Old Testament into the
God of the New is in reality the transformation of the deus
absconditus (i.e., the natura abscondita) into the medicina
catholica of alchemical wisdom. 48

359 The divisive and separative function of the sword, which is
of such importance in alchemy, is prefigured in the flaming
sword of the angel that separated our first parents from paradise.
Separation by a sword is a theme that can also be found in the
Gnosis of the Ophites: the earthly cosmos is surrounded by a
ring of fire which at the same time encloses paradise. But para-
dise and the ring of fire are separated by the "flaming sword." 49
An important interpretation of this flaming sword is given in
Simon Magus: 50 there is an incorruptible essence potentially
present in every human being, the divine pneuma "which is
stationed above and below in the stream of water." Simon says
of this pneuma: "I and thou, thou before me. I, who am after
thee." It is a force "that generates itself, that causes itself to
grow; it is its own mother, sister, bride, daughter; its own son,
mother, father; a unity, a root of the whole." It is the very

47 Another remark of Dorn's points in the same direction: "The sword was
suspended from a tree over the bank of the river" (p. 288).

48 A few pages later Dorn himself remarks: "Scitote, fratres, omnia quae superius
dicta sunt et dicentur in posterum, intelligi posse de praeparationibus alchemicis"
(Know, brothers, that everything which has been said above and everything
which will be said in what follows can also be understood of the alchemical
preparations).

4 Leisegang, Die Gnosis, pp. 17 if.

50 The passage which follows occurs in Hippolytus, Elenchos, vi, pp. 4!

236

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

ground of existence, the procreative urge, which is of fiery
origin. Fire is related to blood, which "is fashioned warm and
ruddy like fire." Blood turns into semen in men, and in women
into milk. This "turning" is interpreted as "the flaming sword
which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." 51
The operative principle in semen and milk turns into mother
and father. The tree of life is guarded by the turning (i.e., trans-
forming) sword, and this is the "seventh power" which begets
itself. "For if the flaming sword turned not, then would that fair
Tree be destroyed, and perish utterly; but if it turneth into
semen and milk, and there be added the Logos and the place of
the Lord where the Logos is begotten, he who dwelleth po-
tentially in the semen and milk shall grow to full stature from
the littlest spark, and shall increase and become a power bound-
less and immutable, like to an unchanging Aeon, which suffer-
eth no more change until measureless eternity/' 52 It is clear
from these remarkable statements of Hippolytus concerning
the teachings of Simon Magus that the sword is very much more
than an instrument which divides; it is itself the force which
"turns" from something infinitesimally small into the infinitely
great: from water, fire, and blood it becomes the limitless aeon.
What it means is the transformation of the vital spirit in man
into the Divine. The natural being becomes the divine pneuma,
as in the vision of Zosimos. Simon's description of the creative
pneuma, the true arcane substance, corresponds in every detail
to the uroboros or serpens mercurialis of the Latinists. It too is
its own father, mother, son, daughter, brother, and sister from
the earliest beginnings of alchemy right down to the end. 53 It
begets and sacrifices itself and is its own instrument of sacrifice,
for it is a symbol of the deadly and life-giving water. 54
360 Simon's ideas also throw a significant light on the above-
quoted passage from Dorn, where the sword of wrath is trans-
formed into Christ. Were it not that the philosophemes of Hip-
polytus were first discovered in the nineteenth century, on
Mount Athos, one might almost suppose that Dorn had made
use of them. There are numerous other symbols in alchemy
whose origin is so doubtful that one does not know whether to

51 Genesis 3 : 24. 52 Leisegang, p. 80.

53 That is why it is called "Hermaphroditus."

54 One of its symbols is the scorpion, which stings itself to death.

237

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

attribute them to tradition, or to a study of the heresiologists,
or to spontaneous revival. 55

The sword as the "proper" instrument of sacrifice occurs
again in the old treatise entitled "Consilium coniugii de massa
solis et lunae." This says: "Both must be killed with their own
sword" ("both" referring to Sol and Luna). 56 In the still older
"Tractatus Micreris," 57 dating perhaps from the twelfth cen-
tury, we find the "fiery sword" in a quotation from Ostanes:
"The great Astanus [Ostanes] said: Take an egg, pierce it with
the fiery sword, and separate its soul from its body." 58 Here
the sword is something that divides body and soul, correspond-
ing to the division between heaven and earth, the ring of fire
and paradise, or paradise and the first parents. In an equally old
treatise, the "Allegoriae sapientum . . . supra librum Turbae,"
there is even mention of a sacrificial rite: "Take a fowl [volatile],
cut off its head with the fiery sword, then pluck out its feathers,
separate the limbs, and cook over a charcoal fire till it becomes
of one colour." 59 Here we have a decapitation with the fiery
sword, then a "clipping," or more accurately a "plucking," and
finally a "cooking." The cock, which is probably what is meant
here, is simply called "volatile," a fowl or winged creature, and
this is a common term for spirit, but a spirit still nature-bound
and imperfect, and in need of improvement. In another old
treatise, with the very similar title "Allegoriae super librum
Turbae," 60 we find the following supplementary variants: "Kill
the mother [the prima materia], tearing off her hands and feet."
"Take a viper . . . cut off its head and tail." "Take a cock . . .
and pluck it alive." "Take a man, shave him, and drag him over
the stone [i.e., dry him on the hot stone] till his body dies."
"Take the glass vessel containing bridegroom and bride, throw

55 So far I have come across only two authors who admit to having read any
heresiologists. The silence of the alchemists in this matter is nothing to wonder
at, since the mere proximity to heresy would have put them in danger of their
lives. Thus even 90 years after the death of Trithemius of Spanheim, who was
supposed to have been the teacher of Paracelsus, the abbot Sigismund of Seon
had to compose a moving defence in which he endeavoured to acquit Trithemius
of the charge of heresy. Cf. Trithemius sui-ipsius vindex (1616).
$Ars chemica, p. 259. Printed in Manget, Bibliotheca chemica curiosa (1702), II,
pp. 235 ff. 57 "Micreris" is probably a corruption of "Mercurius."

58 Theatr. chem.j V (1622), p. 103.

59 Ibid., p. 68. 60 Artis auriferae, I, pp. 139!

238

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

them into the furnace, and roast them for three days, and they
will be two in one flesh." "Take the white man from the
vessel." 61

362 One is probably right in assuming that these recipes are in-
structions for magical sacrifices, not unlike the Greek magic
papyri. 62 As an example of the latter I will give the recipe from
the Mimaut Papyrus (li. sfL): "Take a tomcat and make an
Osiris of him 63 [by immersing] his body in water. And when
you proceed to suffocate him, talk into his back." Another ex-
ample from the same papyrus (li. 425): "Take a hoopoe, tear out
its heart, pierce it with a reed, then cut it up and throw it into
Attic honey."

3 6 3 Such sacrifices really were made for the purpose of summon-
ing up the paredroSj the familiar spirit. That this sort of thing
was practised, or at any rate recommended, by the alchemists is
clear from the "Liber Platonis quartorum," where it speaks of
the "oblationes et sacrificia" offered to the planetary demon.
A deeper and more sombre note is struck in the following pas-
sage, which I give in the original (and generally very corrupt)
text: 64

Vas . . . oportet esse rotundae figurae: Ut sit artifex hums
mutator firmament! et testae capitis, ut cum sit res, qua indigemus,
res simplex, habens partes similes, necesse est ipsius generationem,
et in corpore habente similes partibus . . . proiicies ex testa capitis,
videlicet capitis element! hominis et massetur totum cum urina . . ,

(The vessel . . . must be round in shape. Thus the artifex must
be the transformer of this firmament and of the brain-pan, just as the
thing for which we seek is a simple thing having uniform parts. It is
therefore necessary that you should generate it in a body [i.e., a
vessel] of uniform parts . . . from the brain-pan, that is, from the
head of the element Man, and that the whole should be macerated
with urine . . .)

3% One asks oneself how literally this recipe is to be taken. 65
The following story from the "Ghaya al-hakim" is exceedingly
enlightening in this connection:

365 The Jacobite patriarch Dionysius I set it on record that in

si Ibid., pp. 151, 140, 140, 139, 151, 151, resp.

62 Papyri Graecae Magicae, trans, and ed. by Karl Preisendanz.

63 b-jrodtua-ts = 'sacrifice/ 64 Theatr. chem., V, p. 153.
65 See also pp. 127, 128, 130, and 149 of the same work.

239

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

the year 765, a man who was destined for the sacrifice, on be-
holding the bloody head of his predecessor, was so terrified that
he took flight and lodged a complaint with Abbas, the prefect of
Mesopotamia, against the priests of Harran, who were after-
wards severely punished. The story goes on to say that in 830
the Caliph Mamun told the Harranite envoys: "You are without
doubt the people of the head, who were dealt with by my father
Rashid." We learn from the "Ghaya" that a fair-haired man with
dark-blue eyes was lured into a chamber of the temple, where
he was immersed in a great jar filled with sesame oil. Only his
head was left sticking out. There he remained for forty days,
and during this time was fed on nothing but figs soaked in
sesame oil. He was not given a drop of water to drink. As a re-
sult of this treatment his body became as soft as wax. The
prisoner was repeatedly fumigated with incense, and magical
formulae were pronounced over him. Eventually his head was
torn off at the neck, the body remaining in the oil. The head
was then placed in a niche on the ashes of burnt olives, and was
packed round with cotton wool. More incense was burned be-
fore it, and the head would thereupon predict famines or good
harvests, changes of dynasty, and other future events. Its eyes
could see, though the lids did not move. It also revealed to
people their inmost thoughts, and scientific and technical ques-
tions were likewise addressed to it. 66

366 Even though it is possible that the real head was, in later
times, replaced by a dummy, the whole idea of this ceremony,
particularly when taken in conjunction with the above passage
from the "Liber quartorum," seems to point to an original
human sacrifice. The idea of a mysterious head is, however, con-
siderably older than the school of Harran. As far back as Zosimos
we find the philosophers described as "children of the golden
head," and we also encounter the "round element," which
Zosimos says is the letter omega (o). This symbol may well be
interpreted as the head, since the "Liber quartorum" also asso-
ciates the round vessel with the head. Zosimos, moreover, refers
on several occasions to the "whitest stone, which is in the
head." 67 Probably all these ideas go back to the severed head

66 Dozy and de Goeje, p. 365.

67 'Top iraw \evKtnarov \Woy rbv &Ytck(f>a,\ov." Berthelot, Alchimistes, III, xxix, 4. Cf.
also I, iii, i and III, ii. i.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

of Osiris, which crossed the sea and was therefore associated
with the idea of resurrection. The "head of Osiris" also plays an
important part in medieval alchemy.

367 In this connection we might mention the legend that was
current about Gerbert of Rheims, afterwards Pope Sylvester II
(d. 1003). He was believed to have possessed a golden head which
spoke to him in oracles. Gerbert was one of the greatest savants
of his time, and well known as a transmitter of Arabic science. 68
Can it be that the translation of the "Liber quartorum," which
is of Harranite origin, goes back to this author? Unfortunately
there is little prospect of our being able to prove this.

3 68 It has been conjectured that the Harranite oracle head may
be connected with the ancient Hebrew teraphim. Rabbinic
tradition considers the teraphim to have been originally either
the decapitated head or skull of a human being, or else a dummy
head. 69 The Jews had teraphim about the house as a sort of lares
and penates (who were plural spirits, like the Cabiri). The idea
that they were heads goes back to I Samuel 19: igf., which de-
scribes how Michal, David's wife, put the teraphim in David's
bed in order to deceive the messengers of Saul, who wanted to
kill him. "Then Michal took an image and laid it on the bed
and put a pillow of goats' hair at its head, and covered it with
the clothes (RSV)." The "pillow of goats' hair" is linguistically
obscure and has even been interpreted as meaning that the
teraphim were goats. But it may also mean something woven or
plaited out of goats' hair, like a wig, and this would fit in better
with the picture of a man lying in bed. Further evidence for this
comes from a legend in a collection of midrashim from the
twelfth century, printed in Bin Gorion's Die Sagen der Juden.
There it is said:

The teraphim were idols, and they were made in the following way,
The head of a man, who had to be a first-born, was cut off and the
hair plucked out. The head was then sprinkled with salt and
anointed with oil. Afterwards a little plaque, of copper or gold, was
inscribed with the name of an idol and placed under the tongue of
the decapitated head. The head was set up in a room, candles were
lit before it, and the people made obeisance. And if any man fell

68 Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science f I, p. 705.

69 Jewish Encyclopaedia, XII, s.v. "Teraphim," pp. io8f.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

down before it, the head began to speak, and answered all questions
that were addressed to it. 70

369 This is an obvious parallel to the Harranite ritual with the
head. The tearing out of the hair seems significant, since it is
an equivalent of scalping or shearing, and is thus a rebirth
mystery. It is conceivable that in later times the bald skull was
covered with a wig for a rite of renewal, as is also reported from

. r . . .

37 It seems probable that this magical procedure is of primitive
origin. I am indebted to the South African writer, Laurens van
der Post, for the following report from a lecture which he gave
in Zurich in 1951:

The tribe in question was an offshoot of the great Swazi nation
a Bantu people. When, some years ago, the old chief died, he was
succeeded by his son, a young man of weak character. He soon proved
to be so unsatisfactory a chief that his uncles called a meeting of
the tribal elders. They decided that something must be done to
strengthen their chief, so they consulted the witch doctors. The witch
doctors treated him with a medicine which proved ineffective.
Another meeting was held and the witch doctors were asked to use
the strongest medicine of all on the chief because the situation was
becoming desperate. A half brother of the chief, a boy of' twelve,
was chosen to provide the material for the medicine.

One afternoon a sorcerer went up to the boy, who was tending
cattle, and engaged him in conversation. Then, emptying some
powder from a horn into his hand, he took a reed and blew the
powder into the ears and nostrils of the boy. A witness told me that
the lad thereupon began to sway like a drunken person and sank to
the ground shivering. He was then taken to the river bed and tied
to the roots of a tree. More powder was sprinkled round about, the
sorcerer saying: "This person will no longer eat food but only earth
and roots."

The boy was kept in the river bed for nine months. Some people
say a cage was made and put into the stream, with the boy inside it,
for hours on end, so that the water should flow over him and make
his skin white. Others reported seeing him crawling about in the
river bed on his hands and knees. But all were so frightened that,
although there was a mission school only one hundred yards away,

70 Josef bin Gorion, Die Sagen der Juden, p. 325. I am indebted to Dr. Riwkah
Scharf for drawing my attention to this passage.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

no one except those directly concerned in the ritual would go near
him. All are agreed that at the end of nine months this fat, normal,
healthy boy was like an animal and quite white-skinned. One woman
said, "His eyes were white and the whole of his body was white as
white paper."

On the evening that the boy was to be killed a veteran witch doc-
tor was summoned to the chief's kraal and asked to consult the tribal
spirits. This he did in the cattle kraal, and after selecting an animal
for slaughter he retired to the chiefs hut. There the witch doctor
was handed parts of the dead boy's body: first the head in a sack,
then a thumb and a toe. He cut off the nose and ears and lips, mixed
them with medicine, and cooked them over a fire in a broken clay
pot. He stuck two spears on either side of the pot. Then those pres-
enttwelve in all including the weak chiefleaned over the pot and
deeply inhaled the steam. All save the boy's mother dipped their
fingers in the pot and licked them. She inhaled but refused to dip
her fingers in the pot. The rest of the body the witch doctor mixed
into a kind of bread for doctoring the tribe's crops.

37 l Although this magical rite is not actually a "head mystery,"
it has several things in common with the practices previously
mentioned. The body is macerated and transformed by long
immersion in water. The victim is killed, and the salient por-
tions of the head form the main ingredient of the "strengthen-
ing" medicine which was concocted for the chief and his im-
mediate circle. The body is kneaded into a sort of bread, and
this is obviously thought of as a strengthening medicine for the
tribe's crops as well. The rite is a transformation process, a sort
of rebirth after nine months of incubation in the water. Laurens
van der Post thinks that the purpose of the "whitening" 71 was
to assimilate the mana of the white man, who has the political
power. I agree with this view, and would add that painting with
white clay often signifies transformation into ancestral spirits,
in the same way as the neophytes are made invisible in the
Nandi territory, in Kenya, where they walk about in portable,
cone-shaped grass huts and demonstrate their invisibility to
everyone.

37* Skull worship is widespread among primitives. In Melanesia
and Polynesia it is chiefly the skulls of the ancestors that are
worshipped, because they establish connections with the spirits

71 Cf. the alchemical albedo and homo albus.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

or serve as tutelary deities, like the head of Osiris in Egypt.
Skulls also play a considerable role as sacred relics. It would lead
us too far to go into this primitive skull worship, so I must refer
the reader to the literature. 72 I would only like to point out
that the cut-off ears, nose, and mouth can represent the head
as parts that stand for the whole. There are numerous examples
of this. Equally, the head or its parts (brain, etc.) can act as
magical food or as a means for increasing the fertility of the
land.

373 It is of special significance for the alchemical tradition that
the oracle head was also known in Greece. Aelian 73 reports that
Cleomenes of Sparta had the head of his friend Archonides pre-
served in a jar of honey, and that he consulted it as an oracle. The
same was said of the head of Orpheus. Onians 74 rightly empha-
sizes the fact that the ^u%^ whose seat was in the head, corre-
sponds to the modern "unconscious," and that at that stage of
development consciousness was identified with 6vy,6s (breath)
and <j>pkv$ (lungs), and was localized in the chest or heart region.
Hence Pindar's expression for the soul alWos ddu\ov (image of
Aion)is extraordinarily apt, for the collective unconscious not
only imparts "oracles" but forever represents the microcosm
(i.e., the form of a physical man mirroring the Cosmos).

374 There is no evidence to show that any of the parallels we
have drawn are historically connected with the Zosimos visions.
It seems rather to be a case partly of parallel traditions (trans-
mitted, perhaps, chiefly through the Harran school), and partly
of spontaneous fantasies arising from the same archetypal back-
ground from which the traditions were derived in the first place.
As my examples have shown, the imagery of the Zosimos visions,
however strange it may be, is by no means isolated, but is inter-
woven with older ideas some of which were certainly, and others
quite possibly, known to Zosimos, as well as with parallels of
uncertain date which continued to mould the speculations of
the alchemists for many centuries to come. Religious thought
in the early Christian era was not completely cut off from all
contact with these conceptions; it was in fact influenced by them,
and in turn it fertilized the minds of the natural philosophers
during later centuries. Towards the end of the sixteenth century

72 Hastings, VI, pp. 535^ 73 Varia historia, XII, 8.

74 Onians, The Origins of European Thought, pp. ioifL

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

the alchemical opus was even represented in the form of a Mass.
The author of this tour de force was the Hungarian alchemist,
Melchior Cibinensis. I have elaborated this parallel in my book
Psychology and Alchemy. 75

375 In the visions of Zosimos, the Hiereus who is transformed
into pneuma represents the transformative principle at work in
nature and the harmony of opposing forces. Chinese philosophy
formulated this process as the enantiodromian interplay of Yin
and Yang. 76 But the curious personifications and symbols char-
acteristic not only of these visions but of alchemical literature
in general show in the plainest possible terms that we are deal-
ing with a psychic process that takes place mainly in the uncon-
scious and therefore can come into consciousness only in the
form of a dream or vision. At that time and until very much
later no one had any idea of the unconscious; consequently all
unconscious contents were projected into the object, or rather
were found in nature as apparent objects or properties of matter
and were not recognized as purely internal psychic events. There
is some evidence that Zosimos was well aware of the spiritual
or mystical side of his art, but he believed that what he was con-
cerned with was a spirit that dwelt in natural objects, and not
something that came from the human psyche. It remained for
modern science to despiritualize nature through its so-called
objective knowledge of matter. All anthropomorphic projections
were withdrawn from the object one after another, with a two-
fold result: firstly man's mystical identity with nature 77 was
curtailed as never before, and secondly the projections falling
back into the human soul caused such a terrific activation of
the unconscious that in modern times man was compelled to
postulate the existence of an unconscious psyche. The first be-
ginnings of this can be seen in Leibniz and Kant, and then, with
mounting intensity, in Schelling, Carus, and von Hartmann,
until finally modern psychology discarded the last metaphysical
claims of the philosopher-psychologists and restricted the idea
of the psyche's existence to the psychological statement, in other

75 Pars. 480-89.

76 The classical example being The I Ching or Book of Changes.

77 Mystical or unconscious identity occurs in every case of projection, because the
content projected upon the extraneous object creates an apparent relationship
between it and the subject.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

words, to its phenomenology. So far as the dramatic course of
the Mass represents the death, sacrifice and resurrection of a
god and the inclusion and active participation of the priest and
congregation, its phenomenology may legitimately be brought
into line with other fundamentally similar, though more primi-
tive, religious customs. This always involves the risk that sensi-
tive people will find it unpleasant when "small things are com-
pared with great." In fairness to the primitive psyche, however,
I would like to emphasize that the "holy dread" of civilized man
differs but little from the awe of the primitive, and that the God
who is present and active in the mystery is a mystery for both.
No matter how crass the outward differences, the similarity or
equivalence of meaning should not be overlooked.

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4. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MASS

I. GENERAL REMARKS ON THE SACRIFICE

376 Whereas I kept to the Church's interpretation when dis-
cussing the transformation rite in section 2, in the present
section I shall treat this interpretation as a symbol Such a pro-
cedure does not imply any evaluation of the content of religious
belief. Scientific criticism must, of course, adhere to the view
that when something is held as an opinion, thought to be true,
or believed, it does not posit the existence of any real fact other
than a psychological one. But that does not mean that a mere
nothing has been produced. Rather, expression has been given
to the psychic reality underlying the statement of the belief or
rite as its empirical basis. When psychology "explains" a state-
ment of this kind, it does not, in the first place, deprive the
object of this statement of any reality on the contrary, it is
granted a psychic reality and in the second place the intended
metaphysical statement is not, on that account, turned into an
hypostasis, since it was never anything more than a psychic
phenomenon. Its specifically "metaphysical" coloration indi-
cates that its object is beyond the reach of human perception
and understanding except in its psychic mode of manifestation,
and therefore cannot be judged. But every science reaches its
end in the unknowable. Yet it would not be a science at all if it

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

regarded its temporary limitations as definitive and denied the
existence of anything outside them. No science can consider its
hypotheses to be the final truth.

377 The psychological explanation and the metaphysical state-
ment do not contradict one another any more than, shall we
say, the physicist's explanation of matter contradicts the as yet
unknown or unknowable nature of matter. The very existence
of a belief has in itself the reality of a psychic fact. Just what
we posit by the concept "psyche" is simply unknowable, for
psychology is in the unfortunate position where the observer
and the observed are ultimately identical. Psychology has no
Archimedean point outside, since all perception is of a psychic
nature and we have only indirect knowledge of what is non-
psychic.

378 The ritual event that takes place in the Mass has a dual
aspect, human and divine. From the human point of view, gifts
are offered to God at the altar, signifying at the same time the
self-oblation of the priest and the congregation. The ritual act
consecrates both the gifts and the givers. It commemorates and
represents the Last Supper which our Lord took with his
disciples, the whole Incarnation, Passion, death, and resurrec-
tion of Christ. But from the divine point of view this anthropo-
morphic action is only the outer shell or husk in which what is
really happening is not a human action at all but a divine event.
For an instant the life of Christ, eternally existent outside time,
becomes visible and is unfolded in temporal succession, but in
condensed form, in the sacred action: Christ incarnates as a man
under the aspect of the offered substances, he suffers, is killed,
is laid in the sepulchre, breaks the power of the underworld,
and rises again in glory. In the utterance of the words of conse-
cration the Godhead intervenes, Itself acting and truly present,
and thus proclaims that the central event in the Mass is Its act
of grace, in which the priest has only the significance of a min-
ister. The same applies to the congregation and the offered sub-
stances: they are all ministering causes of the sacred event. The
presence of the Godhead binds all parts of the sacrificial act into
a mystical unity, so that it is God himself who offers himself as
a sacrifice in the substances, in the priest, and in the congrega-
tion, and who, in the human form of the Son, offers himself as
an atonement to the Father.

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379 Although this act is an eternal happening taking place within
the divinity, man is nevertheless included in it as an essential
component, firstly because God clothes himself in our human
nature, and secondly because he needs the ministering co-opera-
tion of the priest and congregation, and even the material sub-
stances of bread and wine which have a special significance for
man. Although God the Father is of one nature with God the
Son, he appears in time on the one hand as the eternal Father
and on the other hand as a man with limited earthly existence.
Mankind as a whole is included in God's human nature, which
is why man is also included in the sacrificial act. Just as, in the
sacrificial act, God is both agens and patiens, so too is man
according to his limited capacity. The causa efficiens of the
transubstantiation is a spontaneous act of God's grace. Ecclesi-
astical doctrine insists on this view and even tends to attribute
the preparatory action of the priest, indeed the very existence
of the rite, to divine prompting, 1 rather than to slothful human
nature with its load of original sin. This view is of the utmost
importance for a psychological understanding of the Mass.
Wherever the magical aspect of a rite tends to prevail, it brings
the rite nearer to satisfying the individual ego's blind greed for
power, and thus breaks up the mystical body of the Church into
separate units. Where, on the other hand, the rite is conceived
as the action of God himself, the human participants have only
an instrumental or " ministering" significance. The Church's
view therefore presupposes the following psychological situa-
tion: human consciousness (represented by the priest and con-
gregation) is confronted with an autonomous event which,
taking place on a "divine" and "timeless" plane transcending
consciousness, is in no way dependent on human action, but
which impels man to act by seizing upon him as an instrument
and making him the exponent of a "divine" happening. In the
ritual action man places himself at the disposal of an autono-
mous and "eternal" agency operating outside the categories of
human consciousness si parva licet componere magnisin
much the same way that a good actor does not merely represent
the drama, but allows himself to be overpowered by the genius
of the dramatist. The beauty of the ritual action is one of its

1 John 6 : 44: "No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me
draw him."

849

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

essential properties, for man has not served God rightly unless
he has also served him in beauty. Therefore the rite has no prac-
tical utility, for that would be making it serve a purpose a
purely human category. But everything divine is an end-in-itself ,
perhaps the only legitimate end-in-itself we know. How some-
thing eternal can "act" at all is a question we had better not
touch, for it is simply unanswerable. Since man, in the action of
the Mass, is a tool (though a tool of his own free will), he is not
in a position to know anything about the hand which guides
him. The hammer cannot discover within itself the power which
makes it strike. It is something outside, something autonomous,
which seizes and moves him. What happens in the consecration
is essentially a miracle, and is meant to be so, for otherwise we
should have to consider whether we were not conjuring up God
by magic, or else lose ourselves in philosophical wonder how
anything eternal can act at all, since action is a process in time
with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is necessary that the
transubstantiation should be a cause of wonder and a miracle
which man can in no wise comprehend. It is a mysterium in the
sense of a dp&pevov and Seucvbii&ov , a secret that is acted and dis-
played. The ordinary man is not conscious of anything in him-
self that would cause him to perform a "mystery." He can only
do so if and when it seizes upon him. This seizure, or rather the
sensed or presumed existence of a power outside consciousness
which seizes him, is the miracle par excellence, really and truly
a miracle when one considers what is being represented. What
in the world could induce us to represent an absolute impossi-
bility? What is it that for thousands of years has wrung from
man the greatest spiritual effort, the loveliest works of art, the
profoundest devotion, the most heroic self-sacrifice, and the most
exacting service? What else but a miracle? It is a miracle which
is not man's to command; for as soon as he tries to work it him-
self, or as soon as he philosophizes about it and tries to compre-
hend it intellectually, the bird is flown. A miracle is something
that arouses man's wonder precisely because it seems inexplica-
ble. And indeed, from what we know of human nature we
could never explain why men are constrained to such statements
and to such beliefs. (I am thinking here of the impossible state-
ments made by all religions.) There must be some compelling
reason for this, even though it is not to be found in ordinary

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

experience. The very absurdity and impossibility of the state-
ments vouches for the existence of this reason. That is the real
ground for belief, as was formulated most brilliantly in Ter-
tullian's "prorsus credibile, quia ineptum." 2 An improbable
opinion has to submit sooner or later to correction. But the
statements of religion are the most improbable of all and yet
they persist for thousands of years. 3 Their wholly unexpected
vitality proves the existence of a sufficient cause which has so
far eluded scientific investigation. I can, as a psychologist, only
draw attention to this fact and emphasize my belief that there
are no facile "nothing but" explanations for psychic phenomena
of this kind.

The dual aspect of the Mass finds expression not only in the
contrast between human and divine action, but also in the dual
aspect of God and the God-man, who, although they are by
nature a unity, nevertheless represent a duality in the ritual
drama. Without this "dichotomy of God," if I may use such a
term, the whole act of sacrifice would be inconceivable and
would lack actuality. According to the Christian view God has
never ceased to be God, not even when he appeared in human
form in the temporal order. The Christ of the Johannine gospel
declares: "I and my Father are one. He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father" (John 10:30, 14:9). And yet on the Cross
Christ cries out: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?" This contradiction must exist if the formula "very God
and very man" is psychologically true. And if it is true, then
the different sayings of Christ are in no sense a contradiction.
Being "very man" means being at an extreme remove and
utterly different from God. "De profundis clamavi ad te,
Domine" this cry demonstrates both, the remoteness and the
nearness, the outermost darkness and the dazzling spark of the
Divine. God in his humanity is presumably so far from himself
that he has to seek himself through absolute self-surrender. And
where would God's wholeness be if he could not be the "wholly

2 "Et mortuus est Dei films, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus
resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est" (And the Son of God is dead, which is
to be believed because it is absurd. And buried He rose again, which is certain
because it is impossible). Migne, PX V vol. 2, col. 751.

3 The audacity of Tertullian's argument is undeniable, and so is its danger, but
that does not detract from its psychological truth.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

other"? Accordingly it is with some psychological justification,
so it seems to me, that when the Gnostic Nous fell into the
power of Physis he assumed the dark chthonic form of the
serpent, and the Manichaean "Original Man" in the same situa-
tion actually took on the qualities of the Evil One. In Tibetan
Buddhism all gods without exception have a peaceful and a
wrathful aspect, for they reign over all the realms of being. The
dichotomy of God into divinity and humanity and his return
to himself in the sacrificial act hold out the comforting doctrine
that in man's own darkness there is hidden a light that shall
once again return to its source, and that this light actually
wanted to descend into the darkness in order to deliver the
Enchained One who languishes there, and lead him to light
everlasting. All this belongs to the stock of pre-Christian ideas,
being none other than the doctrine of the "Man of Light," the
Anthropos or Original Man, which the sayings of Christ in the
gospels assume to be common knowledge.

II. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF SACRIFICE

(a) The Sacrificial Gifts

Kramp, in his book on the Roman liturgy, makes the follow-
ing observations about the substances symbolizing the sacrifice:

Now bread and wine are not only the ordinary means of subsistence
for a large portion of humanity, they are also to be had all over the
earth (which is of the greatest significance as regards the world-
wide spread of Christianity). Further, the two together constitute
the perfect food of man, who needs both solid and liquid sustenance.
Because they can be so regarded as the typical food of man, they
are best fitted to serve as a symbol of human life and human per-
sonality, a fact which throws significant light on the gift-symbol. 4

It is not immediately apparent why precisely bread and wine
should be a "symbol of human life and human personality."
This interpretation looks very like a conclusion a posteriori from
the special meaning which attaches to these substances in the
Mass. In that case the meaning would be due to the liturgy and
not to the substances themselves, for no one could imagine that

4 Die Opferanschauungen, p. 55.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

bread and wine, in themselves, signify human life or human
personality. But, in so far as bread and wine are important
products of culture, they do express a vital human striving. They
represent a definite cultural achievement which is the fruit of
attention, patience, industry, devotion, and laborious toil. The
words ''our daily bread" express man's anxious care for his ex-
istence. By producing bread he makes his life secure. But in so
far as he "does not live by bread alone," bread is fittingly ac-
companied by wine, whose cultivation has always demanded a
special degree of attention and much painstaking work. Wine,
therefore, is equally an expression of cultural achievement.
Where wheat and the vine are cultivated, civilized life prevails.
But where agriculture and vine-growing do not exist, there is
only the uncivilized life of nomads and hunters.

3 8 3 So in offering bread and wine man is in the first instance
offering up the products of his culture, the best, as it were, that
human industry produces. But the "best" can be produced only
by the best in man, by his conscientiousness and devotion. Cul-
tural products can therefore easily stand for the psychological
conditions of their production, that is, for those human virtues
which alone make man capable of civilization. 5

384 As to the special nature of these substances, bread is un-
doubtedly a food. There is a popular saying that wine "fortifies,"
though not in the same sense as food "sustains." It stimulates
and "makes glad the heart of man" by virtue of a certain volatile
substance which has always been called "spirit." It is thus, unlike
innocuous water, an "inspiriting" drink, for a spirit or god
dwells within it and produces the ecstasy of intoxication. The
wine miracle at Cana was the same as the miracle in the temple
of Dionysus, and it is profoundly significant that, on the Da-
mascus Chalice, Christ is enthroned among vine tendrils like
Dionysus himself. 6 Bread therefore represents the physical means
of subsistence, and wine the spiritual. The offering up of bread
and wine is the offering of both the physical and the spiritual
fruits of civilization.

5 My reason for saying this is that every symbol has an objective and a subjective
or psychic origin, so that it can be interpreted on the "objective level" as well
as on the "subjective level." This is a consideration of some importance in dream-
analysis. Cf. Psychological Types, Defs. 38 and 50.

6 Further material in Eisler, Orpheus the Fisher f pp. 28of.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

385 But, however sensible he was of the care and labour lavished
upon them, man could hardly fail to observe that these cul-
tivated plants grew and flourished according to an inner law of
their own, and that there was a power at work in them which
he compared to his own life breath or vital spirit. Frazer has
called this principle, not unjustly, the "corn spirit." Human
initiative and toil are certainly necessary, but even more neces-
sary, in the eyes of primitive man, is the correct and careful
performance of the ceremonies which sustain, strengthen, and
propitiate the vegetation numen. 7 Grain and wine therefore
have something in the nature of a soul, a specific life principle
which makes them appropriate symbols not only of man's cul-
tural achievements, but also of the seasonally dying and re-
surgent god who is their life spirit. Symbols are never simple-
only signs and allegories are simple. The symbol always covers a
complicated situation which is so far beyond the grasp of lan-
guage that it cannot be expressed at all in any unambiguous
manner. 8 Thus the grain and wine symbols have a fourfold layer
of meaning:

1. as agricultural products;

2. as products requiring special processing (bread from
grain, wine from grapes);

3. as expressions of psychological achievement (work, indus-
try, patience, devotion, etc.) and of human vitality in general;

4. as manifestations of mana or of the vegetation daemon.

386 From this list it can easily be seen that a symbol is needed to
sum up such a complicated physical and psychic situation. The
simplest symbolical formula for this is "bread and wine," giving
these words the original complex significance which they have
always had for tillers of the soil.

(b) The Sacrifice

3 8 7 It is clear from the foregoing that the sacrificial gift is sym-
bolic, and that it embraces everything which is expressed by the
symbol, namely the physical product, the processed substance,
the psychological achievement, and the autonomous, daemonic
life principle of cultivated plants. The value of the gift is en-

7 Similarly, in hunting, the rites d f entree are more important than the hunt itself,
for on these rites the success of the hunt depends.

8 Cf. Psychological Types, Def. 51.

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hanced when it is the best or the first fruits. Since bread and
wine are the best that agriculture can offer, they are by the same
token man's best endeavour. In addition, bread symbolizes the
visible manifestation of the divine numen which dies and rises
again, and wine the presence of a pneuma which promises in-
toxication and ecstasy. 9 The classical world thought of this
pneuma as Dionysus, particularly the suffering Dionysus Za-
greus, whose divine substance is distributed throughout the
whole of nature. In short, what is sacrificed under the forms of
bread and wine is nature, man, and God, all combined in the
unity of the symbolic gift.

388 The offering of so significant a gift at once raises the ques-
tion: Does it lie within man's power to offer such a gift at all?
Is he psychologically competent to do so? The Church says no,
since she maintains that the sacrificing priest is Christ himself.
But, since man is included in the gift included, as we have seen,
twice over the Church also says yes, though with qualifications.
On the side of the sacrificer there is an equally complicated, sym-
bolic state of affairs, for the symbol is Christ himself, who is both
the sacrificer and the sacrificed. This symbol likewise has several
layers of meaning which I shall proceed to sort out in what
follows.

389 The act of making a sacrifice consists in the first place in giv-
ing something which belongs to me. Everything which belongs
to me bears the stamp of "mineness," that is, it has a subtle
identity with my ego. This is vividly expressed in certain primi-
tive languages, where the suffix of animation is added to an
object a canoe, for instance when it belongs to me, but not
when it belongs to somebody else. The affinity which all the
things bearing the stamp of "mineness" have with my personality
is aptly characterized by Levy-Bruhl 10 as participation mystique.
It is an irrational, unconscious identity, arising from the fact
that anything which comes into contact with me is not only it-
self, but also a symbol. This symbolization comes about firstly
because every human being has unconscious contents, and
secondly because every object has an unknown side. Your watch,
for instance. Unless you are a watchmaker, you would hardly
presume to say that you know how it works. Even if you do, you
wouldn't know anything about the molecular structure of the

Leisegang, Pneuma Hagion, pp. 248!?. How Natives Think.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

steel unless you happened to be a mineralogist or a physicist.
And have you ever heard o a scientist who knew how to repair
his pocket watch? But where two unknowns come together, it
is impossible to distinguish between them. The unknown in
man and the unknown in the thing fall together in one. Thus
there arises an unconscious identity which sometimes borders
on the grotesque. No one is permitted to touch what is "mine,"
much less use it. One is affronted if "my" things are not treated
with sufficient respect. I remember once seeing two Chinese
rickshaw boys engaged in furious argument. Just as they were
about to come to blows, one of them gave the other's rickshaw
a violent kick, thus putting an end to the quarrel. So long as
they are unconscious our unconscious contents are always pro-
jected, and the projection fixes upon everything "ours," inani-
mate objects as well as animals and people. And to the extent
that "our" possessions are projection carriers, they are more
than what they are in themselves, and function as such. They
have acquired several layers of meaning and are therefore sym-
bolical, though this fact seldom or never reaches consciousness.
In reality, our psyche spreads far beyond the confines of the
conscious mind, as was apparently known long ago to the old
alchemist who said that the soul was for the greater part outside
the body. 11
39 When, therefore, I give away something that is "mine," what

I am giving is essentially a symbol, a thing of many meanings;
but, owing to my unconsciousness of its symbolic character, it
adheres to my ego, because it is part of my personality. Hence
there is, explicitly or implicitly, a personal claim bound up with
every gift. There is always an unspoken "give that thou mayest
receive." Consequently the gift always carries with it a personal
intention, for the mere giving of it is not a sacrifice. It only be-
comes a sacrifice if I give up the implied intention of receiving
something in return. If it is to be a true sacrifice, the gift must
be given as if it were being destroyed. 12 Only then is it possible

II Michael Sendivogius, "Tractatus de sulphure" (i6th cent.), in the Musaeum
hermeticum (1678), p. 617: "[Anima] quae extra corpus multa profundissima
imaginatur" ([The soul] which imagines many things of the utmost profundity
outside the body).

12 The parallel to this is total destruction of the sacrificial gift by burning, or by
throwing it into water or into a pit.

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for the egoistic claim to be given up. Were the bread and wine
simply given without any consciousness of an egoistic claim, the
fact that it was unconscious would be no excuse, but would on
the contrary be sure proof of the existence of a secret claim. Be-
cause of its egoistic nature, the offering would then inevitably
have the character of a magical act of propitiation, with the
unavowed purpose and tacit expectation of purchasing the good
will of the Deity. That is an ethically worthless simulacrum of
sacrifice, and in order to avoid it the giver must at least make
himself sufficiently conscious of his identity with the gift to
recognize how far he is giving himself up in giving the gift. In
other words, out of the natural state of identity with what is
"mine" there grows the ethical task of sacrificing oneself, or at
any rate that part of oneself which is identical with the gift. One
ought to realize that when one gives or surrenders oneself there
are corresponding claims attached, the more so the less one
knows of them. The conscious realization of this alone guar-
antees that the giving is a real sacrifice. For if I know and admit
that I am giving myself, forgoing myself, and do not want to be
repaid for it, then I have sacrificed my claim, and thus a part of
myself. Consequently, all absolute giving, a giving which is a
total loss from the start, is a self-sacrifice. Ordinary giving for
which no return is received is felt as a loss; but a sacrifice is
meant to be like a loss, so that one may be sure that the egoistic
claim no longer exists. Therefore the gift should be given as if
it were being destroyed. But since the gift represents myself, I
have in that case destroyed myself, given myself away without
expectation of return. Yet, looked at in another way, this in-
tentional loss is also a gain, for if you can give yourself it proves
that you possess yourself. Nobody can give what he has not got.
So anyone who can sacrifice himself and forgo his claim must
have had it; in other words, he must have been conscious of the
claim. This presupposes an act of considerable self-knowledge,
lacking which one remains permanently unconscious of such
claims. It is therefore quite logical that the confession of sin
should come before the rite of transformation in the Mass. The
self-examination is intended to make one conscious of the selfish
claim bound up with every gift, so that it may be consciously
given up; otherwise the gift is no sacrifice. The sacrifice proves
that you possess yourself, for it does not mean just letting your-

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

self be passively taken: it is a conscious and deliberate self-
surrender, which proves that you have full control of yourself,
that is, of your ego. The ego thus becomes the object of a moral
act, for "I" am making a decision on behalf of an authority
which is supraordinate to my ego nature. I am, as it were, decid-
ing against my ego and renouncing my claim. The possibility of
self-renunciation is an established psychological fact whose
philosophical implications I do not propose to discuss. Psycho-
logically, it means that the ego is a relative quantity which can
be subsumed under various supraordinate authorities. What are
these authorities? They are not to be equated outright with col-
lective moral consciousness, as Freud wanted to do with his
superego, but rather with certain psychic conditions which ex-
isted in man from the beginning and are not acquired by experi-
ence. Behind a man's actions there stands neither public opinion
nor the moral code, 13 but the personality of which he is still
unconscious. Just as a man still is what he always was, so he al-
ready is what he will become. The conscious mind does not
embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly
of his conscious contents, and for the other and far greater part,
of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assign-
able limits. In this totality the conscious mind is contained like
a smaller circle within a larger one. Hence it is quite possible
for the ego to be made into an object, that is to say, for a more
compendious personality to emerge in the course of develop-
ment and take the ego into its service. Since this growth of per-
sonality comes out of the unconscious, which is by definition
unlimited, the extent of the personality now gradually realizing
itself cannot in practice be limited either. But, unlike the Freud-
ian superego, it is still individual. It is in fact individuality in
the highest sense, and therefore theoretically limited, since no
individual can possibly display every quality. (I have called this
process of realization the "individuation process/') So far as the
personality is still potential, it can be called transcendent, and

13 if there were really nothing behind him but collective standards of value on
the one hand and natural instincts on the other, every breach of morality would
be simply a rebellion of instinct. In that case valuable and meaningful innovations
would be impossible, for the instincts are the oldest and most conservative ele-
ment in man and beast alike. Such a view forgets the creative instinct which,
although it can behave like an instinct, is seldom found in nature and is con-
fined almost exclusively to Homo sapiens.

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so far as it is unconscious, it is indistinguishable from all those
things that carry its projections in other words, the unconscious
personality merges with our environment in accordance with the
above-named participation mystique. This fact is of the greatest
practical importance because it renders intelligible the peculiar
symbols through which this projected entity expresses itself in
dreams. By this I mean the symbols of the outside world and the
cosmic symbols. These form the psychological basis for the con-
ception of man as a microcosm, whose fate, as we know, is bound
up with the macrocosm through the astrological components of
his character.

39 1 The term "self seemed to me a suitable one for this uncon-
scious substrate, whose actual exponent in consciousness is the
ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as
object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate
out from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore
supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori
existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an un-
conscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself,
rather I happen to myself. This realization is of fundamental
importance for the psychology of religious phenomena, which
is why Ignatius Loyola started off his Spiritual Exercises with
"Homo creatus est" as their "fundamentum." But, fundamental
as it is, it can be only half the psychological truth. If it were the
whole truth it would be tantamount to determinism, for if man
were merely a creature that came into being as a result of some-
thing already existing unconsciously, he would have no freedom
and there would be no point in consciousness. Psychology must
reckon with the fact that despite the causal nexus man does
enjoy a feeling of freedom, which is identical with autonomy of
consciousness. However much the ego can be proved to be de-
pendent and preconditioned, it cannot be convinced that it has
no freedom. An absolutely preformed consciousness and a totally
dependent ego would be a pointless farce, since everything
would proceed just as well or even better unconsciously. The
existence of ego consciousness has meaning only if it is free and
autonomous. By stating these facts we have, it is true, established
an antinomy, but we have at the same time given a picture of
things as they are. There are temporal, local, and individual
differences in the degree of dependence and freedom. In reality

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

both are always present: the supremacy of the self and the hybris
of consciousness.

392 This conflict between conscious and unconscious is at least
brought nearer to a solution through our becoming aware of it.
Such an act of realization is presupposed in the act of self-sacri-
fice. The ego must make itself conscious of its claim, and the
self must cause the ego to renounce it. This can happen in two
ways:

393 i.I renounce my claim in consideration of a general moral
principle, namely that one must not expect repayment for a gift.
In this case the "self" coincides with public opinion and the
moral code. It is then identical with Freud's superego and for
this reason it is projected into the environment and therefore
remains unconscious as an autonomous factor.

394 2.1 renounce my claim because I feel impelled to do so for
painful inner reasons which are not altogether clear to me.
These reasons give me no particular moral satisfaction; on the
contrary, I even feel some resistance to them. But I must yield
to the power which suppresses my egoistic claim. Here the self
is integrated; it is withdrawn from projection and has become
perceptible as a determining psychic factor. The objection that
in this case the moral code is simply unconscious must be ruled
out, because I am perfectly well aware of the moral criticism
against which I would have to assert my egoism. Where the ego
wish clashes with the moral standard, it is not easy to show that
the tendency which suppresses it is individual and not collec-
tive. But where it is a case of conflicting loyalties, or we find our-
selves in a situation of which the classic example is Hosea's
marriage with the harlot, then the ego wish coincides with the
collective moral standard, and Hosea would have been bound
to accuse Jehovah of immorality. Similarly, the unjust steward
would have had to admit his guilt. Jesus took a different view. 14
Experiences of this kind make it clear that the self cannot be
equated either with collective morality or with natural instinct,
but must be conceived as a determining factor whose nature is
individual and unique. The superego is a necessary and un-
avoidable substitute for the experience of the self.

14 To the defiler of the Sabbath he said: "Man, if indeed thou knowest what thou
doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed, and a trans-
gressor of the law." James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 33.

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395 These two ways of renouncing one's egoistic claim reveal not
only a difference of attitude, but also a difference of situation.
In the first case the situation need not affect me personally and
directly; in the second, the gift must necessarily be a very per-
sonal one which seriously affects the giver and forces him to
overcome himself. In the one case it is merely a question, say,
of going to Mass; in the other it is more like Abraham's sacrifice
of his son or Christ's decision in Gethsemane. The one may be
felt very earnestly and experienced with all piety, but the other
is the real thing. 15

39 6 So long as the self is unconscious, it corresponds to Freud's
superego and is a source of perpetual moral conflict. If, however,
it is withdrawn from projection and is no longer identical with
public opinion, then one is truly one's own yea and nay. The
self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes
the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psycho-
logically possible to imagine. 16

397 What I sacrifice is my own selfish claim, and by doing this I
give up myself. Every sacrifice is therefore, to a greater or lesser
degree, a self-sacrifice. The degree to which it is so depends on
the significance of the gift. If it is of great value to me and
touches my most personal feelings, I can be sure that in giving
up my egoistic claim I shall challenge my ego personality to
revolt. I can also be sure that the power which suppresses this
claim, and thus suppresses me, must be the self. Hence it is the
self that causes me to make the sacrifice; nay more, it compels me
to make it. 17 The self is the sacrificer, and I am the sacrificed gift,
the human sacrifice. Let us try for a moment to look into Abra-
ham's soul when he was commanded to sacrifice his only son.

15 In order to avoid misunderstandings, I must emphasize that I am speaking only
from personal experience, and not of the mysterious reality which the Mass has
for the believer.

16 Cf. the "uniting symbol" in Psychological Types, Def. 51.

IT In Indian philosophy we and a parallel in Prajapati and Purusha Narayana.
Purusha sacrifices himself at the command of Prajapati, but at bottom the two
are identical. Cf. the Shatapatha-Brahmana (Sacred Books of the East, XLIV, pp,
lyaff.); also the Rig- Veda, X, 90 (trans, by Macnicol, pp. 28-29).

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Quite apart from the compassion he felt for his child, would not
a father in such a position feel himself as the victim, and feel
that he was plunging the knife into his own breast? He would be
at the same time the sacrificer and the sacrificed.

39 8 Now, since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the
son to the father, we can say that when the self calls on us to
sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on
itself. We know more or less what this act means to us, but what
it means to the self is not so clear. As the self can only be com-
prehended by us in particular acts, but remains concealed from
us as a whole because it is more comprehensive than we are, all
we can do is to draw conclusions from the little of the self that
we can experience. We have seen that a sacrifice only takes place
when we feel the self actually carrying it out on ourselves. We
may also venture to surmise that in so far as the self stands to us
in the relation of father to son, the self in some sort feels our
sacrifice as a sacrifice of itself. From that sacrifice we gain our-
selvesour "self" for we have only what we give. But what does
the self gain? We see it entering into manifestation, freeing itself
from unconscious projection, and, as it grips us, entering into
our lives and so passing from unconsciousness into consciousness,
from potentiality into actuality. What it is in the diffuse uncon-
scious state we do not know; we only know that in becoming
ourself it has become man.

399 This process of becoming human is represented in dreams
and inner images as the putting together of many scattered
units, and sometimes as the gradual emergence and clarification
of something that was always there. 18 The speculations of alche-
my, and also of some Gnostics, revolve round this process. It is

is This contradiction is unavoidable because the concept of the self allows only of
antinomial statements. The self is by definition an entity more comprehensive
than the conscious personality. Consequently the latter cannot pass any compre-
hensive judgment on the self; any judgment and any statement about it is incom-
plete and has to be supplemented (but not nullified) by a conditioned negative.
If I assert, "The self exists," I must supplement this by saying, "But it seems not
to exist." For the sake of completeness I must also invert the proposition and say,
"The self does not exist, but yet seems to exist." Actually, this inversion is super-
fluous in view of the fact that the self is not a philosophical concept like Kant's
"thing-in-itself," but an empirical concept of psychology, and can therefore be
hypostatized if the above precautions are taken.

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likewise expressed in Christian dogma, and more particularly
in the transformation mystery of the Mass. The psychology of
this process makes it easier to understand why, in the Mass, man
appears as both the sacrificer and the sacrificed gift, and why it
is not man who is these things, but God who is both; why God
becomes the suffering and dying man, and why man, through
partaking of the Glorified Body, gains the assurance of resurrec-
tion and becomes aware of his participation in Godhead.
40 As I have already suggested, the integration or humanization
of the self is initiated from the conscious side by our making
ourselves aware of our selfish aims; we examine our motives
and try to form as complete and objective a picture as possible
of our own nature. It is an act of self-recollection, a gathering
together of what is scattered, of all the things in us that have
never been properly related, and a coming to terms with oneself
with a view to achieving full consciousness. (Unconscious self-
sacrifice is merely an accident, not a moral act.) Self-recollection,
however, is about the hardest and most repellent thing there is
for man, who is predominantly unconscious. Human nature has
an invincible dread of becoming more conscious of itself. What
nevertheless drives us to it is the self, which demands sacrifice
by sacrificing itself to us. Conscious realization or the bringing
together of the scattered parts is in one sense an act of the ego's
will, but in another sense it is a spontaneous manifestation of
the self, 19 which was always there. Individuation appears, on the
one hand, as the synthesis of a new unity which previously con-
sisted of scattered particles, and on the other hand, as the revela-
tion of something which existed before the ego and is in fact its
father or creator and also its totality. Up to a point we create
the self by making ourselves conscious of our unconscious con-
tents, and to that extent it is our son. This is why the alchemists
called their incorruptible substancewhich means precisely the
self the filius philosophorum. But we are forced to make this
effort by the unconscious presence of the self, which is all the
time urging us to overcome our unconsciousness. From that
point of view the self is the father. This accounts for certain
alchemical terms, such as Mercurius Senex (Hermes Trismegis-
tus) and Saturnus, who in Gnosticism was regarded as both
19 In so far as it is the self that actuates the ego's self-recollection.

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greybeard and youth, just as Mercurius was in alchemy. These
psychological connections are seen most clearly in the ancient
conceptions of the Original Man, the Protanthropos, and the
Son of Man. Christ as the Logos is from all eternity, but in his
human form he is the "Son of Man." 20 As the Logos, he is the
world-creating principle. This corresponds with the relation of
the self to consciousness, without which no world could be per-
ceived at all. The Logos is the real principium individuationis,
because everything proceeds from it, and because everything
which is, from crystal to man, exists only in individual form. In
the infinite variety and differentiation of the phenomenal world
is expressed the essence of the auctor rerum. As a correspond-
ence we have, on the one hand, the indefiniteness and unlimited
extent of the unconscious self (despite its individuality and
uniqueness), its creative relation to individual consciousness,
and, on the other hand, the individual human being as a mode
of its manifestation. Ancient philosophy paralleled this idea with
the legend of the dismembered Dionysus, who, as creator, is the
d/iepterros (undivided) m}$, and, as the creature, the jue/zpicr^6>os
(divided) vovs. 21 Dionysus is distributed throughout the whole of
nature, and just as Zeus once devoured the throbbing heart of
the god, so his worshippers tore wild animals to pieces in order
to reintegrate his dismembered spirit. The gathering together of
the light-substance in Barbelo-Gnosis and in Manichaeism
points in the same direction. The psychological equivalent of
this is the integration of the self through conscious assimilation
of the split-off contents. Self-recollection is a gathering together
of the self. It is in this sense that we have to understand the in-
structions which Monoimos gives to Theophrastus:

Seek him [God] from out thyself, and learn who it is that taketh pos-
session of everything in thee, saying: my god, my spirit [*>oi5s], my
understanding, my soul, my body; and learn whence is sorrow and
joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and
sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one

20 if I use the unhistorical term "self for the corresponding processes in the
psyche, I do so out of a conscious desire not to trespass on other preserves, but to
confine myself exclusively to the field of empirical psychology.

21 Firmicus Maternus, De errore profanarum religionum, 7, 8.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

would not, and falling in love though one would not. And if thou
shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find Him in thy-
self, the One and the Many, like to that little point, for it is from
thee that he hath his origin. 22

401 Self-reflection orwhat comes to the same thing the urge
to individuation gathers together what is scattered and multi-
farious, and exalts it to the original form of the One, the Primor-
dial Man. In this way our existence as separate beings, our
former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is wid-
ened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious the
sources of conflict are dried up. This approximation to the self
is a kind of repristination or apocatastasis, in so far as the self
has an ' Incorruptible' ' or "eternal" character on account of its
being pre-existent to consciousness. 23 This feeling is expressed
in the words from the benedictio fontis: "Et quos aut sexus in
corpora aut aetas discernit in tempore, omnes in unam pariat
gratia mater infantiam" (And may Mother Grace bring forth
into one infancy all those whom sex has separated in the body,
or age in time).

402 The figure of the divine sacrificer corresponds feature for
feature to the empirical modes of manifestation of the archetype
that lies at the root of almost all known conceptions of God.
This archetype is not merely a static image, but dynamic, full of
movement. It is always a drama, whether in heaven, on earth,
or in hell. 24

(d) The Archetype of Sacrifice

403 Comparing the basic ideas of the Mass with the imagery of
the Zosimos visions, we find that, despite considerable differ-
ences, there is a remarkable degree of similarity. For the sake of
clearness I give the similarities and differences in tabular form.

22 Hippolytus, Elenchos, VIII, 15.

23 And also on account of the fact that the unconscious is only conditionally bound
by space and time. The comparative frequency of telepathic phenomena proves
that space and time have only a relative validity for the psyche. Evidence for this
is furnished by Rhine's experiments. Cf. my "Synchronicity."

24 The word "hell" may strike the reader as odd in this connection. I would, how-
ever, recommend him to study the brothel scene in James Joyce's Ulysses, or James
Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

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Zosimos

Mass

SIMILARITIES

1. The chief actors are two
priests.

2. One priest slays the other.

3. Other human beings are sac-
rificed as well.

4. The sacrifice is a voluntary
self-sacrifice.

5. It is a painful death.

6. The victim is dismembered.

7. There is a thysia.

8. The priest eats his own flesh.

9. He is transformed into spirit. 9.

10. A shining white figure ap- 10.
pears, like the midday sun.

11. Production of the "divine 11.
water."

There is the priest, and
Christ the eternal priest.
The Mactatio Christi takes
place as the priest pronounces
the words of consecration.
The congregation itself is a
sacrificial gift.

Christ offers himself freely as
a sacrifice.

He suffers in the sacrificial
act.

Breaking of the Bread.
Offering up of incense.
Christ drinks his own blood
(St. Chrysostom).
The substances are trans-
formed into the body and
blood of Christ.
The Host is shown as the
Beatific Vision ("Quaesivi
vultum tuum, Domine") in
the greater elevation.
The Grace conferred by the
Mass; similarity of water
chalice and font; water a
symbol of grace.

DIFFERENCES

The whole sacrificial process
is an individual dream vision,
a fragment of the unconscious
depicting itself in dream con-
sciousness.

The dreamer is only a spec-
tator of the symbolic action.
The action is a bloody and
gruesome human sacrifice.

266

The Mass is a conscious arti-
fact, the product of many cen-
turies and many minds.

Priest and congregation both
participate in the mystery.
Nothing obnoxious; the mac-
tatio itself is not mentioned.
There is only the bloodless
sacrifice of bread and wine
(incruente immolatur!).

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

4. The sacrifice is accompanied 4. Nothing comparable,
by a scalping.

5. It is also performed on a 5. Symbolic sacrifice of the Lamb,
dragon, and is therefore an

animal sacrifice.

6. The flesh is roasted. 6. The substances are spiritually

transformed.

7. The meaning of the sacrifice 7. The meaning of the Mass is
is the production of the divine the communion of the living
water, used for the transmuta- Christ with his flock.

tion of metals and, mystically,
for the birth of the self.

8. What is transformed in the 8. What is transformed in the
vision is presumably the plan- Mass is God, who as Father
etary demon Saturn, the su- begat the Son in human form,
preme Archon (who is related suffered and died in that
to the God of the Hebrews). form, and rose up again to
It is the dark, heavy, material his origin.

principle in man hyle which
is transformed into pneuma.

404 The gross concretism of the vision is so striking that one
might easily feel tempted, for aesthetic and other reasons, to
drop the comparison with the Mass altogether. If I nevertheless
venture to bring out certain analogies, I do so not with the ration-
alistic intention of devaluing the sacred ceremony by putting
it on a level with a piece of pagan nature worship. If I have any
aim at all apart from scientific truth, it is to show that the most
important mystery of the Catholic Church rests, among other
things, on psychic conditions which are deeply rooted in the
human soul.

405 The vision, which in all probability has the character of a
dream, must be regarded as a spontaneous psychic product that
was never consciously intended. Like all dreams, it is a product
of nature. The Mass, on the other hand, is a product of man's
mind or spirit, and is a definitely conscious proceeding. To use
an old but not outmoded nomenclature, we can call the vision
psychic, and the Mass pneumatic. The vision is undifferentiated
raw material, while the Mass is a highly differentiated artifact.
That is why the one is gruesome and the other beautiful. If
the Mass is antique, it is antique in the best sense of the word,

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and its liturgy is therefore satisfying to the highest requirements
of the present day. In contrast to this, the vision is archaic and
primitive, but its symbolism points directly to the fundamental
alchemical idea of the incorruptible substance, namely to the
self, which is beyond change. The vision is a piece of unalloyed
naturalism, banal, grotesque, squalid, horrifying and profound
as nature herself. Its meaning is not clear, but it allows itself to
be divined with the abysmal uncertainty and ambiguity that
pertains to all things nonhuman, suprahuman, and subhuman.
The Mass, on the other hand, represents and clearly expresses
the Deity itself, and clothes it in the garment of the most beauti-
ful humanity.

406 From all this it is evident that the vision and the Mass
are two different things, so different as to be almost incom-
mensurable. But if we could succeed in reconstructing the natu-
ral process in the unconscious on which the Mass is psychically
based, we should probably obtain a picture which would be
rather more commensurable with the vision of Zosimos. Accord-
ing to the view of the Church, the Mass is based on the historical
events in the life of Jesus. From this "real" life we can single
out certain details that add a few concretistic touches to our
picture and thus bring it closer to the vision. For instance, I
would mention the scourging, the crowning with thorns, and
the clothing in a purple robe, which show Jesus as the archaic
sacrificed king. This is further emphasized by the Barabbas epi-
sode (the name means "son of the father") which leads to the
sacrifice of the king. Then there is the agony of death by cruci-
fixion, a shameful and horrifying spectacle, far indeed from any
"incruente immolatur"! The right pleural cavity and probably
the right ventricle of the heart were cut open by the spear, so
that blood clots and serum flowed out. If we add these details to
the process which underlies the Mass, we shall see that they form
a striking equivalent to certain archaic and barbarous features
of the vision. There are also the fundamental dogmatic ideas to
be considered. As is shown by the reference to the sacrifice of
Isaac in the prayer Unde et memores, the sacrifice has the char-
acter not only of a human sacrifice, but the sacrifice of a son
and an only son. That is the cruellest and most horrible kind of
sacrifice we can imagine, so horrible that, as we know, Abraham

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was not required to carry it out. 25 And even if he had carried it
out, a stab in the heart with a knife would have been a quick and
relatively painless death for the victim. Even the bloody Aztec
ceremony of cutting out the heart was a swift death. But the
sacrifice of the son which forms the essential feature of the Mass
began with scourging and mockery, and culminated in six hours
of suspension on a cross to which the victim was nailed hand
and foot not exactly a quick death, but a slow and exquisite
form of torture. As if that were not enough, crucifixion was re-
garded as a disgraceful death for slaves, so that the physical
cruelty is balanced by the moral cruelty.

40? Leaving aside for the moment the unity of nature of Fathei
and Sonwhich it is possible to do because they are two distinct
Persons who are not to be confused with one another let us try
to imagine the feelings of a father who saw his son suffering such
a death, knowing that it was he himself who had sent him into
the enemy's country and deliberately exposed him to this dan-
ger. Executions of this kind were generally carried out as an act
of revenge or as punishment for a crime, with the idea that both
father and son should suffer. The idea of punishment can be
seen particularly clearly in the crucifixion between two thieves.
The punishment is carried out on God himself, and the model
for this execution is the ritual slaying of the king. The king is
killed when he shows signs of impotence, or when failure of the
crops arouses doubts as to his efficacy. Therefore he is killed in
order to improve the condition of his people, just as God is sacri-
ficed for the salvation of mankind.

408 What is the reason for this "punishment" of God? Despite
the almost blasphemous nature of this question, we must never-
theless ask it in view of the obviously punitive character of the

25 How Jewish piety reacted to this sacrifice can be seen from the following
Talmudic legend: " 'And I/ cried Abraham, 'swear that I will not go down from
the altar until you have heard me. When you commanded me to sacrifice my son
Isaac you offended against your word, "in Isaac shall your descendants be
named." So if ever my descendants offend against you, and you wish to punish
them, then remember that you too are not without fault, and forgive them/
'Very well, then/ replied the Lord, 'there behind you is a ram caught in the
thicket with his horns. Offer up that instead of your son Isaac. And if ever your
descendants sin against me, and I sit in judgment over them on New Year's Day,
let them blow the horn of a ram, that I may remember my words, and temper
justice with mercy/ " Fremer and Schnitzer, Legenden aus dem Talmud, pp. 34!.

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sacrifice. The usual explanation is that Christ was punished for
our sins. 26 The dogmatic validity of this answer is not in ques-
tion here. As I am in no way concerned with the Church's ex-
planation, but only wish to reconstruct the underlying psychic
process, we must logically assume the existence of a guilt propor-
tionate to the punishment. If mankind is the guilty party, logic
surely demands that mankind should be punished. But if God
takes the punishment on himself, he exculpates mankind, and
we must then conjecture that it is not mankind that is guilty,
but God (which would logically explain why he took the guilt
on himself). For reasons that can readily be understood, a satis-
factory answer is not to be expected from orthodox Christianity.
But such an answer may be found in the Old Testament, in
Gnosticism, and in late Catholic speculation. From the Old
Testament we know that though Yahweh was a guardian of the
law he was not just, and that he suffered from fits of rage which
he had every occasion to regret. 27 And from certain Gnostic sys-
tems it is clear that the auctor rerum was a lower archon who
falsely imagined that he had created a perfect world, whereas
in fact it was woefully imperfect. On account of his Saturnine
disposition this demiurgic archon has affinities with the Jewish
Yahweh, who was likewise a world creator. His work was im-
perfect and did not prosper, but the blame cannot be placed
on the creature any more than one can curse the pots for being
badly turned out by the potter! This argument led to the
Marcionite Reformation and to purging the New Testament of
elements derived from the Old. Even as late as the seventeenth
century the learned Jesuit, Nicolas Caussin, declared that the
unicorn was a fitting symbol for the God of the Old Testament,
because in his wrath he reduced the world to confusion like an
angry rhinoceros (unicorn), until, overcome by the love of a
pure virgin, he was changed in her lap into a God of Love. 28

26 Isaiah 53:5: "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for
our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes
we are healed." 27 See "Answer to Job/' in this volume.

28 Caussin, De symbolica Aegyptiorum sapientia. Polyhistor symbolicus, Electorum
symbolorum, et Parabolarum historicarum stromata (1618), p. 401. Cf. also
Philippus Picinelli, Mondo Simbolico, p. 299: "Of a truth God, terrible beyond
measure, appeared before the world peaceful and wholly tamed after dwelling in
the womb of the most blessed Virgin. St. Bonaventura said that Christ was
tamed and pacified by the most kindly Mary, so that he should not punish the
sinner with eternal death."

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409 In these explanations we find the natural logic we missed in
the answer of the Church. God's guilt consisted in the fact that,
as creator of the world and king of his creatures, he was inade-
quate and therefore had to submit to the ritual slaying. For
primitive man the concrete king was perfectly suited to this
purpose, but not for a higher level of civilization with a more
spiritual conception of God. Earlier ages could still dethrone
their gods by destroying their images or putting them in chains.
At a higher level, however, one god could be dethroned only by
another god, and when monotheism developed, God could only
transform himself.

4*0 The fact that the transformative process takes the form of a
"punishment" Zosimos uses this very word (/coXao-ts) may be
due to a kind of rationalization or a need to offer some explana-
tion of its cruelty. Such a need only arises at a higher level of
consciousness with developed feeling, which then seeks an ade-
quate reason for the revolting and incomprehensible cruelty of
the procedure. (A modern parallel would be the experience of
dismemberment in shamanistic initiations.) The readiest con-
jecture at this level is that some guilt or sin is being punished.
In this way the transformation process acquires a moral function
that can scarcely be conceived as underlying the original event.
It seems more likely that a higher and later level of conscious-
ness found itself confronted with an experience for which no
sensible reasons or explanations had ever been given, but which
it tried to make intelligible by weaving into it a moral aetiology.
It is not difficult to see that dismemberment originally served
the purpose of reconstituting the neophyte as a new and more
effective human being. Initiation even has the aspect of a heal-
ing. 29 In the light of these facts, moral interpretation in terms
of punishment seems beside the mark and arouses the suspicion
that dismemberment has still not been properly understood. A
moral interpretation is inadequate because it fails to understand
the contradiction at the heart of its explanation, namely that
guilt should be avoided if one doesn't want to be punished. But,
for the neophyte, it would be a real sin if he shrank from the
torture of initiation. The torture inflicted on him is not a pun-
ishment but the indispensable means of leading him towards
his destiny. Also, these ceremonies often take place at so young
an age that a guilt of corresponding proportions is quite out of
29 Eliade, Le Chamanisme, p. 39.

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the question. For this reason, the moralistic view of suffering
as punishment seems to me not only inadequate but misleading.
It is obviously a primitive attempt to give a psychological ex-
planation of an age-old archetypal idea that had never before
been the object of reflection. Such ideas and rituals, far from
ever having been invented, simply happened and were acted
long before they were thought. I have seen primitives practising
rites of which none of them had the remotest idea what they
meant, and in Europe we still find customs whose meaning has
always been unconscious. First attempts at explanation usually
turn out to be somewhat clumsy.

4n The aspect of torture, then, is correlated with a detached
and observing consciousness that has not yet understood the real
meaning of dismemberment. What is performed concretely on
the sacrificial animal, and what the shaman believes to be actu-
ally happening to himself, appears on a higher level, in the
vision of Zosimos, as a psychic process in which a product of the
unconscious, an homunculus, is cut up and transformed. By all
the rules of dream-interpretation, this is an aspect of the ob-
serving subject himself; that is to say, Zosimos sees himself as an
homunculus, or rather the unconscious represents him as such,
as an incomplete, stunted, dwarfish creature who is made of
some heavy material (lead or bronze) and thus signifies the
"hylical man." Such a one is dark, and sunk in materiality. He
is essentially unconscious and therefore in need of transforma-
tion and enlightenment. For this purpose his body must be
taken apart and dissolved into its constituents, a process known
in alchemy as the divisio, separatio and solutio, and in later
treatises as discrimination and self-knowledge* This psycho-
logical process is admittedly painful and for many people a
positive torture. But, as always, every step forward along the
path of individuation is achieved only at the cost of suffering.

4 1 * In the case of Zosimos there is of course no real consciousness
of the transformative process, as is abundantly clear from his
own interpretation of the vision: he thought the dream imagery
was showing him the "production of the waters.'* We can see
from this that he was still exteriorizing the transformation and
did not feel it in any way as an alteration of his own psyche.

30 Particularly in Gerhard Dorn, "Speculativae philosophiae," Theatrum chem-
icum, I (1602), pp. 276f.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

413 A similar state o affairs prevails in Christian psychology
whenever the rites and dogmas are taken as merely external
factors and are not experienced as inner events. But, just as the
imitatio Christi in general, and the Mass in particular, en-
deavour to include the believer in the process o transformation,
the Mass actually representing him as a sacrificial gift parallel
with Christ, so a better understanding of Christianity raises it
as high above the sphere of "mind" as the rite of the Mass is
above the archaic level of the Zosimos vision. The Mass tries to
effect a participation mystique or identity of priest and con-
gregation with Christ, so that on the one hand the soul is as-
similated to Christ and on the other hand the Christ-figure is
recollected in the soul. It is a transformation of God and man
alike, since the Mass is, at least by implication, a repetition of the
whole drama of Incarnation.

III. THE MASS AND THE INDIVIDUATION PROCESS

4H Looked at from the psychological standpoint, Christ, as the
Original Man (Son of Man, second Adam, reXetos fotfpwiros), repre-
sents a totality which surpasses and includes the ordinary man,
and which corresponds to the total personality that transcends
consciousness. 31 We have called this personality the "self." Just
as, on the more archaic level of the Zosimos vision, the homun-
culus is transformed into pneuma and exalted, so the mystery
of the Eucharist transforms the soul of the empirical man, who
is only a part of himself, into his totality, symbolically expressed
by Christ. In this sense, therefore, we can speak of the Mass as
the rite of the individuation process.

415 Reflections of this kind can be found very early on in the
old Christian writings, as for instance in the Acts of John, one
of the most important of the apocryphal texts that have come
down to us. 32 That part of the text with which we are concerned
here begins with a description of a mystical "round dance"
which Christ instituted before his crucifixion. He told his
disciples to hold hands and form a ring, while he himself stood

31 Cf. my Aion, Ch. V.

32 The Apocryphal New Testament. The Acts of John were probably written dur-
ing the first half of the and cent.

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in the centre. As they moved round in a circle, Christ sang a
song of praise, from which I would single out the following
characteristic verses: 33

I will be saved and I will save, Amen.
I will be loosed and I will loose, 34 Amen.
I will be wounded and I will wound, Amen.
I will be begotten and I will beget, Amen.
I will eat and I will be eaten, Amen.

I will be thought, being wholly spirit, Amen.
I will be washed and I will wash, Amen.
Grace paces the round. I will blow the pipe. Dance
the round all, Amen.

The Eight [ogdoad] sings praises with us, Amen.

The Twelve paces the round aloft, Amen.

To each and all it is given to dance, Amen.

Who joins not the dance mistakes the event, Amen.

I will be united and I will unite, Amen.

A lamp am I to you that perceive me, Amen.
A mirror am I to you that know me, Amen.
A door am I to you that knock on me, Amen.
A way am I to you the wayfarer.

Now as you respond to my dancing, behold yourself in me who
speaks . . .

As you dance, ponder what I do, for yours is this human suffering
which I will to suffer. For you would be powerless to understand
your suffering had I not been sent to you as the Logos by the Father.
... If you had understood suffering, you would have non-suffering.
Learn to suffer, and you shall understand how not to suffer. . . .
Understand the Word of Wisdom in me. 35

416 I would like to interrupt the text here, as we have come to a
natural break, and introduce a few psychological remarks. They
will help us to understand some further passages that still have

33 Ibid., pp. s53f., modified.

34 [Or: I will be freed and I will free. TRANS.]

35 Trans, based on James, pp. 253^, and that of Ralph Manheim from the Ger-
man of Max Pulver, "J esus> Round Dance and Crucifixion according to the Acts
of St. John," in The Mysteries, pp. 179!

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to be discussed. Although our text is obviously based on New
Testament models, what strikes us most of all is its antithetical
and paradoxical style, which has very little in common with the
spirit of the Gospels. This feature only appears in a veiled way
in the canonical writings, for instance in the parable of the un-
just steward (Luke 16), in the Lord's Prayer ("Lead us not into
temptation"), in Matthew 10: 16 ("Be wise as serpents"), John
10:34 ("Ye are gods"), in the logion of the Codex Bezae to Luke
6:4, 36 in the apocryphal saying "Whoso is near unto me is near
unto the fire," and so on. Echoes of the antithetical style can
also be found in Matthew 10: 26: ". . . . for nothing is covered
that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known."

417 Paradox is a characteristic of the Gnostic writings. It does
more justice to the unknowable than clarity can do, for uni-
formity of meaning robs the mystery of its darkness and sets it
up as something that is known. That is a usurpation, and it leads
the human intellect into hybris by pretending that it, the in-
tellect, has got hold of the transcendent mystery by a cognitive
act and has "grasped" it. The paradox therefore reflects a higher
level of intellect and, by not forcibly representing the unknow-
able as known, gives a more faithful picture of the real state of
affairs.

418 These antithetical predications show the amount of reflec-
tion that has gone into the hymn: it formulates the figure of our
Lord in a series of paradoxes, as God and man, sacrificer and
sacrificed. The latter formulation is important because the
hymn was sung just before Jesus was arrested, that is, at about
the moment when the synoptic gospels speak of the Last Supper
and John among other things-of the parable of the vine. John,
significantly enough, does not mention the Last Supper, and in
the Acts of John its place is taken by the "round dance." But the
round table, like the round dance, stands for synthesis and
union. In the Last Supper this takes the form of participation
in the body and blood of Christ, i.e., there is an ingestion and
assimilation of the Lord, and in the round dance there is a cir-
cular circumambulation round the Lord as the central point.
Despite the outward difference of the symbols, they have a com-
mon meaning: Christ is taken into the midst of the disciples.
But, although the two rites have this common basic meaning,

36 See James, p. 33.

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the outward difference between them should not be overlooked.
The classical Eucharistic feast follows the synoptic gospels,
whereas the one in the Acts of John follows the Johannine pat-
tern. One could almost say that it expresses, in a form borrowed
from some pagan mystery feast, a more immediate relationship
of the congregation to Christ, after the manner of the Johannine
parable: "I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in
me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit" (John
15:5). This close relationship is represented by the circle and
central point: the two parts are indispensable to each other and
equivalent. Since olden times the circle with a centre has been a
symbol for the Deity, illustrating the wholeness of God in-
carnate: the single point in the centre and the series of points
constituting the circumference. Ritual circumambulation often
bases itself quite consciously on the cosmic picture of the starry
heavens revolving, on the "dance of the stars/' an idea that is
still preserved in the comparison of the twelve disciples with the
zodiacal constellations, as also in the depictions of the zodiac
that are sometimes found in churches, in front of the altar or
on the roof of the nave. Some such picture may well have been
at the back of the medieval ball-game of pelota that was played
in church by the bishop and his clergy.

419 At all events, the aim and effect of the solemn round dance
is to impress upon the mind the image of the circle and the
centre and the relation of each point along the periphery to that
centre. 37 Psychologically this arrangement is equivalent to a
mandala and is thus a symbol of the self, 38 the point of reference
not only of the individual ego but of all those who are of like
mind or who are bound together by fate. The self is not an ego
but a supraordinate totality embracing the conscious and the
unconscious. But since the latter has no assignable limits and

37 Another idea of the kind is that every human being is a ray of sunlight. This
image occurs in the Spanish poet Jorge Guillen, Cantico: Fe de Vida, pp. 24-25
("Mas alia," VI):

Where could I stray to, where?
This point is my centre . . .

With this earth and this ocean

To rise to the infinite:

One ray more of the sun. (Trans, by J. M. Cohen.)

38 Cf. Aion, Ch. IV, and "Psychology and Poetry/'

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in its deeper layers is of a collective nature, it cannot be dis-
tinguished from that of another individual. As a result, it con-
tinually creates that ubiquitous participation mystique which
is the unity of many, the one man in all men. This psychological
fact forms the basis for the archetype of the foBpwros, the Son of
Man, the homo maximus, the vir unus, purusha, etc. 39 Because
the unconscious, in fact and by definition, cannot be discrimi-
nated as such, the most we can hope to do is to infer its nature
from the empirical material. Certain unconscious contents are un-
doubtedly personal and individual and cannot be attributed to
any other individual. But, besides these, there are numerous
others that can be observed in almost identical form in many
different individuals in no way connected with one another.
These experiences suggest that the unconscious has a collective
aspect. It is therefore difficult to understand how people today
can still doubt the existence of a collective unconscious. After
all, nobody would dream of regarding the instincts or human
morphology as personal acquisitions or personal caprices. The
unconscious is the universal mediator among men. It is in a
sense the all-embracing One, or the one psychic substratum com-
mon to alb The alchemists knew it as their Mercurius and they
called him the mediator in analogy to Christ. 40 Ecclesiastical
doctrine says the same thing about Christ, and so, particularly,
does our hymn. Its antithetical statements could, however, be
interpreted as referring just as well to Mercurius, if not better.
420 For instance, in the first verse, "I will be saved," it is not
clear how far the Lord is able to say such a thing of himself,
since he is the saviour (o-cor^p) par excellence. Mercurius, on the
other hand, the helpful arcane substance of the alchemists, is
the world-soul imprisoned in matter and, like the Original
Man who fell into the embrace of Physis, is in need of salva-
tion through the labours of the artifex. Mercurius is set free
("loosed") and redeemed; as aqua permanens he is also the

39 The universality of this figure may explain why its epiphanies take so many
different forms. For instance, it is related in the Acts of John (James, p. 251) that
Drusiana saw the Lord once "in the likeness of John" and another time "in that
of a youth." The disciple James saw him as a child, but John as an adult. John
saw him first as "a small man and uncomely," and then again as one reaching to
heaven (p. 251). Sometimes his body felt "material and solid," but sometimes "the
substance was immaterial and as if it existed not at all" (p. 252).

40 "The Spirit Mercurius" (Swiss edn., pp. i26ff.).

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classical solvent. "I will be wounded, and I will wound" is
clearer: it refers to the wound in Christ's side and to the divisive
sword. But Mercurius too, as the arcane substance, is divided or
pierced through with the sword (separatio and penetratio), and
wounds himself with the sword or telum passionis, the dart of
love. The reference to Christ is less clear in the words "I will be
begotten, and I will beget/' The first statement refers essen-
tially to him in so far as the Son was begotten by the Holy Ghost
and not created, but the "begetting" is generally held to be the
property of the Holy Ghost and not of Christ as such. It
certainly remains a moot point whether Mercurius as the world-
soul was begotten or created, but he is unquestionably 'Vivify-
ing," and in his ithyphallic form as Hermes Kyllenios he is
actually the symbol of generation. "Eating" as compared with
"being eaten" is not exactly characteristic of Christ, but rather
of the devouring dragon, the corrosive Mercurius, who, as the
uroboros, also eats himself, like Zosimos's homunculus.
421 "I will be thought," if evangelical at all, is an exclusively
Johannine, post-apostolic speculation concerning the nature of
the Logos. Hermes was very early considered to be Nous and
Logos, and Hermes Trismegistus was actually the Nous of reve-
lation. Mercurius, until well into the seventeenth century, was
thought of as the veritas hidden in the human body, i.e., in
matter, and this truth had to be known by meditation, or by
cogitatio, reflection. Meditation is an idea that does not occur
at all in the New Testament. 41 The cogitatio which might pos-
sibly correspond to it usually has a negative character and ap-
pears as the wicked cogitatio cordis of Genesis 6:5 (and 8:21):
"Cuncta cogitatio cordis intenta ad malum" (DV: ". . . all the
thought of their heart was bent upon evil at all times"; AV:
". . . every imagination of the thoughts of his heart . . ."). In
I Peter 4: i &VOLO. is given as "cogitatio" (DV: ". . . arm your-
selves with the same intent"; AV: "same mind"; RSV: "same
thought"). "Cogitare" has a more positive meaning in II Corin-
thians 10:7, where it really means to "bethink oneself," "re-
member by reflection": "hoc cogitet iterum apud se" ("rouro
\oytfeadu TaXw e<' cavrov"', DV: "let him reflect within himself";

4i"Haec meditare" (raura jucXfcra) in I Tim. 4:15 has more the meaning of
'see to' or 'attend to' these things. [Both DV and AV have "meditate on these
things," but RSV has "practise these duties/' TRANS.]

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AV: "let him of himself think this again"; RSV: "let him re-
mind himself). But this positive thinking in us is of God (II
Cor. 3:5: "non quod sufficientes simus cogitare aliquid a nobis,
quasi ex nobis"; "ov% on a<j>* tavr&v ucwoi k(T^V \oyicracrBaL n ws e
tavr&V) dXX' y ticavoT'ns fin&v kK TOV 6eov" ; DV: "Not that we are suffi-
cient of ourselves to think anything, as from ourselves, but our
sufficiency is from God"). The only place where cogitatio has the
character of a meditation culminating in enlightenment is Acts
10 : 19: "Petro autem cogitante de visione, dixit Spiritus ei" ("Toi;
51 Ukrpov div8viJiOVfj,kpov wepl TOV bpaparos elwev TO Trvtvua aura"; DV:

"But while Peter was pondering over the vision, the spirit said
to him . . .").

422 Thinking, in the first centuries of our era, was more the
concern of the Gnostics than of the Church, for which reason
the great Gnostics, such as Basilides and Valentinus, seem almost
like Christian theologians with a bent for philosophy. With
John's doctrine of the Logos, Christ came to be regarded simul-
taneously as the Nous and the object of human thought; the
Greek text says literally: "Noi^ae ^Xw vovs &v oXos" 42 (I will be
thought, being wholly spirit). Similarly, the Acts of Peter say of
Christ: "Thou art perceived of the spirit only." 43

423 The "washing" refers to the purificatio, or to baptism, and
equally to the washing of the dead body. The latter idea lin-
gered on into the eighteenth century, as the alchemical washing
of the "black corpse," an opus mulierum. The object to be
washed was the black prima materia: it, the washing material
(sapo sapientum!), and the washer were all three of themthe
selfsame Mercurius in different guises. But whereas in alchemy
the nigredo and sin were identical concepts (since both needed
washing), in Christian Gnosticism there are only a few hints
of Christ's possible identity with the darkness. The \ovvaa6at.
("I will be washed") in our text is one of them.

424 The "ogdoad," being a double quaternity, belongs to the
symbolism of the mandala. It obviously represents the archetype
of the round dance in the "supra-celestial place," since it sings
in harmony. The same applies to the number Twelve, the zodi-
acal archetype of the twelve disciples, a cosmic idea that still

42 Lipsius and Bonnet, eds., Ada Apostolorum Apocrypha, I, p. 197.

43 James, p. 335.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

echoes in Dante's Paradiso,, where the saints form shining con-
stellations.

4*5 Anyone who does not join in the dance, who does not make
the circumambulation of the centre (Christ and Anthropos), is
smitten with blindness and sees nothing. What is described here
as an outward event is really a symbol for the inward turning
towards the centre in each of the disciples, towards the archetype
of man, towards the self for the dance can hardly be under-
stood as an historical event. It should be understood, rather, as
a sort of paraphrase of the Eucharist, an amplifying symbol that
renders the mystery more assimilable to consciousness, and it
must therefore be interpreted as a psychic phenomenon. It is
an act of conscious realization on a higher level, establishing a
connection between the consciousness of the individual and the
supraordinate symbol of totality.

426 The "Acts of Peter" says of Christ:

Thou art unto me father, thou my mother, thou my brother, thou
my friend, thou my bondsman, thou my steward. Thou art All and
All is in thee; thou Art, and there is naught else that is save thee
only.

Unto him therefore do ye also, brethren, flee, and if ye learn that
in him alone ye exist, ye shall obtain those things whereof he saith
unto you: "Which neither eye hath seen nor ear heard, neither have
they entered into the heart of man." 44

427 The words "I will be united" must be understood in this
sense, as meaning that subjective consciousness is united with an
objective centre, thus producing the unity of God and man
represented by Christ. The self is brought into actuality through
the concentration of the many upon the centre, and the self
wants this concentration. It is the subject and the object of the
process. Therefore it is a "lamp" to those who "perceive" it.
Its light is invisible if it is not perceived; it might just as well
not exist. It is as dependent on being perceived as the act of
perception is on light. This brings out once again the paradox-
ical subject-object nature of the unknowable. Christ, or the self,
is a "mirror": on the one hand it reflects the subjective con-
sciousness of the disciple, making it visible to him, and on the
other hand it "knows" Christ, that is to say it does not merely

44 James, p. 335.

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reflect the empirical man, it also shows him as a (transcendental)
whole. And, just as a "door" opens to one who "knocks" on it, or
a "way" opens out to the wayfarer who seeks it, so, when you
relate to your own (transcendental) centre, you initiate a process
of conscious development which leads to oneness and wholeness.
You no longer see yourself as an isolated point on the periphery,
but as the One in the centre. Only subjective consciousness is
isolated; when it relates to its centre it is integrated into whole-
ness. Whoever joins in the dance sees himself in the reflecting
centre, and his suffering is the suffering which the One who
stands in the centre "wills to suffer." The paradoxical identity
and difference of ego and self could hardly be formulated more
trenchantly.

428 As the text says, you would not be able to understand what
you suffer unless there were that Archimedean point outside,
the objective standpoint of the self, from which the ego can be
seen as a phenomenon. Without the objectivation of the self
the ego would remain caught in hopeless subjectivity and would
only gyrate round itself. But if you can see and understand your
suffering without being subjectively involved, then, because of
your altered standpoint, you also understand "how not to
suffer," for you have reached a place beyond all involvements
("you have me as a bed, rest upon me"). This is an unexpectedly
psychological formulation of the Christian idea of overcoming
the world, though with a Docetist twist to it: "Who I am, you
shall know when I depart. What now I am seen to be, I am
not." 45 These statements are clarified by a vision in which John
sees the Lord "standing in the rnidst of the cave and illumi-
nating it." He says to John:

129 John, for the multitude below in Jerusalem I am being crucified

and pierced with lances and staves, and vinegar and gall are given
me to drink. But to you I speak, and what I say, hear: I put it into
your mind to go up on this mountain, that you might hear those
things which a disciple must learn from his master and a man from
his God. And with these words he showed me a cross of light,
and about the cross a great multitude that had no form [piav juop<i?z>
M xoj>ra], and in the cross there was one form and one appear-
ance. And above [kwavoo] the cross I saw the Lord himself, and he
had no outward shape [o-x^/ia], but only a voice, and a voice not
45 ibid., p. 254..

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such as we knew, but one sweet and kind and truly [that] of [a] God,
which spoke to me: John, one man must hear this from me, for I
require one that shall hear. For your sakes this cross of light was
named by me now Logos, now Nous, now Jesus, now Christ, now
Door, now Way, now Bread, now Seed [Wopos], now Resurrection,
now Son, now Father, now Pneuma, now Life, now Truth, now
Faith [Trums], now Grace. So is it called for men; but in itself and
in its essence, as spoken of to you, it is the Boundary of all things,
and the composing of things unstable, 46 and the harmony of wisdom,
and the wisdom that is in harmony. For there are [places] of the
right and of the left, Powers, Authorities, Archons, Daemons, Work-
ings, Threatenings, Wraths, Devils, Satan, and the Nether Root
whence proceeded the nature of whatever comes to be. And so it is
this cross which joined all things together through the Word, and
which separated the things that are from those that are below, and
which caused all things to flow forth from the One.

But this is not the cross of wood which you will see when you go
down from here; neither am I he that is on the cross, whom now
you do not see, but only hear his voice. I passed for that which I am
not, for I am not what I was to many others. But what they will say
of me is vile and not worthy of me. Since, then, the place of rest is
neither seen nor named, how much less will they see and name me,
their Lord!

Now the formless multitude about the cross is of the lower nature.
And if those whom you see in the cross have not one form, then not
all the parts of him who descended have yet been recollected. But
when the nature of man has been taken up and a generation of men
that obey my voice draws near to me, he that now hears me shall
be united with them and shall no longer be what he now is, but shall
stand above them, as I do now. For so long as you call not yourself
mine, I am not what I was. But if you understand me, you shall be
in your understanding as I am, and I shall be what I was when
I have you with me. For this you are through me. . . .

Behold, what you are, I have shown you. But what I am, I alone
know, and no man else. Therefore let me have what is mine, but
behold what is thine through me. And behold me truly, not as I
have said I am, but as you, being akin to me, know me. 47

430 Our text throws some doubt on the traditional view of
Docetism. Though it is perfectly clear from the texts that Christ
only seemed to have a body, which only seemed to suffer, this

46 'kv&yrn tda uncertain.

47 Based on James, pp. 2548:., and the author's modified version of Hennecke, ed.,
Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, pp. i86ff.

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is Docetism at its grossest. The Acts of John are more subtle,
and the argument used is almost epistemological: the historical
facts are real enough, but they reveal no more than is intelligible
to the senses of the ordinary man. Yet even for the knower of
divine secrets the act of crucifixion is a mystery, a symbol that
expresses a parallel psychic event in the beholder. In the lan-
guage of Plato it is an event which occurs in a "supra-celestial
place," i.e., on a "mountain" and in a "cave" where a cross of
light is set up, its many synonyms signifying that it has many
aspects and many meanings. It expresses the unknowable nature
of the "Lord," the supraordinate personality and rcAaos foBpuiros,
and since it is a quaternity, a whole divided into four parts, it
is the classic symbol of the self.

43 1 Understood in this sense, the Docetism of the Acts of John
appears more as a completion of the historical event than a de-
valuation of it. It is not surprising that the common people
should have failed to appreciate its subtlety, though it is plain
enough from a psychological point of view. On the other hand,
the educated public of those days were by no means unfamiliar
with the parallelism of earthly and metaphysical happenings,
only it was not clear to them that their visionary symbols were
not necessarily metaphysical realities but were perceptions of
intrapsychic or subliminal processes which I have called "re-
ceptor phenomena." The contemplation of Christ's sacrificial
death in its traditional form and cosmic significance constellated
analogous psychic processes which in their turn gave rise to a
wealth of symbols, as I have shown elsewhere. 48 This is, quite
obviously, what has happened here, and it took the form of a
visible split between the historical event down below on earth,
as perceived by the senses, and its ideal, visionary reflection on
high, the cross appearing on the one hand as a wooden instru-
ment of torture and on the other as a glorious symbol. Evidently
the centre of gravity has shifted to the ideal event, with the
result that the psychic event is involuntarily given the greater
importance. Although the emphasis on the pneuma detracts
from the meaning of the concrete event in a rather one-sided
and debatable way, it cannot be dismissed as superfluous, since
a concrete event by itself can never create meaning, but is largely
dependent for this on the manner in which it is understood.

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Interpretation is necessary before the meaning of a thing can be
grasped. The naked facts by themselves "mean" nothing. So
one cannot assert that the Gnostic attempts at interpretation
were entirely lacking in merit, even though they go far beyond
the framework of early Christian tradition. One could even ven-
ture to assert that these efforts were already implicit in that
tradition, since the cross and the crucified are practically synon-
ymous in the language of the New Testament. 49

432 The text shows the cross as the antithesis of the formless
multitude: it is, or it has, "form" and its meaning is that of a
central point defined by the crossing of two straight lines. It is
identical with the Kyrios (Lord) and the Logos, with Jesus and
with Christ. How John could "see" the Lord above the cross,
when the Lord is described as having no "outward shape," must
remain a mystery. He only hears an explanatory voice, and this
may indicate that the cross of light is only a visualization of the
unknowable, whose voice can be heard apart from the cross.
This seems to be confirmed by the remark that the cross was
named Logos and so on "for your sakes."

433 The cross signifies order as opposed to the disorderly chaos
of the formless multitude. It is, in fact, one of the prime symbols
of order, as I have shown elsewhere. In the domain of psycholog-
ical processes it functions as an organizing centre, and in states
of psychic disorder 50 caused by an invasion of unconscious con-
tents it appears as a mandala divided into four. No doubt this
was a frequent phenomenon in early Christian times, and not
only in Gnostic circles. 51 Gnostic introspection could hardly fail,
therefore, to perceive the numinosity of this archetype and be
duly impressed by it. For the Gnostics the cross had exactly the
same function that the atman or Self has always had for the East.
This realization is one of the central experiences of Gnosticism.

49 The quaternity, earlier hinted at in the vision of Ezekiel, is patently manifest
in the pre-Christian Book of Enoch. (Cf. "Answer to Job," below, pars. 662 ff.)
In the Apocalypse of Sophonias [Zephaniah], Christ appears surrounded by a
garland of doves (Stern, "Die koptische Apokalypse des Sophonias," p. 124). Cf.
also the mosaic of St. Felix at Nola, showing a cross surrounded by doves. There
is another in San Clemente, Rome (Wickhoff, "Das Apsismosaik in der Basilica
des H. Felix zu Nola," pp. 1585.; and Rossi, Musaici Cristiani delle Ghiese di
Roma anteriori al secolo XV, pi. XXIX).

50 Symbolized by the formless multitude.

51 Cf. "speaking with tongues" and glossolalia.

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

434 The definition o the cross or centre as 8u>purp6s, the "bound-
ary" of all things, is exceedingly original, for it suggests that the
limits of the universe are not to be found in a nonexistent pe-
riphery but in its centre. There alone lies the possibility of
transcending this world. All instability culminates in that which
is unchanging and quiescent, and in the self all disharmonies
are resolved in the "harmony of wisdom."

435 As the centre symbolizes the idea of totality and finality, it
is quite appropriate that the text should suddenly start speaking
of the dichotomy of the universe, polarized into right and left,
brightness and darkness, heaven and the "nether root," the
omnium genetrix. This is a clear reminder that everything is
contained in the centre and that, as a result, the Lord (i.e.,
the cross) unites and composes all things and is therefore
"nirdvanda," free from the opposites, in conformity with East-
ern ideas and also with the psychology of this archetypal symbol.
The Gnostic Christ-figure and the cross are counterparts of the
typical mandalas spontaneously produced by the unconscious.
They are natural symbols and they differ fundamentally from
the dogmatic figure of Christ, in whom all trace of darkness is
expressly lacking.

436 In this connection mention should be made of Peter's vale-
dictory words, which he spoke during his martyrdom (he was
crucified upside down, at his own request):

O name of the cross, hidden mystery! O grace ineffable that is pro-
nounced in the name of the cross! O nature of man, that cannot be
separated from God! O love unspeakable and indivisible, that can-
not be shown forth by unclean lips! I grasp thee now, I that am at
the end of my earthly course. I will declare thee as thou art, I will
not keep silent the mystery of the cross which was once shut and
hidden from my soul. You that hope in Christ, let not the cross be
for you that which appears; for it is another thing, and different
from that which appears, this suffering which is in accordance with
Christ's. And now above all, because you that can hear are able to
hear it of me, who am at the last and farewell hour of my life,
hearken: separate your souls from everything that is of the senses,
from everything that appears to be but in truth is not. Lock your
eyes, close your ears, shun those happenings which are seen! Then
you shall perceive that which was done to Christ, and the whole
mystery of your salvation. . . .

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Learn the mystery of all nature and the beginning of all things,
as it was. For the first man, of whose race I bear the likeness, fell
head downwards, and showed forth a manner of birth such as had
not existed till then, for it was dead, having no motion. And being
pulled downwards, and having also cast his origin upon the earth,
he established the whole disposition of things; for, being hanged
up in the manner appointed, he showed forth the things of the
right as those of the left, and the things of the left as those of the
right, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that
things that were not fair were perceived to be fair, and those that
were in truth evil were perceived to be good. Wherefore the Lord
says in a mystery: "Except ye make the things of the right as those
of the left, and those of the left as those of the right, and those that
are above as those below, and those that are behind as those that
are before, ye shall not have knowledge of the kingdom/ 1

This understanding have I brought you, and the figure in which
you now see me hanging is the representation of that first man who
came to birth.

437 In this passage, too, the symbolical interpretation of the cross
is coupled with the problem of opposites, first in the unusual
idea that the creation of the first man caused everything to be
turned upside down, and then in the attempt to unite the op-
posites by identifying them with one another. A further point
of significance is that Peter, crucified head downwards, is
identical not only with the first created man, but with the cross:

For what else is Christ but the word, the sound of God? So the word
is this upright beam on which I am crucified; and the sound is the
beam which crosses it, the nature of man; but the nail which holds
the centre of the crossbeam to the upright is man's conversion and
repentance (/zerdvota). 52

4S 8 In the light of these passages it can hardly be said that the
author of the Acts of John presumably a Gnostic has drawn
the necessary conclusions from his premises or that their full
implications have become clear to him. On the contrary, one
gets the impression that the light has swallowed up everything
dark. Just as the enlightening vision appears high above the
actual scene of crucifixion, so, for John, the enlightened one
stands high above the formless multitude. The text says: "There-
fore care not for the many, and despise those that are outside

52 Based on James, pp. 334.!:.

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the mystery!" 53 This overweening attitude arises from an infla-
tion caused by the fact that the enlightened John has identified
with his own light and confused his ego with the self. Therefore
he feels superior to the darkness in him. He forgets that light
only has a meaning when it illuminates something dark and
that his enlightenment is no good to him unless it helps him to
recognize his own darkness. If the powers of the left are as real
as those of the right, then their union can only produce a third
thing that shares the nature of both. Opposites unite in a new
energy potential: the "third" that arises out of their union is a
figure "free from the opposites," beyond all moral categories.
This conclusion would have been too advanced for the Gnostics.
Recognizing the danger of Gnostic irrealism, the Church, more
practical in these matters, has always insisted on the concretism
of the historical events despite the fact that the original New
Testament texts predict the ultimate deification of man in a
manner strangely reminiscent of the words of the serpent in the
Garden of Eden: "Ye shall be as gods." 54 Nevertheless, there
was some justification for postponing the elevation of man's
status until after death, as this avoided the danger of Gnostic
inflation. 55

439 Had the Gnostic not identified with the self, he would have
been bound to see how much darkness was in him a realization
that comes more naturally to modern man but causes him no
less difficulties. Indeed, he is far more likely to assume that he
himself is wholly of the devil than to believe that God could
ever indulge in paradoxical statements. For all the ill conse-
quences of his fatal inflation, the Gnostic did, however, gain an
insight into religion, or into the psychology of religion, from
which we can still learn a thing or two today. He looked deep
into the background of Christianity and hence into its future
developments. This he could do because his intimate connection
with pagan Gnosis made him a "receptor" that helped to inte-
grate the Christian message into the spirit of the times.

440 The extraordinary number of synonyms piled on top of one
another in an attempt to define the cross have their analogy in
the Naassene and Peratic symbols of Hippolytus, all pointing to

53 Ibid., p. 255. 54 Genesis 3 : 5.

55 The possibility of inflation was brought very close indeed by Christ's words:

"Ye are gods" (John 10 : 34).

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

this one centre. It is the lv TO TTCLV of alchemy, which is on the
one hand the heart and governing principle of the macrocosm,
and on the other hand its reflection in a point, in a microcosm
such as man has always been thought to be. He is of the same
essence as the universe, and his own mid-point is its centre. This
inner experience, shared by Gnostics, alchemists, and mystics
alike, has to do with the nature of the unconscious one could
even say that it is the experience of the unconscious; for the
unconscious, though its objective existence and its influence on
consciousness cannot be doubted, is in itself undifferentiable
and therefore unknowable. Hypothetical germs of differentia-
tion may be conjectured to exist in it, but their existence cannot
be proved, because everything appears to be in a state of mutual
contamination. The unconscious gives the impression of multi-
plicity and unity at once. However overwhelmed we may be by
the vast quantity of things differentiated in space and time, we
know from the world of the senses that the validity of its laws
extends to immense distances. We therefore believe that it is
one and the same universe throughout, in its smallest part as in
its greatest. On the other hand the intellect always tries to dis-
cern differences, because it cannot discriminate without them.
Consequently the unity of the cosmos remains, for it, a some-
what nebulous postulate which it doesn't rightly know what to
do with. But as soon as introspection starts penetrating into the
psychic background it comes up against the unconscious, which,
unlike consciousness, shows only the barest traces of any definite
contents, surprising the investigator at every turn with a confus-
ing medley of relationships, parallels, contaminations, and iden-
tifications. Although he is forced, for epistemological reasons, to
postulate an indefinite number of distinct and separate arche-
types, yet he is constantly overcome by doubt as to how far they
are really distinguishable from one another. They overlap to
such a degree and have such a capacity for combination that all
attempts to isolate them conceptually must appear hopeless. In
addition the unconscious, in sharpest contrast to consciousness
and its contents, has a tendency to personify itself in a uniform
way, just as if it possessed only one shape or one voice. Because
of this peculiarity, the unconscious conveys an experience of
unity, to which are due all those qualities enumerated by the
Gnostics and alchemists, and a lot more besides.

TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

441 As can plainly be seen from Gnosticism and other spiritual
movements of the kind, people are naively inclined to take all
the manifestations of the unconscious at their face value and to
believe that in them the essence of the world itself, the ultimate
truth, has been unveiled. This assumption does not seem to me
quite as unwarranted as it may look at first sight, because the
spontaneous utterances of the unconscious do after all reveal a
psyche which is not identical with consciousness and which is,
at times, greatly at variance with it. These utterances occur as a
natural psychic activity that can neither be learnt nor controlled
by the will. The manifestation of the unconscious is therefore
a revelation of the unknown in man. We have only to disregard
the dependence of dream language on environment and substi-
tute "eagle" for "aeroplane," "dragon" for "automobile" or
"train," "snake-bite" for "injection," and so forth, in order to
arrive at the more universal and more fundamental language
of mythology. This gives us access to the primordial images that
underlie all thinking and have a considerable influence even on
our scientific ideas. 56

442 In these archetypal forms, something, presumably, is express-
ing itself that must in some way be connected with the mysteri-
ous operation of a natural psyche in other words, with a cosmic
factor of the first order. To save the honour of the objective
psyche, which the contemporary hypertrophy of consciousness
has done so much to depreciate, I must again emphasize that
without the psyche we could not establish the existence of any
world at all, let alone know it. But, judging by all we do know,
it is certain that the original psyche possesses no consciousness
of itself. This only comes in the course of development, a de-
velopment that falls mostly within the historical epoch. 57 Even
today we know of primitive tribes whose level of consciousness
is not so far removed from the darkness of the primordial psyche,
and numerous vestiges of this state can still be found among
civilized people. It is even probable, in view of its potentialities
for further differentiation, that our modern consciousness is
still on a relatively low level. Nevertheless, its development so

56 Cf. Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on Kepler's Scientific Theories."

57 Cf. the remarkable account of developing consciousness in an ancient Egyptian
text, translated, with commentary, by Jacobsohn, entitled "Das Gesprach eines
Lebensmiiden mit seinem Ba."

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far has made it emancipated enough to forget its dependence on
the unconscious psyche. It is not a little proud of this emancipa-
tion, but it overlooks the fact that although it has apparently
got rid of the unconscious it has become the victim of its own
verbal concepts. The devil is cast out with Beelzebub. Our de-
pendence on words is so strong that a philosophical brand of
"existentialism" had to restore the balance by pointing to a
reality that exists in spite of words at considerable risk, how-
ever, of concepts such as "existence/* "existential," etc. turning
into more words which delude us into thinking that we have
caught a reality. One can be and is just as dependent on words
as on the unconscious. Man's advance towards the Logos was a
great achievement, but he must pay for it with loss of instinct
and loss of reality to the degree that he remains in primitive
dependence on mere words. Because words are substitutes for
things, which of course they cannot be in reality, they take on
intensified forms, become eccentric, outlandish, stupendous,
swell up into what schizophrenic patients call "power words."
A primitive word-magic develops, and one is inordinately im-
pressed by it because anything out of the ordinary is felt to
be especially profound and significant. Gnosticism in particular
affords some very instructive examples of this. Neologisms tend
not only to hypostatize themselves to an amazing degree, but
actually to replace the reality they were originally intended to
express.

443 This rupture of the link with the unconscious and our sub-
mission to the tyranny of words have one great disadvantage:
the conscious mind becomes more and more the victim of its
own discriminating activity, the picture we have of the world
gets broken down into countless particulars, and the original
feeling of unity, which was integrally connected with the unity
of the unconscious psyche, is lost. This feeling of unity, in the
form of the correspondence theory and the sympathy of all
things, dominated philosophy until well into the seventeenth
century and is now, after a long period of oblivion, looming
up again on the scientific horizon, thanks to the discoveries made
by the psychology of the unconscious and by parapsychology.
The manner in which the unconscious forcibly obtrudes upon
the conscious by means of neurotic disturbances is not only

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reminiscent of contemporary political and social conditions but
even appears as an accompanying phenomenon. In both cases
there is an analogous dissociation: in the one case a splitting
o the world's consciousness by an 'Iron curtain/' and in the
other a splitting of the individual personality. This dissociation
extends throughout the entire world, so that a psychological
split runs through vast numbers of individuals who, in their
totality, call forth the corresponding mass phenomena. In the
West it was chiefly the mass factor, and in the East technics,
that undermined the old hierarchies. The cause of this develop-
ment lay principally in the economic and psychological up-
rootedness of the industrial masses, which in turn was caused by
the rapid advance in technics. But technics, it is obvious, are
based on a specifically rationalistic differentiation of conscious-
ness which tends to repress all irrational psychic factors. Hence
there arises, in the individual and nation alike, an unconscious
counterposition which in time grows strong enough to burst
out into open conflict.

444 The same situation in reverse was played out on a smaller
scale and on a spiritual plane during the first centuries of our
era, when the spiritual disorientation of the Roman world was
compensated by the irruption of Christianity. Naturally, in
order to survive, Christianity had to defend itself not only
against its enemies but also against the excessive pretensions
of some of its adherents, including those of the Gnostics. Increas-
ingly it had to rationalize its doctrines in order to stem the flood
of irrationality. This led, over the centuries, to that strange mar-
riage of the originally irrational Christian message with human
reason, which is so characteristic of the Western mentality. But
to the degree that reason gradually gained the upper hand, the
intellect asserted itself and demanded autonomy. And just as the
intellect subjugated the psyche, so also it subjugated Nature and
begat on her an age of scientific technology that left less and less
room for the natural and irrational man. Thus the foundations
were laid for an inner opposition which today threatens the
world with chaos. To make the reversal complete, all the powers
of the underworld now hide behind reason and intellect, and
under the mask of rationalistic ideology a stubborn faith seeks to
impose itself by fire and sword, vying with the darkest aspects

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of a church militant. By a strange enantiodromia, 58 the Chris-
tian spirit of the West has become the defender of the irrational,
since, in spite of having fathered rationalism and intellectual-
ism, it has not succumbed to them so far as to give up its belief
in the rights of man, and especially the freedom of the indi-
vidual. But this freedom guarantees a recognition of the
irrational principle, despite the lurking danger of chaotic indi-
vidualism. By appealing to the eternal rights of man, faith
binds itself inalienably to a higher order, not only on account
of the historical fact that Christ has proved to be an ordering
factor for many hundreds of years, but also because the self
effectively compensates chaotic conditions no matter by what
name it is known: for the self is the Anthropos above and be-
yond this world, and in him is contained the freedom and
dignity of the individual man. From this point of view, dispar*
agement and vilification of Gnosticism are an anachronism. Its
obviously psychological symbolism could serve many people
today as a bridge to a more living appreciation of Christian
tradition.

445 These historical changes have to be borne in mind if we
wish to understand the Gnostic figure of Christ, because the say-
ings in the Acts of John concerning the nature of the Lord only
become intelligible when we interpret them as expressing an
experience of the original unity as contrasted with the formless
multiplicity of conscious contents. This Gnostic Christ, of whom
we hear hints even in the Gospel according to St. John, sym-
bolizes man's original unity and exalts it as the saving goal of his
development. By "composing the unstable," by bringing order
into chaos, by resolving disharmonies and centring upon the
mid-point, thus setting a "boundary" to the multitude and
focusing attention upon the cross, consciousness is reunited with
the unconscious, the unconscious man is made one with his
centre, which is also the centre of the universe, and in this wise
the goal of man's salvation and exaltation is reached.

446 Right as this intuition may be, it is also exceedingly danger-
ous, for it presupposes a coherent ego-consciousness capable of
resisting the temptation to identify with the self. Such an ego-
consciousness seems to be comparatively rare, as history shows;

58 [Cf Psychological Types, Del 18, and "The Psychology of the Unconscious,"
p. 71. EDITORS.]

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usually the ego identifies with the inner Christ, and the danger
is increased by an imitatio Christi falsely understood. The result
is inflation, of which our text affords eloquent proof. In order
to exorcise this danger, the Church has not made too much of
the "Christ within/' but has made all it possibly could of the
Christ whom we "have seen, heard, and touched with hands,"
in other words, with the historical event "below in Jerusalem."
This is a wise attitude, which takes realistic account of the primi-
tiveness of man's consciousness, then as now. For the less mind-
ful it is of the unconscious, the greater becomes the danger of
its identification with the latter, and the greater, therefore, the
danger of inflation, which, as we have experienced to our cost,
can seize upon whole nations like a psychic epidemic. If Christ
is to be "real" for this relatively primitive consciousness, then
he can be so only as an historical figure and a metaphysical
entity, but not as a psychic centre in all too perilous proximity
to a human ego. The Gnostic development, supported by scrip-
tural authority, pushed so far ahead that Christ was clearly
recognized as an inner, psychic fact. This also entailed the rela-
tivity of the Christ-figure, as expressively formulated in our text:
"For so long as you call not yourself mine, I. am not what I was.
... I shall be what I was when I have you with me." From this
it follows unmistakably that although Christ was whole once
upon a time, that is, before time and consciousness began, he
either lost this wholeness or gave it away to mankind 59 and
can only get it back again through man's integration. His whole-
ness depends on man: "You will be in your understanding as I
am" this ineluctable conclusion shows the danger very clearly.
The ego is dissolved in the self; unbeknown to itself, and with
all its inadequacy and darkness, it has become a god and deems
itself superior to its unenlightened fellows. It has identified
with its own conception of the "higher man/' quite regardless
of the fact that this figure consists of "Places of the right and left,
Authorities, Archons, Daemons" etc., and the devil himself. A
figure like this is simply not to be comprehended, an awesome

59 This view may be implicit in the kenosis passage (Philippians 2 : 5f.): "Have
this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who though he was hy nature
God, did not consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied
himself [kK&vacv, exinanivit], taking the nature of a slave and being made like
unto man" (BV).

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mystery with which one had better not identify if one has any
sense. It is sufficient to know that such a mystery exists and that
somewhere man can feel its presence, but he should take care
not to confuse his ego with it. On the contrary, the confronta-
tion with his own darkness should not only warn him against
identification but should inspire him with salutary terror on
beholding just what he is capable of becoming. He cannot con-
quer the tremendous polarity of his nature on his own resources;
he can only do so through the terrifying experience of a psychic
process that is independent of him, that works him rather than
he it.

447 If such a process exists at all, then it is something that can
be experienced. My own personal experience, going back over
several decades and garnered from many individuals, and the
experience of many other doctors and psychologists, not to men-
tion the statements terminologically different, but essentially
the same of all the great religions, 60 all confirm the existence
of a compensatory ordering factor which is independent of the
ego and whose nature transcends consciousness. The existence
of such a factor is no more miraculous, in itself, than the orderli-
ness of radium decay, or the attunement of a virus to the anat-
omy and physiology of human beings, 61 or the symbiosis of
plants and animals. What is miraculous in the extreme is that
man can have conscious, reflective knowledge of these hidden
processes, while animals, plants, and inorganic bodies seemingly
lack it. Presumably it would also be an ecstatic experience for a
radium atom to know that the time of its decay is exactly de-
termined, or for the butterfly to recognize that the flower has
made all the necessary provisions for its propagation.

448 The numinous experience of the individuation process is,
on the archaic level, the prerogative of shamans and medicine
men; later, of the physician, prophet, and priest; and finally, at
the civilized stage, of philosophy and religion. The shaman's
experience of sickness, torture, death, and regeneration implies,
at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacri-
fice, of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the

60 Including shamanism, whose widespread phenomenology anticipates the alche-
mist's individuation symbolism on an archaic level. For a comprehensive account
see Eliade, Le Chamanisme.

61 Cf. Portmann, "Die Bedeutung der Bilder in der lebendigen Energiewandlung."

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TRANSFORMATION SYMBOLISM IN THE MASS

pneumatic man in a word, of apotheosis. The Mass is the sum-
mation and quintessence of a development which began many
thousands of years ago and, with the progressive broadening and
deepening of consciousness, gradually made the isolated experi-
ence of specifically gifted individuals the common property of a
larger group. The underlying psychic process remained, of
course, hidden from view and was dramatized in the form of
suitable "mysteries" and "sacraments/' these being reinforced
by religious teachings, exercises, meditations, and acts of sacri-
fice which plunge the celebrant so deeply into the sphere of the
mystery that he is able to become conscious of his intimate con-
nection with the mythic happenings. Thus, in ancient Egypt,
we see how the experience of "Osirification," 62 originally the
prerogative of the Pharaohs, gradually passed to the aristocracy
and finally, towards the end of the Old Kingdom, to the single
individual as well. Similarly, the mystery religions of the Greeks,
originally esoteric and not talked about, broadened out into
collective experience, and at the time of the Caesars it was
considered a regular sport for Roman tourists to get themselves
initiated into foreign mysteries. Christianity, after some hesita-
tion, went a step further and made celebration of the mysteries
a public institution, for, as we know, it was especially concerned
to introduce as many people as possible to the experience of
the mystery. So, sooner or later, the individual could not fail
to become conscious of his own transformation and of the neces-
sary psychological conditions for this, such as confession and
repentance of sin. The ground was prepared for the realization
that, in the mystery of transubstantiation, it was not so much a
question of magical influence as of psychological processes a
realization for which the alchemists had already paved the way
by putting their opus operatum at least on a level with the ec-
clesiastical mystery, and even attributing to it a cosmic sig-
nificance since, by its means, the divine world-soul could be
liberated from imprisonment in matter. As I think I have
shown, the "philosophical" side of alchemy is nothing less than
a symbolic anticipation of certain psychological insights, and
these to judge by the example of Gerhard Dorn were pretty
far advanced by the end of the sixteenth century. 63 Only our in-

62 Cf. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, pp. saoff.

63 Aion, pars. 24gff. (Swiss edn., pp. sgyff.).

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tellectualized age could have been so deluded as to see in alche-
my nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry, and in the
interpretative methods of modern psychology a mere "psycholo-
gizing," i.e., annihilation, of the mystery. Just as the alchemists
knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could
only happen "Deo concedente," so the modern psychologist is
aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched
in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature
transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life
or of matter. At no point has he explained the mystery itself,
thereby causing it to fade. He has merely, in accordance with
the spirit of Christian tradition, brought it a little nearer to
individual consciousness, using the empirical material to set
forth the individuation process and show it as an actual and
experienceable fact. To treat a metaphysical statement as a
psychic process is not to say that it is "merely psychic," as my
critics assert in the fond belief that the word "psychic" postu-
lates something known. It does not seem to have occurred to
people that when we say "psyche" we are alluding to the densest
darkness it is possible to imagine. The ethics of the researcher
require him to admit where his knowledge comes to an end.
This end is the beginning of true wisdom.

296

FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE
UNCONSCIOUS"

FOREWORD TO WERBLOWSKY'S
"LUCIFER AND PROMETHEUS"

BROTHER KLAUS

FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE
UNCONSCIOUS" 1

449 It is now many years since I expressed a desire for co-opera-
tion with a theologian, but I little knew or even dreamthow
or to what extent my wish was to be fulfilled. This book, to
which I have the honour of contributing an introductory fore-
word, is the third major publication 2 from the theological side
which has been written in a spirit of collaboration and mutual
effort. In the fifty years of pioneer work that now lie behind me
I have experienced criticism, just and unjust, in such abundance
that I know how to value any attempt at positive co-operation.
Criticism from this quarter is constructive and therefore wel-
come.

450 Psychopathology and medical psychotherapy are, when
viewed superficially, far removed from the theologian's particu-
lar field of interest, and it is therefore to be expected that no
small amount of preliminary effort will be required to estab-
lish a terminology comprehensible to both parties. To make this

1 [Originally trans, (by Fr. White) from the German ms. for publication in the
book by Fr. Victor White, O.P. (London, 1952; Chicago, 1953). The foreword was
there subscribed May 1952. It has been slightly revised, on the basis of the orig-
inal ms. EDITORS.]

2 [The two previous ones were by the Protestant theologian Hans Schaer: Religion
and the Cure of Souls in Jungs Psychology, and Erlosungsvorstellungen und ihre
psychologischen Aspekte.EDTTORS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AN0 RELIGION : WEST

possible, certain fundamental realizations are required on either
side. The most important of these is an appreciation of the fact
that the object of mutual concern is the psychically sick and
suffering human being, who is in need of consideration as much
from the somatic or biological standpoint as from the spiritual
or religious. The problem of neurosis ranges from disturbances
in the sphere of instinct to the ultimate questions and decisions
of our whole Weltanschauung. Neurosis is not an isolated,
sharply defined phenomenon; it is a reaction of the whole
human being. Here a pure therapy of the symptoms is obviously
even more definitely proscribed than in the case of purely
somatic illnesses; these too, however, always have a psychic com-
ponent or accompanying symptom even though they are not
psychogenic. Modern medicine has just begun to take account
of this fact, which the psychotherapists have been emphasizing
for a long time. In the same way, long years of experience have
shown me over and over again that a therapy along purely bio-
logical lines does not suffice, but requires a spiritual complement.
This becomes especially clear to the medical psychologist where
the question of dreams is concerned; for dreams, being state-
ments of the unconscious, play no small part in the therapy.
Anyone who sets to work in an honest and critical frame of mind
will have to admit that the correct understanding of dreams is
no easy matter, but one that calls for careful reflection, leading
far beyond purely biological points of view. The indubitable
occurrence of archetypal motifs in dreams makes a thorough
knowledge of the spiritual history of man indispensable for
anyone seriously attempting to understand the real meaning of
dreams. The likeness between certain dream-motifs and mytho-
logems is so striking that they may be regarded not merely as
similar but even as identical. This recognition not only raises
the dream to a higher level and places it in the wider context
of the mythologem, but, at the same time, the problems posed
by mythology are brought into connection with the psychic life
of the individual. From the mythologem to the religious state-
ment it is only a step. But whereas the mythological figures ap-
pear as pale phantoms and relics of a long past life that has
become strange to us, the religious statement represents an im-
mediate "numinous" experience. It is a living mythologem.
451 Here the empiricist's way of thinking and expressing himself

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FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS"

gets him into difficulties with the theologian. The latter when
he is either making a dogma of the Gospel or "demythologizing"
it won't hear anything of "myth" because it seems to him a
devaluation of the religious statement, in whose supreme truth
he believes. The empiricist, on the other hand, whose orienta-
tion is that of natural science, does not connect any notion of
value with the concept "myth/' "Myth," for him, means "a
statement about processes in the unconscious," and this applies
equally to the religious statement. He has no means of deciding
whether the latter is "truer" than the mythologem, for between
the two he sees only one difference: the difference in living in-
tensity. The so-called religious statement is still numinous, a
quality which the myth has already lost to a great extent. The
empiricist knows that rites and figures once "sacred" have be-
come obsolete and that new figures have become "numinous."
452 The theologian can reproach the empiricist and say that he
does possess the means of deciding the truth, he merely does not
wish to make use of it referring to the truth of revelation. In
all humility the empiricist will then ask: Which revealed truth,
and where is the proof that one view is truer than another?
Christians themselves do not appear to be at one on this point.
While they are busy wrangling, the doctor has an urgent case
on his hands. He cannot wait for age-long schisms to be settled,
but will seize upon anything that is "alive" for the patient and
therefore effective. Naturally he cannot prescribe any religious
system which is commonly supposed to be alive. Rather, by dint
of careful and persevering investigation, he must endeavour to
discover just where the sick person feels a healing, living quality
which can make him whole. For the present he cannot be con-
cerned whether this so-called truth bears the official stamp of
validity or not. If, however, the patient is able to rediscover
himself in this way and so get on his feet again, then the ques-
tion of reconciling his individual realization or whatever one
may choose to call the new insight or life-giving experience
with the collectively valid opinions and beliefs becomes a matter
of vital importance. That which is only individual has an iso-
lating effect, and the sick person will never be healed by be-
coming a mere individualist. He would still be neurotically
unrelated and estranged from his social group. Even Freud's
exclusively personalistic psychology of drives was obliged to

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

come to terms, at least negatively, with the generally valid
truths, the age-old representations collectives of human society.
Scientific materialism is by no means a private religious or
philosophical matter, but a very public matter indeed, as we
might well have realized from contemporary events. In view
of the extraordinary importance of these so-called universal
truths, a rapprochement between individual realizations and
social convictions becomes an urgent necessity. And just as the
sick person in his individual distinctiveness must find a modus
vivendi with society, so it will be a no less urgent task for him
to compare the insights he has won through exploring the un-
conscious with the universal truths, and to bring them into
mutual relationship.

453 A great part of my life's work has been devoted to this en-
deavour. But it was clear to me from the outset that I could
never accomplish such a task by myself. Although I can testify to
the psychological facts, it is quite beyond my power to promote
the necessary processes of assimilation which coming to terms
with the representations collectives requires. This calls for the
cooperation of many, and above all of those who are the ex-
pounders of the universal truths, namely the theologians. Apart
from doctors, they are the only people who have to worry pro-
fessionally about the human soul, with the exception perhaps
of teachers. But the latter confine themselves to children, who
as a rule only suffer from the problems of the age indirectly, via
their parents and educators. Surely, then, it would be valuable
for the theologian to know what happens in the psyche of an
adult. It must gradually be dawning on any responsible doctor
what a tremendously important role the spiritual atmosphere
plays in the psychic economy.

454 I must acknowledge with gratitude that the co-operation I
had so long wished and hoped for has now become a reality.
The present book bears witness to this, for it meets the pre-
occupations of medical psychology not only with intellectual
understanding, but with good will. Only the most uncritical
optimism could expect such an encounter to be love at first
sight. The points de depart are too far apart and too different,
and the road to their meeting-place too long and too hard, for
agreement to come as a matter of course. I do not presume to
know what the theologian misunderstands or fails to under-

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FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS"

stand in the empiricist's point of view, for it is as much as I can
do to learn to estimate his theological premises correctly. If I
am not mistaken, however, one of the main difficulties lies in the
fact that both appear to speak the same language, but this
language calls up in their minds two totally different fields of
association. Both can apparently use the same concept and must
then acknowledge, to their amazement, that they are speaking
of two different things. Take, for instance, the word "God."
The theologian will naturally assume that the metaphysical
Ens Absolutum is meant. The empiricist, on the contrary, does
not dream of making such a far-reaching assumption, which
strikes him as downright impossible anyway. He just as natu-
rally means the word "God" as a mere statement, or at most as
an archetypal motif which prefigures such statements. For him
"God" can just as well mean Yahweh, Allah, Zeus, Shiva, or
Huitzilopochtli. The divine attributes of omnipotence, omnis-
cience, eternity, and so on are to him statements which, symp-
tomatically or as syndromes, more or less regularly accompany
the archetype. He grants the divine image numinosity that is,
a deeply stirring emotional effect which he accepts in the first
place as a fact and sometimes tries to explain rationally, in a
more or less unsatisfactory way. As a psychiatrist, he is suffi-
ciently hardboiled to be profoundly convinced of the relativity
of all such statements. As a scientist, his primary interest is the
verification of psychic facts and their regular occurrence, to
which he attaches incomparably greater importance than to ab-
stract possibilities. His religio consists in establishing facts which
can be observed and proved. He describes and circumscribes
these in the same way as the mineralogist his mineral samples
and the botanist his plants. He is aware that beyond provable
facts he can know nothing and at best can only dream, and he
considers it immoral to confuse a dream with knowledge. He
does not deny what he has not experienced and cannot experi-
ence, but he will on no account assert anything which he does
not think he can prove with facts. It is true that I have often
been accused of having dreamt up the archetypes. I must remind
these too hasty critics that a comparative study of motifs existed
long before I ever mentioned archetypes. The fact that arche-
typal motifs occur in the psyche of people who have never
heard of mythology is common knowledge to anyone who has

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ; WEST

investigated the structure of schizophrenic delusions, if his eyes
have not already been opened in this respect by the universal
occurrence of certain mythologems. Ignorance and narrow-
mindedness, even when the latter is political, have never been
conclusive scientific arguments. 3

455 I must be content to describe the standpoint, the faith, the
struggle, the hope and devotion of the empiricist, which all
culminate in the discovery and verification of provable facts and
their hypothetical interpretation. For the theological standpoint
I refer the reader to the competent expose by the author of this
book.

456 When standpoints differ so widely, it is understandable that
numerous clashes should occur in practice, some important,
some unimportant. They are important, above all, where one
realm threatens to encroach upon the territory of the other. My
criticism of the doctrine of the privatio boni is such a case. Here
the theologian has a certain right to fear an intrusion on the
part of the empiricist. This discussion has left its mark on the
book, as the reader will see for himself. Hence I feel at liberty to
avail myself of the right of free criticism, so generously offered
me by the author, and to lay my argument before the reader.

457 I should never have dreamt that I would come up against
such an apparently out-of-the-way problem as that of the
privatio boni in my practical work. Fate would have it, how-
ever, that I was called upon to treat a patient, a scholarly man
with an academic training, who had got involved in all manner
of dubious and morally reprehensible practices. He turned out
to be a fervent adherent of the privatio boni, because it fitted in
admirably with his scheme: evil in itself is nothing, a mere
shadow, a trifling and fleeting diminution of good, like a cloud
passing over the sun. This man professed to be a believing
Protestant and would therefore have had no reason to appeal
to a sententia communis of the Catholic Church had it not
.proved a welcome sedative to his uneasy conscience. It was this
case that originally induced me to come to grips with the
privatio boni in its psychological aspect. It is self-evident to the

3 The fact that the psyche is not a tabula rasa, but brings with it instinctive
conditions, just as somatic life does, naturally does not suit a Marxist philosophy
at all. True, the psyche can be crippled just like the body, but such a prospect
would not be pleasing even to Marxists.

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FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS"

empiricist that the metaphysical aspect of such a doctrine must
be left out of account, for he knows that he is dealing only with
moral judgments and not with substances. We name a thing,
from a certain point of view, good or bad, high or low, right or
left, light or dark, and so forth. Here the antithesis is just as
factual and real as the thesis. 4 It would never occur to anyone
except under very special conditions and for a definite purpose-
to define cold as a diminution of heat, depth as a diminution
of height, right as a diminution of left. With this kind of logic
one could just as well call good a diminution of evil. The psy-
chologist would, it is true, find this way of putting it a little too
pessimistic, but he would have nothing against it logically.
Instead of ninety-nine you can also say a hundred minus one,
if you don't find it too complicated. But should he, as a moral
man, catch himself glossing over an immoral act by optimis-
tically regarding it as a slight diminution of good, which alone
is real, or as an "accidental lack of perfection," then he would
immediately have to call himself to order. His better judgment
would tell him: If your evil is in fact only an unreal shadow of
your good, then your so-called good is nothing but an unreal
shadow of your real evil. If he does not reflect in this way he is
deceiving himself, and self-deceptions of this kind have dissoci-
ating effects which breed neurosis, among them feelings of in-
feriority, with all their well-known attendant phenomena.

For these reasons I have felt compelled to contest the validity
of the privatio boni so far as the empirical realm is concerned.
For the same reasons I also criticize the dictum derived from
the privatio boni, namely: "Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum
ab homine"; 5 for then on the one hand man is deprived of the
possibility of doing anything good, and on the other he is given
the seductive power of doing evil. The only dignity which is
left him is that of the fallen angeL The reader will see that I
take this dictum literally.

Criticism can be applied only to psychic phenomena, i.e.,
to ideas and concepts, and not to metaphysical entities. These

4 A recent suggestion that evil should be looked upon as a "decomposition" of
good does not alter this fact in the slightest. A rotten egg is unfortunately just as
real as a fresh one.

5 The justice of this dictum strikes me as questionable, since Adam can hardly
be held responsible for the wickedness of the serpent.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

can only be confronted with other metaphysical entities. Hence
my criticism is valid only within the empirical realm. In the
metaphysical realm, on the other hand, good may be a substance
and evil a ^ 6v. I know of no factual experience which approxi-
mates to such an assertion, so at this point the empiricist must
remain silent. Nevertheless, it is possible that here, as in the
case of other metaphysical statements, especially dogmas, there
are archetypal factors in the background, which have existed
for an indefinitely long time as preformative psychic forces and
would therefore be accessible to empirical research. In other
words, there might be a preconscious psychic tendency which,
independent of time and place, continually causes similar state-
ments to be made, as is the case with mythologems, folklore
motifs, and the individual formation of symbols. It seems to me,
however, that the existing empirical material, at least so far as
I am acquainted with it, permits of no definite conclusion as
to the archetypal background of the privatio boni. Subject to
correction, I would say that clear-cut moral distinctions are the
most recent acquisition of civilized man. That is why such dis-
tinctions are often so hazy and uncertain, unlike other anti-
thetical constructions which undoubtedly have an archetypal
nature and are the prerequisites for any act of cognition, such
as the Platonic T&Mp-S&Tepw (the Same and the Different).
460 Psychology, like every empirical science, cannot get along
without auxiliary concepts, hypotheses, and models. But the
theologian as well as the philosopher is apt to make the mistake
of taking them for metaphysical postulates. The atom of which
the physicist speaks is not an hypostasis, it is a model Similarly,
my concept of the archetype or of psychic energy is only an
auxiliary idea which can be exchanged at any time for a better
formula. From a philosophical standpoint my empirical concepts
would be logical monsters, and as a philosopher I should cut a
very sorry figure. Looked at theologically, my concept of the
anima, for instance, is pure Gnosticism; hence I am often classed
among the Gnostics. On top of that, the individuation process
develops a symbolism whose nearest affinities are to be found
in folklore, in Gnostic, alchemical, and suchlike "mystical" con-
ceptions, not to mention shamanism. When material of this kind
is adduced for comparison, the exposition fairly swarms with
"exotic" and "far-fetched" proofs, and anyone who merely

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FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS"

skims through a book instead of reading it can easily succumb
to the illusion that he is confronted with a Gnostic system. In
reality, however, individuation is an expression of that biolog-
ical process simple or complicated as the case may be by
which every living thing becomes what it was destined to be-
come from the beginning. This process naturally expresses it-
self in man as much psychically as somatically. On the psychic
side it produces those well-known quaternity symbols, for in-
stance, whose parallels are found in mental asylums as well as in
Gnosticism and other exoticisms, and last but not least in
Christian allegory. Hence it is by no means a case of mystical
speculations, but of clinical observations and their interpreta-
tion through comparison with analogous phenomena in other
fields. It is not the daring fantasy of the anatomist that can be
held responsible when he discovers the nearest analogies to the
human skeleton in certain African anthropoids of which the
layman has never heard.

461 It is certainly remarkable that my critics, with few excep-
tions, ignore the fact that, as a doctor and scientist, I proceed
from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify. Instead, they
criticize me as if I were a philosopher, or a Gnostic with pre-
tensions to supernatural knowledge. As a philosopher and
speculating heretic I am, of course, easy prey. That is probably
the reason why people prefer to ignore the facts I have discov-
ered, or to deny them without scruple. But it is the facts that
are of prime importance to me and not a provisional terminol-
ogy or attempts at theoretical reflections. The fact that arche-
types exist is not spirited away by saying that there are no inborn
ideas. I have never maintained that the archetype an sich is an
idea, but have expressly pointed out that I regard it as a form
without definite content.

462 In view of these manifold misunderstandings, I set a par-
ticularly high value on the real understanding shown by the
author, whose point de depart is diametrically opposed to that
of natural science. He has successfully undertaken to feel his
way into the empiricist's manner of thinking as far as possible,
and if he has not always entirely succeeded in his attempt, I
am the last person to blame him, for I am convinced that I am
unwittingly guilty of many an offence against the theological
way of thinking. Discrepancies of this kind can only be settled

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

by lengthy discussions, but they have their good side: not only
do two apparently incompatible mental spheres come into con-
tact, they also animate and fertilize one another. This calls for
a great deal of good will on either side, and here I can give the
author unstinted praise. He has taken the part of the opposite
standpoint very fairly, and what is especially valuable to me
has at the same time illustrated the theological standpoint in a
highly instructive way. The medical psychotherapist cannot in
the long run afford to overlook the religious systems of healing
if one may so describe certain aspects of religion any more than
the theologian, if he has the cure of souls at heart, can afford to
ignore the experience of medical psychology.

463 In the practical field of individual treatment it seems to me
that no serious difficulties should arise. These may be expected
only when the discussion begins between individual experience
and the collective truths. In most cases this necessity does not
present itself until fairly late in the treatment, if at all. In prac-
tice it quite often happens that the whole treatment takes place
on the personal plane, without the patient having any inner ex-
periences that are definite enough to necessitate his coming to
terms with the collective beliefs. If the patient remains within
the framework of his traditional faith, he will, even if stirred
or perhaps shattered by an archetypal dream, translate this ex-
perience into the language of his faith. This operation may
strike the empiricist (if he happens to be a fanatic of the truth)
as questionable, but it can pass off harmlessly and may even lead
to a satisfactory issue, in so far as it is legitimate for this type of
man. I try to impress it upon my pupils not to treat their pa-
tients as if they were all cut to the same measure: the population
consists of different historical layers. There are people who,
psychologically, might be living in the year 5000 B.C., i.e., who
can still successfully solve their conflicts as people did seven
thousand years ago. There are countless troglodytes and bar-
barians living in Europe and in all civilized countries, as well
as a large number of medieval Christians. On the other hand,
there are relatively few who have reached the level of conscious-
ness which is possible in our time. We must also reckon with
the fact that a few of our generation belong to the third or
fourth millennium A.D. and are consequently anachronistic. So
it is psychologically quite "legitimate" when a medieval man

308

FOREWORD TO WHITE'S "GOD AND THE UNCONSCIOUS"

solves his conflict today on a thirteenth-century level and treats
his shadow as the devil incarnate. For such a man any other
procedure would be unnatural and wrong, for his belief is that
of a thirteenth-century Christian. But, for the man who belongs
by temperament, i.e., psychologically, to the twentieth century,
there are certain important considerations which would never
enter the head of our medieval specimen. How much the Middle
Ages are still with us can be seen, among other things, from the
fact that such a simple truth as the psychic quality of metaphysi-
cal figures will not penetrate into people's heads. This is not a
matter of intelligence or education, or of Weltanschauung, for
the materialist also is unable to perceive to what extent, for
instance, God is a psychic quantity which nothing can deprive
of its reality, which does not insist on a definite name and which
allows itself to be called reason, energy, matter, or even ego.

464 This historical stratification must be taken into account most
carefully by the psychotherapist, likewise the possibility of a
latent capacity for development, which he would do well, how-
ever, not to take for granted.

465 Whereas the "reasonable," i.e., rationalistic, point of view is
satisfying to the man of the eighteenth century, the psycho-
logical standpoint appeals much more to the man of the twenti-
eth century. The most threadbare rationalism means more to
the former than the best psychological explanation, for he is
incapable of thinking psychologically and can operate only with
rational concepts, which must on no account savour of meta-
physics, for the latter are taboo. He will at once suspect the
psychologist of mysticism, for in his eyes a rational concept can
be neither metaphysical nor psychological. Resistances against
the psychological standpoint, which regards psychic processes as
facts, are, I fear, all equally anachronistic, including the preju-
dice of "psychologism," which does not understand the em-
pirical nature of the psyche either. To the man of the twentieth
century this is a matter of the highest importance and the very
foundation of his reality, because he has recognized once and
for all that without an observer there is no world and conse-
quently no truth, for there would be nobody to register it. The
one and only immediate guarantor of reality is the observer.
Significantly enough, the most unpsychological of all sciences,

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

physics, comes up against the observer at the decisive point.
This knowledge sets its stamp on our century.

466 it would be an anachronism, i.e., a regression, for the man
o the twentieth century to solve his conflicts either rational-
istically or metaphysically. Therefore, for better or worse, he
has built himself a psychology, because it is impossible to get
along without it. Both the theologian and the somatic doctor
would do well to give earnest consideration to this fact, if
they do not want to risk losing touch with their time. It is
not easy for the somatically oriented doctor to see his long
familiar clinical pictures and their aetiology in the unaccus-
tomed light of psychology, and in the same way it will cost the
theologian considerable effort to adjust his thinking to the new
fact of the psyche and, in particular, of the unconscious, so that
he too can reach the man of the twentieth century. No art,
science, or institution in any way concerned with human beings
can escape the effects of the development which the psychologists
and physicists have let loose, even if they oppose it with the most
stubborn prejudices.

467 Father White's book has the merit of being the first theolog-
ical work from the Catholic side to concern itself with the far-
reaching effects of the new empirical knowledge in the realm
of archetypal ideas, and to make a serious attempt to integrate it.
Although the book is addressed primarily to the theologian, the
psychologist and particularly the medical psychotherapist will
be able to glean from it a rich harvest of knowledge.

310

FOREWORD TO WERBLOWSKY'S
"LUCIFER AND PROMETHEUS" 1

468 The author has submitted his manuscript to me with the
request that I should write a few words by way of introduction.
As the subject of the book is essentially literary, I do not feel
altogether competent to express an opinion on the matter. The
author has, however, rightly discerned that, although the prob-
lem of Milton's Paradise Lost is primarily a subject for literary
criticism, it is, as a piece of confessional writing, fundamentally
bound up with certain psychological assumptions. Though he
has only touched on these at least in so many words he has
made it sufficiently plain why he has appealed to me as a psychol-
ogist. However little disposed I am to regard Dante's Divine
Comedy or Klopstock's Messiah or Milton's opus as fit subjects
for psychological commentary, I cannot but acknowledge the
acumen of the author, who has seen that the problem of Milton
might well be elucidated from that angle of research which is my
special field of study.

4 6 9 For over two thousand years the figure of Satan, both as a
theme of poetico-religious thinking and artistic creation and as

l [Originally trans, by R. F. C. Hull from the German ms. for publication in the
book by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (London, 1952). The present text contains only
minor alterations. Professor Jung subscribed the foreword March 1951. -EDITORS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

a mythologem, has been a constant expression of the psyche,
having its source in the unconscious evolution of "metaphysical"
images. We should go very wrong in our judgment if we as-
sumed that ideas such as this derive from rationalistic thinking.
All the old ideas of God, indeed thought itself, and particularly
numinous thought, have their origin in experience. Primitive
man does not think his thoughts, they simply appear in his
mind. Purposive and directed thinking is a relatively late
human achievement. The numinous image is far more an ex-
pression of essentially unconscious processes than a product of
rational inference. Consequently it falls into the category of
psychological objects, and this raises the question of the under-
lying psychological assumptions. We have to imagine a mil-
lennial process of symbol-formation which presses towards
consciousness, beginning in the darkness of prehistory with
primordial or archetypal images, and gradually developing and
differentiating these images into conscious creations. The history
of religion in the West can be taken as an illustration of this:
I mean the historical development of dogma, which also in-
cludes the figure of Satan. One of the best-known archetypes,
lost in the grey mists of antiquity, is the triad of gods. In the
early centuries of Christianity it reappears in the Christian
formula for the Trinity, whose pagan version is Hermes ter
units. Nor is it difficult to see that the great goddess of the
Ephesians has been resurrected in the QZOTOKOS. This latter prob-
lem, after lying dormant for centuries, came into circulation
again with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and, more
recently, of the Assumption of the Virgin. The figure of the
mediatrix rounds itself out in almost classical perfection, and it
is especially noteworthy that behind the solemn promulgation
of the dogma there stands no arbitrary tenet of papal authority
but an anonymous movement of the Catholic world. The
numerous miracles of the Virgin which preceded it are equally
autochthonous; they are genuine and legitimate experiences
springing directly from the unconscious psychic life of the
people.

470 I do not wish to multiply examples needlessly, but only to
make it clear that the figure of Satan, too, has undergone a curi-
ous development, from the time of his first undistinguished
appearance in the Old Testament texts to his heyday in Chris-

FOREWORD TO WERBLOWSKY'S ' 'LUCIFER AND PROMETHEUS"

tianity. He achieved notoriety as the personification of the
adversary or principle o evil, though by no means for the first
time, as we meet him centuries earlier in the ancient Egyptian
Set and the Persian Ahriman. Persian influences have been con-
jectured as mainly responsible for the Christian devil But the
real reason for the differentiation of this figure lies in the con-
ception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp
contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of
psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of an infimum
malum. No logical reasons are needed for this, only the natural
and unconscious striving for balance and symmetry. Hence very
early, in Clement of Rome, we meet with the conception of
Christ as the right hand and the devil as the left hand of God,
not to speak of the Judaeo-Christian view which recognized two
sons of God, Satan the elder and Christ the younger. The figure
of the devil then rose to such exalted metaphysical heights that
he had to be forcibly depotentiated, under the threatening influ-
ence of Manichaeism. The depotentiation was effected this
time by rationalistic reflection, by a regular tour de force of
sophistry which defined evil as a privatio boni. But that did
nothing to stop the belief from arising in many parts of Europe
during the eleventh century, mainly under the influence of the
Catharists, that it was not God but the devil who had created
the world. In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge,
who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared
in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to
be found in the cosmogonic jester 2 of primitive peoples.) With
the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an uneasy calm ensued, but
the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the
foreground. I would only mention Jakob Bohme, who sketched
a picture of evil which leaves the privatio boni pale by compari-
son. The same can be said of Milton. He inhabits the same
mental climate. As for Bohme, although he was not a direct
descendant of alchemical philosophy, whose importance is still
grossly underrated today, he certainly took over a number of
its leading ideas, among them the specific recognition of Satan,
who was exalted to a cosmic figure of first rank in Milton, even
emancipating himself from his subordinate role as the left hand
2 [Cf. Jung's "On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure." EDITORS.]

3*3

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

of God (the role assigned to him by Clement). Milton goes even
further than Bohrne and apostrophizes the devil as the true
principium individuationis, a concept which had been antici-
pated by the alchemists some time before. To mention only one
example: "Ascendit a terra in coelum, iterumque descendit in
terram et recipit vim superiorum et inferiorum. Sic habebis
gloriam totius mundi." (He rises from earth to heaven and
descends again to earth, and receives into himself the power of
above and below. Thus thou wilt have the glory of the whole
world.) The quotation comes from the famous alchemical classic,
the Tabula Smaragdina, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus,
whose authority remained unchallenged for more than thirteen
centuries of alchemical thought. His words refer not to Satan,
but to the filius philosophorum, whose symbolism, as I believe
I have shown, coincides with that of the psychological "self."
The filius of the alchemists is one of the numerous manifesta-
tions of Mercurius, who is called "duplex" and "ambiguus" and
is also known outside alchemy as "utriusque capax" capable of
anything. His "dark" half has an obvious affinity with Lucifer.
47 1 In Milton's time these ideas were very much in the air, form-
ing part of the general stock of culture, and there were not a
few Masters who realized that their philosophical stone was none
other than the "total man." The Satan-Prometheus parallel
shows clearly enough that Milton's devil stands for the essence
of human individuation and thus comes within the scope of
psychology. This close proximity, as we know, proved a danger
not only to the metaphysical status of Satan, but to that of other
numinous figures as well. With the coming of the Enlighten-
ment, metaphysics as a whole began to decline, and the rift
which then opened out between knowledge and faith could no
longer be repaired. The more resplendent figures in the meta-
physical pantheon had their autonomy restored to them prac-
tically untarnished, which assuredly cannot be said of the devil.
In Goethe's Faust he has dwindled to a very personal familiaris,
the mere "shadow" of the struggling hero. After rational-liberal
Protestantism had, as it were, deposed him by order of the day,
he retired to the shadier side of the Christian Olympus as the
"odd man out," and thus, in a manner not unwelcome to the
Church, the old principle reasserted itself: Omne bonum a

FOREWORD TO WERBLOWSKY'S "LUCIFER AND PROMETHEUS"

Deo, omne malum ab homine. The devil remains as an appendix
to psychology.

472 It is a psychological rule that when an archetype has lost its
metaphysical hypostasis, it becomes identified with the conscious
mind of the individual, which it influences and refashions in
its own form. And since an archetype always possesses a certain
numinosity, the integration of the numen generally produces
an inflation of the subject. It is therefore entirely in accord with
psychological expectations that Goethe should dub his Faust a
Superman. In recent times this type has extended beyond
Nietzsche into the field of political psychology, and its incarna-
tion in man has had all the consequences that might have been
expected to follow from such a misappropriation of power.

473 As human beings do not live in airtight compartments,
this infectious inflation has spread everywhere and given rise to
an extraordinary uncertainty in morals and philosophy. The
medical psychologist is bound to take an interest in such matters,
if only for professional reasons, and so we witness the memorable
spectacle of a psychiatrist introducing a critical study of Milton's
Paradise Lost. Meditating upon this highly incongruous con-
junction, I decided that I should best fulfil my obligations if I
explained to the well-intentioned reader how and why the devil
got into the consulting-room of the psychiatrist.

3*5

BROTHER KLAUS :

474 Before me lies a little book by Father Alban Stoeckli on the
Visions of the Blessed Brother Klaus. 2 Let the reader not be
alarmed. Though a psychiatrist takes up his pen, it does not
necessarily mean that he is going to set about this venerable
figure with the profane instrument of psychopathology. Psychi-
atrists have committed enough sins already and have put their
science to the most unsuitable uses. Nothing of the kind is to
happen here: no diagnosis or analysis will be undertaken, no
significant hints of pathological possibilities will be dropped,
and no attempt will be made to bring the Blessed Nicholas of
Flue anywhere near a psychiatric clinic. Hence it must seem
all the stranger to the reader that the reviewer of the book is a
physician. I admit this fact is difficult to explain to anyone who
does not know my unfashionable view on visions and the like.
In this respect I am a good deal less sophisticated and more con-
servative than the so-called educated public, whose philosophical
perplexity is such that it sighs with relief when visions are
equated with hallucinations, delusional ideas, mania, and schizo-

1 [First published as a review In the Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich), new
series, I (1933) : 4, 223-29. Previously trans, by Horace Gray in the Journal of
Nervous and Mental Diseases (New York, Richmond, London), GUI (1946) : 4, 359-
77. In 1947 Nicholas of Flue, "Bnider Klaus," was canonized by Pope Pius XII
and declared patron saint of Switzerland. EDITORS.]

2 [Die Fisionen des sdigen Bruder Klaus (Einsiedeln, 1933). EDITORS.]

BROTHER KLAUS

phrenia, or whatever else these morbid things may be called, and
are reduced to the right denominator by some competent au-
thority. Medically, I can find nothing wrong with Brother
Klaus. I see him as a somewhat unusual but in no wise patholog-
ical person, a man after my own heart: my brother Klaus.
Rather remote, to be sure, at this distance of more than four
hundred years, separated by culture and creed, by those fashion-
able trifles which we always think constitute a world. Yet they
amount to no more than linguistic difficulties, and these do not
impede understanding of the essentials. So little, in fact, that
I was able to converse, in the primitive language of inward
vision, with a man who in every way was even further removed
from me than Brother Klaus a Pueblo Indian, my friend
Ochwiabiano ("Mountain Lake"). For what interests us here
is not the historical personage, not the well-known figure at the
Diet of Stans, 3 but the "friend of God," who appeared but a few
times on the world stage, yet lived a long life in the realms of
the soul. Of what he there experienced he left behind only scant
traces, so few and inarticulate that it is hard for posterity to
form any picture of his inner life.

475 It has always intrigued me to know what a hermit does with
himself all day long. Can we still imagine a real spiritual an-
chorite nowadays, one who has not simply crept away to vegetate
in misanthropic simplicity? A solitary fellow, like an old ele-
phant who resentfully defies the herd instinct? Can we imagine
a normal person living a sensible, vital existence by himself,
with no visible partner?

47 6 Brother Klaus had a house, wife, and children, and we do
not know of any external factors which could have induced him
to become a hermit. The sole reason for this was his singular
inner life; experiences for which no merely natural grounds
can be adduced, decisive experiences which accompanied him
from youth up. These things seemed to him of more value than
ordinary human existence. They were probably the object of
his daily interest and the source of his spiritual vitality. It

3 [The Diet of Stans was a meeting in 1481 of representatives of the Swiss cantons
at which disputes between the predominantly rural and the predominantly urban
cantons were regulated, and as a result of which largely through the intervention
of Nicholas Fribourg and Solothurn became members of the Confederation. Cf.
Cambridge Medieval History, VII, p. 210. EDITORS.]

3 1 ?

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

sounds rather like an anecdote from the life of a scholar who
is completely immersed in his studies when the so-called "Pil-
grim's Tract" 4 relates: "And he [Brother Klaus] began to speak
again and said to me, If it does not trouble you, I would like
to show you my book, in which I am learning and seeking the
art of this doctrine.* And he brought me a figure, drawn like a
wheel with six spokes/* So evidently Brother Klaus studied
some mysterious "doctrine" or other; he sought to understand
and interpret the things that happened to him* That the her-
mit's activity was a sort of study must also have occurred to
Gundolfingen, 5 one of the oldest writers on our subject. He
says: "Did he not likewise learn in that High School of the Holy
Ghost the representation of the wheel, which he caused to be
painted in his chapel, and through which, as in a clear mirror,
was reflected the entire essence of the Godhead?" From the same
"High School" he derived "his kindness, his doctrine, and his
science."

477 Here we are concerned with the so-called Trinity Vision,
which was of the greatest significance for the hermit's inner life.
According to the oldest reports, it was an apparition of light,
of surpassing intensity, in the form of a human face. The first-
hand reports make no mention of a "wheel." This seems to have
been a subsequent addition for the purpose of clarifying the
vision. Just as a stone, falling into calm water, produces wave
after wave of circles, so a sudden and violent vision of this kind
has long-lasting after-effects, like any shock. And the stranger
and more impressive the initial vision was, the longer it will take
to be assimilated, and the greater and more persevering will be
the efforts of the mind to master it and render it intelligible to
human understanding. Such a vision is a tremendous "irrup-
tion" in the most literal sense of the word, and it has therefore
always been customary to draw rings round it like those made
by the falling stone when it breaks the smooth surface of the
water,

4 Em nutzlicher und loblicher Tractat von Bruder Glaus und einem Bilger (Niim-
berg, 1488). The actual author is anonymous, according to Robert Durrer, Bruder
Klaus.

5 Heinrich Gundolfingen (Gundelfingen or Gundelfinger), c. 1444-90, priest and
professor of humanistic studies at the University of Fribourg, knew Klaus prob-
ably around the year 1480, and wrote his biography.

318

BROTHER KLAUS

478 Now what has "irrupted" here, and wherein lies its mighty
"impression"? The oldest source, Wolflin's biography, 6 narrates
the following on this score:

All who came to him were filled with terror at the first glance. As
to the cause of this, he himself used to say that he had seen a piercing
light resembling a human face. At the sight of it he feared that his
heart would burst into little pieces. Overcome with terror, he in-
stantly turned his face away and fell to the ground. And that was
the reason why his face was now terrible to others.

This is borne out by the account which the humanist Karl
Bovillus (Charles de Bouelles) gave to a friend in 1508 (some
twenty years after the death of Brother Klaus):

I wish to tell you of a vision which appeared to him in the sky, on a
night when the stars were shining and he stood in prayer and con-
templation. He saw the head of a human figure with a terrifying
face, full of wrath and threats. 7

So we shall not go wrong in surmising that the vision was terrify-
ing in the extreme. When we consider that the mental attitude
of that age, and in particular that of Brother Klaus, allowed no
other interpretation than that this vision represented God him-
self, and that God signified the summum bonum, Absolute Per-
fection, then it is clear that such a vision must, by its violent
contrast, have had a profound and shattering effect, whose as-
similation into consciousness required years of the most strenu-
ous spiritual effort. Through subsequent elaboration this vision
then became the so-called Trinity Vision. As Father Stoeckli
rightly conjectures, the "wheel" or circles were formed on the
basis of, and as parallels to, the illustrated devotional books that
were read at the time. As mentioned above, Brother Klaus even
seems to have possessed such a book himself. Later, as a result
of further mental elaboration, there were added the spokes of
the wheel and the six secondary circles, as shown in the old pic-
ture of the vision in the parish church at Sachseln.

6 Heinrich Wolfiin, also called by the Latin form Lupulus, born 1470, humanist
and director of Latin studies at Bern.

1 Ein gesichte Bruder Clausen ynn Schweytz und seine deutunge (Wittenberg,
1528), p. 5. Cited in Stoeckli, p. 34.

3*9

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

479 The vision of light was not the only one which Brother
Klaus had. He even thought that, while still in his mother's
womb, he had seen a star that outshone all others in brightness,
and later, in his solitude, he saw a very similar star repeatedly.
The vision of light had, therefore, occurred several times be-
fore in his life. Light means illumination; it is an illuminating
idea that "irrupts. Using a very cautious formulation, we
could say that the underlying factor here is a considerable ten-
sion of psychic energy, evidently corresponding to some very
important unconscious content. This content has an overpower-
ing effect and holds the conscious mind spellbound. The tre-
mendous power of the "objective psychic" has been named
"demon" or "God" in all epochs with the sole exception of the
recent present. We have become so bashful in matters of religion
that we correctly say "unconscious," because God has in fact
become unconscious to us. This is what always happens when
things are interpreted, explained, and dogmatized until they
become so encrusted with man-made images and words that they
can no longer be seen. Something similar seems to have hap-
pened to Brother Klaus, which is why the immediate experience
burst upon him with appalling terror. Had his vision been as
charming and edifying as the present picture at Sachseln, no
such terror would ever have emanated from it.

480 "God' 1 is a primordial experience of man, and from the re-
motest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to
portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of
interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And
again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one
hears too much about the "good" God and knows him too well,
so that one confuses him with one's own ideas and regards them
as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand
years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as
the Bolshevist delusion that "God" can be educated out of ex-
istence. Even a modern theologian like Gogarten s is quite sure
that God can only be good. A good man does not terrify me
what then would Gogarten have made of the Blessed Brother
Klaus? Presumably he would have had to explain to him that
he had seen the devil in person.

8 [Frledrich Gogarten (b. 1887), recently professor of systematic theology at
Gottingen; author of Die Kirche in der Welt (1948). EDITORS.]

320

BROTHER KLAUS

481 And here we are in the midst of that ancient dilemma of
how such visions are to be evaluated. I would suggest taking
every genuine case at its face value. If it was an overwhelming
experience for so worthy and shrewd a man as Brother Klaus,
then I do not hesitate to call it a true and veritable experience
of God, even if it turns out not quite right dogmatically. Great
saints were, as we know, sometimes great heretics, so it is proba-
ble that anyone who has immediate experience of God is a little
bit outside the organization one calls the Church. The Church
itself would have been in a pretty pass if the Son of God had
remained a law-abiding Pharisee, a point one tends to forget.

482 There are many indubitable lunatics who have experiences
of God, and here too I do not contest the genuineness of the
experience, for I know that it takes a complete and a brave man
to stand up to it. Therefore I feel sorry for those who go under,
and I shall not add insult to injury by saying that they tripped
up on a mere psychologism. Besides, one can never know in
what form a man will experience God, for there are very pe-
culiar things just as there are very peculiar people like those,
for instance, who think that one can make anything but a con-
ceptual distinction between the individual experience of God
and God himself. It would certainly be desirable to make this
distinction, but to do so one would have to know what God is
in and for himself, which does not seem to me possible.

483 Brother Klaus's vision was a genuine primordial experience,
and it therefore seemed to him particularly necessary to submit
it to a thorough dogmatic revision. Loyally and with great efforts
he applied himself to this task, the more so as he was smitten
with terror in every limb so that even strangers took fright. The
unconscious taint of heresy that probably clings to all genuine
and unexpurgated visions is only hinted at in the Trinity Vision,
but in the touched-up version it has been successfully elimi-
nated. All the affectivity, the very thing that made the strongest
impression, has vanished without a trace, thus affording at least
a negative proof of our interpretation.

484 Brother Klaus's elucidation of his vision with the help of
the three circles (the so-called "wheel") is in keeping with age-
old human practice, which goes back to the Bronze Age sun-
wheels (often found in Switzerland) and to the mandalas de-
picted in the Rhodesian rock-drawings. These sun-wheels may

321

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

possibly be paleolithic; we find them in Mexico, India, Tibet,
and China. The Christian mandalas probably date back to St.
Augustine and his definition of God as a circle. Presumably
Henry Suso's notions o the circle, which were accessible to the
"Friends of God," were derived from the same source. But even
if this whole tradition had been cut off and no little treatise with
mandalas in the margin had ever come to light, and if Brother
Klaus had never seen the rose-window of a church, he would
still have succeeded in working his great experience into the
shape of a circle, because this is what has always happened in
every part of the world and still goes on happening today. 9

485 We spoke above of heresy. In Father Stoeckli's newly found
fragment describing the vision, there is another vision which
contains an interesting parallelism. I put the two passages side
by side for the sake of comparison:

There came a handsome majestic There came a beautiful majestic

man through the palace, with a woman through the palace, also

shining colour in his face, and in in a white garment. . . . And

a white garment. And he laid she laid both arms on his shoul-

both arms on his shoulders and ders and pressed him close to her

pressed him close and thanked heart with an overflowing love,

him with all the fervent love of because he had stood so faith-

his heart, because he had stood fully by her son in his need,
by Ms son and helped him in his
need.

486 It is clear that this is a vision of God the Father and Son,
and of the Mother of God. The palace is heaven, where "God
the Father" dwells, and also "God the Mother." In pagan form
they are unmistakably God and Goddess, as their absolute
parallelism shows. The androgynity of the divine Ground is
characteristic of mystic experience. In Indian Tantrism the
masculine Shiva and the feminine Shakti both proceed from
Brahman, which is devoid of qualities. Man as the son of the
Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother is an age-old conception
which goes back to primitive times, and in this vision the
Blessed Brother Klaus is set on a par with the Son of God. The
Trinity in this vision Father, Mother, and Son is very undog-

9 More on this in Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, and
Wilhebn, The Secret of the Golden Flower, together with my commentary.

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BROTHER KLAUS

matic indeed. Its nearest parallel is the exceedingly unorthodox
Gnostic Trinity: God, Sophia, Christ. The Church, however,
has expunged the feminine nature of the Holy Ghost, though it
is still suggested by the symbolic dove.

487 It is nice to think that the only outstanding Swiss mystic
received, by God's grace, unorthodox visions and was permitted
to look with unerring eye into the depths of the divine soul,
where all the creeds of humanity which dogma has divided are
united in one symbolic archetype. As I hope Father Stoeckli's
little book will find many attentive readers, I shall not discuss
the Vision of the Well, nor the Vision of the Man with the
Bearskin, although from the standpoint of comparative sym-
bolism they offer some very interesting aspects for I do not
want to deprive the reader of the pleasure of finding out their
meaning by himself.

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE
CURE OF SOULS

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY 2

488 It is far more the urgent psychic problems of patients, rather
than the curiosity of research workers, that have given effective
impetus to the recent developments in medical psychology
and psychotherapy. Medical science almost in defiance of the
patients' needs has held aloof from all contact with strictly
psychic problems, on the partly justifiable assumption that
psychic problems belong to other fields of study. But it has been
compelled to widen its scope so as to include experimental psy-
chology, just as it has been driven time and time again out of
regard for the biological unity of the human being to borrow
from such outlying branches of science as chemistry, physics,
and biology.

489 It was natural that the branches of science adopted by medi-
cine should be given a new direction. We can characterize the
change by saying that instead of being regarded as ends in them-
selves they were valued for their practical application to human
beings. Psychiatry, for example, helped itself out of the treasure-
chest of experimental psychology and its methods, and funded
its borrowings in the inclusive body of knowledge that we call

i [First given as a lecture before the Alsatian Pastoral Conference at Strasbourg

in May 1932; published as a pamphlet, Die Beziehungen der Psychotherapie zur
Sedsorge (Zurich, 1932). Previously translated by W. S. Dell and Gary F. Baynes
in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London and New York, 1933). EDITORS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

psychopathology a name for the study of complex psychic
phenomena. Psychopathology is built for one part on the find-
ings of psychiatry in the strict sense of the term, and for the
other part on the findings of neurology a field of study which
originally embraced the so-called psychogenic neuroses, and
still does so in academic parlance. In practice, however, a gulf
has opened out in the last few decades between the trained neu-
rologist and the psychotherapist, especially after the first re-
searches in hypnotism. This rift was unavoidable, because
neurology, strictly speaking, is the science of organic nervous
diseases, whereas the psychogenic neuroses are not organic dis-
eases in the usual sense o the term. Nor do they fall within the
realm of psychiatry, whose particular field of study is the
psychoses, or mental diseasesfor the psychogenic neuroses are
not mental diseases as this term is commonly understood. Rather
do they constitute a special field by themselves with no hard
and fast boundaries, and they show many transitional forms
which point in two directions: towards mental disease on the
one hand, and diseases of the nerves on the other.

49 The unmistakable feature of the neuroses is the fact that
their causes are psychic, and that their cure depends entirely
upon psychic methods of treatment. The attempts to delimit and.
explore this special field both from the side of psychiatry and
from that of neurology led to a discovery which was very un-
welcome to the science of medicine: namely, the discovery of
the psyche as an aetiological or causal factor in disease. In the
course of the nineteenth century medicine had become, in its
methods and theory, one of the disciplines of natural science,
and it cherished the same basically philosophical assumption of
material causation. For medicine, the psyche as a mental "sub-
stance" did not exist, and experimental psychology also did its
best to constitute itself a psychology without a psyche.

491 Investigation, however, has established beyond a doubt that
the crux of the psychoneuroses is the psychic factor, that this is
the essential cause of the pathological state, and must therefore
be recognized in its own right along with other admitted patho-
genic factors such as inheritance, disposition, bacterial infection,
and so forth. All attempts to explain the psychic factor in terms
of more elementary physical factors were doomed to failure.
There was more promise in the attempt to reduce it to the con-

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PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

cept of the drive or instinct a concept taken over from biology.
It is well known that instincts are observable physiological urges
based on the functioning of the glands, and that, as experience
shows, they condition or influence psychic processes. What
could be more plausible, therefore, than to seek the specific
cause of the psychoneuroses not in the mystical notion of the
"soul/' but in a disturbance of the instincts which might pos-
sibly be curable in the last resort by medicinal treatment of
the glands?

492 Freud's theory of the neuroses is based on this standpoint:
it explains them in terms of disturbances of the sexual instinct.
Adler likewise resorts to the concept of the drive, and explains
the neuroses in terms of disturbances of the urge to power, a
concept which, we must admit, is a good deal more psychic than
that of the physiological sexual instinct.

493 The term "instinct" is anything but well defined in the scien-
tific sense. It applies to a biological phenomenon of immense
complexity, and is not much more than a border-line concept
of quite indefinite content standing for an unknown quantity.
I do not wish to enter here upon a critical discussion of instinct.
Instead I will consider the possibility that the psychic factor is
just a combination of instincts which for their part may again
be reduced to the functioning of the glands. We may even con-
sider the possibility that everything "psychic" is comprised in
the sum total of instincts, and that the psyche itself is therefore
only an instinct or a conglomerate of instincts, being in the last
analysis nothing but a function of the glands. A psychoneurosis
would then be a glandular disease.

^94 There is, however, no proof of this statement, and no glandu-
lar extract that will cure a neurosis has yet been found. On the
other hand, we have been taught by all too many mistakes that
organic therapy fails completely in the treatment of neuroses,
while psychic methods cure them. These psychic methods are
just as effective as we might suppose the glandular extracts
would be. So far, then, as our present knowledge goes, neuroses
are to be influenced or cured by approaching them not from the
proximal end, i.e., from the functioning of the glands, but from
the distal end, i.e., from the psyche, just as if the psyche were
itself a substance. For instance, a suitable explanation or a com-
forting word to the patient can have something like a healing

3*9

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

effect which may even influence the glandular secretions. The
doctor's words, to be sure, are "only" vibrations in the air, yet
their special quality is due to a particular psychic state in the
doctor. His words are effective only in so far as they convey a
meaning or have significance. It is this that makes them work.
But "meaning" is something mental or spiritual. Call it a fiction
i you like. Nevertheless this fiction enables us to influence the
course of the disease far more effectively than we could with
chemical preparations. Indeed, we can even influence the bio-
chemical processes of the body. Whether the fiction forms itself
in me spontaneously or reaches me from outside via human
speech, it can make me ill or cure me. Fictions, illusions, opin-
ions are perhaps the most intangible and unreal things we can
think of; yet they are the most effective of all in the psychic and
even the psychophysical realm.

495 It was by recognizing these facts that medicine discovered
the psyche, and it can no longer honestly deny the psyche's real-
ity. It has been shown that the instincts are a condition of
psychic activity, while at the same time psychic processes seem
to condition the instincts.

49 6 The reproach levelled at the Freudian and Adlerian theories
is not that they are based on instincts, but that they are one-
sided. It is psychology without the psyche, and this suits people
who think they have no spiritual needs or aspirations. But here
both doctor and patient deceive themselves. Even though the
theories of Freud and Adler come much nearer to getting at
the bottom of the neuroses than any earlier approach from the
medical side, their exclusive concern with the instincts fails to
satisfy the deeper spiritual needs of the patient. They are too
much bound by the premises of nineteenth-century science, too
matter of fact, and they give too little value to fictional and
imaginative processes. In a word, they do not give enough mean-
ing to life. And it is only meaning that liberates.

497 Ordinary reasonableness, sound human judgment, science
as a compendium of common sense, these certainly help us over
a good part of the road, but they never take us beyond the fron-
tiers of life's most commonplace realities, beyond the merely
average and normal. They afford no answer to the question of
psychic suffering and its profound significance. A psychoneu-
rosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

which has not discovered its meaning. But all creativeness in
the realm of the spirit as well as every psychic advance of man
arises from the suffering of the soul, and the cause of the suffer-
ing is spiritual stagnation, or psychic sterility.

49 8 With this realization the doctor sets foot on territory which
he enters with the greatest caution. He is now confronted with
the necessity of conveying to his patient the healing fiction, the
meaning that quickensfor it is this that the sick person longs
for, over and above everything that reason and science can give
him. He is looking for something that will take possession of
him and give meaning and form to the confusion of his neurotic
soul.

499 Is the doctor equal to this task? To begin with, he will prob-
ably hand his patient over to the clergyman or philosopher, or
abandon him to that vast perplexity which is the special note
of our day. As a doctor he is not required to have a finished out-
look on life, and his professional conscience does not demand it
of him. But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why
his patient is ill; when he sees that he has no love, but only sexu-
ality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope,
because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no
understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of
his own existence?

500 There are many well-educated patients who flatly refuse to
consult a clergyman. Still less will they listen to a philosopher,
for the history of philosophy leaves them cold, and intellectual
problems seem to them more barren than the desert. And where
are the great and wise men who do not merely talk about the
meaning of life and of the world, but really possess it? One can-
not just think up a system or truth which would give the patient
what he needs in order to live, namely faith, hope, love, and
understanding.

50* These four highest achievements of human endeavour are
so many gifts of grace, which are neither to be taught nor
learned, neither given nor taken, neither withheld nor earned,
since they come through experience, which is an irrational
datum not subject to human will and caprice. Experiences can-
not be made. They happen yet fortunately their independence
of man's activity is not absolute but relative. We can draw
closer to them that much lies within our human reach. There

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

are ways which bring us nearer to living experience, yet we
should beware of calling these ways "methods." The very word
has a deadening effect. The way to experience, moreover, is
anything but a clever trick; it is rather a venture which requires
us to commit ourselves with our whole being.

52 Thus, in trying to meet the therapeutic demands made upon
him, the doctor is confronted with a question w r hich seems to
contain an insuperable difficulty. How can he help the sufferer
to attain the liberating experience which will bestow upon him
the four great gifts of grace and heal his sickness? We can, of
course, advise the patient with the best intentions that he should
have true love, or true faith, or true hope; and we can admonish
him with the phrase: "Knoxv thyself." But how is the patient to
obtain beforehand that which only experience can give him?

53 Saul owed his conversion neither to true love, nor to true
faith, nor to any other truth. It was solely his hatred of the
Christians that set him on the road to Damascus, and to that
decisive experience which was to alter the whole course of his
life. He was brought to this experience by following out, with
conviction, his own worst mistake.

504 This opens up a problem which we can hardly take too seri-
ously. And it confronts the psychotherapist with a question
which brings him shoulder to shoulder with the clergyman: the
question of good and evil.

55 It is in reality the priest or the clergyman, rather than the
doctor, who should be most concerned with the problem of
spiritual suffering. But in most cases the sufferer consults the
doctor in the first place, because he supposes himself to be phys-
ically ill, and because certain neurotic symptoms can be at least
alleviated by drugs. But if, on the other hand, the clergyman
is consulted, he cannot persuade the sick man that the trouble
is psychic. As a rule he lacks the special knowledge which would
enable him to discern the psychic factors of the disease, and his
judgment is without the weight of authority.

5 There are, however, persons who, while well aware of the
psychic nature of their complaint, nevertheless refuse to turn
to the clergyman. They do not believe that he can really help
them. Such persons distrust the doctor for the same reason, and
rightly so, for the truth is that both doctor and clergyman stand
before them with empty hands, if not what is even worse

33*

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

with empty words. We can hardly expect the doctor to have any-
thing to say about the ultimate questions of the soul. It is from
the clergyman, not from the doctor, that the sufferer should ex-
pect such help. But the Protestant clergyman often finds him-
self face to face with an almost impossible task, for he has to
cope with practical difficulties that the Catholic priest is spared.
Above all, the priest has the authority of his Church behind
him, and his economic position is secure and independent. This
is far less true of the Protestant clergyman, who may be married
and burdened with the responsibility of a family, and cannot
expect, if all else fails, to be supported by the parish or taken
into a monastery. Moreover the priest, if he is also a Jesuit, is
au fait with the most up-to-date developments in psychology. I
know, for instance, that my own writings were seriously studied
in Rome long before any Protestant theologian thought them
worthy of a glance.

57 We have come to a serious pass. The exodus from the Ger-
man Protestant Church is only one of many symptoms which
should make it plain to the clergy that mere admonitions to
believe, or to perform acts of charity, do not give modern man
what he is looking for. The fact that many clergymen seek sup-
port or practical help from Freud's theory of sexuality or Adler's
theory of power is astonishing, inasmuch as both these theories
are, at bottom, hostile to spiritual values, being, as I have said,
psychology without the psyche. They are rationalistic methods
of treatment which actually hinder the realization of meaning-
ful experience. By far the larger number of psychotherapists are
disciples of Freud or of Adler. This means that the great ma-
jority of patients are necessarily alienated from a spiritual stand-
pointa fact which cannot be a matter of indifference to one
who has the fate of the psyche at heart. The wave of interest in
psychology which at present is sweeping over the Protestant
countries of Europe is far from receding. It is coincident with
the mass exodus from the Church. Quoting a Protestant min-
ister, I may say: "Nowadays people go to the psychotherapist
rather than to the clergyman."

508 I am convinced that this statement is true only of relatively
educated persons, not of mankind in the mass. However, we
must not forget that it takes about twenty years for the ordinary
run of people to begin thinking the thoughts of the educated

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person of today. For Instance, Biichner's work Force and
Matter 2 became one of the most widely read books in German
public libraries some twenty years after educated persons had for-
gotten all about it. I am convinced that the psychological needs
of the educated today will be the interests of the people to-
morrow.

509 I should like to call attention to the following facts. During
the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of
the earth have consulted me. Many hundreds of patients have
passed through my hands, the greater number being Protestants,
a lesser number Jews, and not more than five or six believing
Catholics. Among all my patients in the second half of life that
is to say, over thirty-fivethere has not been one whose problem
in the last resort w r as not that of finding a religious outlook on
life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he
had lost what the living religions of every age have given to
their followers, and none of them has been really healed who
did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing
whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a
church.

5*0 Here, then, the clergyman stands before a vast horizon. But
it would seem as if no one had noticed it. It also looks as though
the Protestant clergyman of today were insufficiently equipped
to cope with the urgent psychic needs of our age. It is indeed
high time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join
forces to meet this great spiritual task.

5 11 Here is a concrete example which goes to show how closely
this problem touches us all. A little more than a year ago the
leaders of the Christian Students' Conference at Aarau [Switzer-
land] laid before me the question whether people in spiritual
distress prefer nowadays to consult the doctor rather than the
clergyman, and what are the causes of their choice. This was a
very direct and very practical question. At the time I knew noth-
ing more than the fact that my own patients obviously had con-
sulted the doctor rather than the clergyman. It seemed to me to
be open to doubt whether this was generally the case or not. At
any rate, I was unable to give a definite reply. I therefore set on
foot an inquiry, through acquaintances of mine, among people

2 [Ludwig Biichner (1824-99), German materialistic philosopher. His Kraft und

Stoff was pub. 1855. EDITORS.]

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PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

whom I did not know personally; I sent out a questionnaire
which was answered by Swiss, German, and French Protestants,
as well as by a few Catholics. The results are very interesting,
as the following general summary shows. Those who decided
for the doctor represented 57 per cent of the Protestants and
only 25 per cent of the Catholics, while those who decided for
the clergyman formed only 8 per cent of the Protestants as
against 58 per cent of the Catholics. These were the unequivocal
decisions. The remaining 35 per cent of the Protestants could
not make up their minds, w r hile only 17 per cent of the Catholics
were undecided.

5*2 The main reasons given for not consulting the clergyman
were, firstly, his lack of psychological knowledge and insight,
and this covered 52 per cent of the answers. Some 28 per cent
were to the effect that he w r as prejudiced in his views and
showed a dogmatic and traditional bias. Curiously enough,
there was even one clergyman who decided for the doctor, while
another made the irritated retort: "Theology has nothing to do
with the treatment of human beings. All the relatives of clergy-
men who answered my questionnaire pronounced themselves
against the clergy.

5*3 So far as this inquiry was restricted to educated persons, it
is only a straw in the wind. I am convinced that the uneducated
classes would have reacted differently. But I am inclined to
accept these sample results as a more or less valid indication
of the views of educated people, the more so as it is a well-known
fact that their indifference in matters of the Church and re-
ligion is steadily growing. Nor should we forget the above-men-
tioned truth of social psychology: that it takes about twenty
years for the general outlook and problems of the educated to
percolate down to the uneducated masses. Who, for instance,
would have dared to prophesy twenty years ago, or even ten,
that Spain, the most Catholic of European countries, would
undergo the tremendous mental revolution we are witnessing
today? 8 And yet it has broken out with the violence of a
cataclysm.

5H It seems to me that, side by side with the decline of religious
life, the neuroses grow noticeably more frequent. There are as

3 [Under the second republic, established in 1931 and later overthrown by the
Franco forces. EDITORS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

yet no statistics with actual figures to prove this increase. But
of one thing I am sure, that everywhere the mental state of
European man shows an alarming lack of balance. We are living
undeniably in a period of the greatest restlessness, nervous ten-
sion, confusion, and disorientation of outlook. Among my pa-
tients from many countries, all of them educated persons, there
is a considerable number who came to see me not because they
were suffering from a neurosis but because they could find no
meaning in their lives or were torturing themselves with ques-
tions which neither our philosophy nor our religion could
answer. Some of them perhaps thought I knew of a magic
formula, but I soon had to tell them that I didn't know the
answer either. And this brings us to practical considerations.

5*5 Let us take for example that most ordinary and frequent of
questions: What is the meaning of my life, or of life in general?
Today people believe that they know only too well what the
clergyman will or rather must say to this. They smile at the
very thought of the philosopher's answer, and in general do not
expect much of the physician. But from the psychotherapist who
analyses the unconscious from him one might at last learn
something. Perhaps he has dug up from the abstruse depths of
his mind, among other things, some meaning which could even
be bought for a fee! It must be a relief to every serious-minded
person to hear that the psychotherapist also does not know what
to say. Such a confession is often the beginning of the patient's
confidence in him.

5 l6 I have found that modern man has an ineradicable aversion
for traditional opinions and inherited truths. He is a Bolshevist
for whom all the spiritual standards and forms of the past have
somehow lost their validity, and who therefore wants to experi-
ment with his mind as the Bolshevist experiments with econom-
ics. Confronted with this attitude, every ecclesiastical system
finds itself in an awkward situation, be it Catholic, Protestant,
Buddhist, or Confucianist. Among these moderns there are of
course some of those negative, destructive, and perverse natures
degenerates and unbalanced eccentrics who are never satis-
fied anywhere, and who therefore flock to every new banner,
much to the hurt of these movements and undertakings, in the
hope of finding something for once which will compensate at
low cost for their own ineptitude. It goes without saying that,

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

in my professional work, I have come to know a great many
modern men and women, including of course their pathological
hangers-on. But these I prefer to leave aside. Those I am think-
ing of are by no means sickly eccentrics, but are very often
exceptionally able, courageous, and upright persons who have
repudiated traditional truths for honest and decent reasons, and
not from wickedness of heart. Every one of them has the feeling
that our religious truths have somehow become hollow. Either
they cannot reconcile the scientific and the religious outlook, or
the Christian tenets have lost their authority and their psycho-
logical justification. People no longer feel redeemed by the
death of Christ; they cannot believe for although it is a lucky
man who can believe, it is not possible to compel belief. Sin
has become something quite relative: what is evil for one man
is good for another. After all, why should not the Buddha be
right too?

5*7 There is no one w r ho is not familiar with these questions and
doubts. Yet Freudian analysis would brush them all aside as
irrelevant, for in its view, it is basically a question of repressed
sexuality, which the philosophical or religious doubts only serve
to mask. If we closely examine an individual case of this sort,
we do discover peculiar disturbances in the sexual sphere as well
as in the sphere of unconscious impulses in general. Freud sees
in the presence of these disturbances an explanation of the
psychic disturbance as a whole; he is interested only in the causal
interpretation of the sexual symptoms. He completely overlooks
the fact that, in certain cases, the supposed causes of the neurosis
were always present, but had no pathological effect until a dis-
turbance of the conscious attitude set in and led to a neurotic
upset. It is as though, when a ship was sinking because of a leak,
the crew interested itself in the chemical constitution of the
water that was pouring in, instead of stopping the leak. The
disturbance of the instinctual sphere is not a primary but a
secondary phenomenon. When conscious life has lost its mean-
ing and promise, it is as though a panic had broken loose: "Let
us eat and drink, for tomorrow 7 we die!" It is this mood, born of
the meaninglessness of life, that causes the disturbance in the
unconscious and provokes the painfully curbed instincts to
break out anew. The causes of a neurosis lie in the present as
much as in the past, and only a cause actually existing in the

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

present can keep a neurosis active. A man is not tubercular be-
cause he was infected twenty years ago with bacilli, but because
active foci of infection are present now. The questions when
and how the infection occurred are totally irrelevant. Even the
most accurate knowledge of the previous history cannot cure the
tuberculosis. And the same holds true of the neuroses.

5 l8 That is why I regard the religious problems which the pa-
tient puts before me as authentic and as possible causes of the
neurosis. But if I take them seriously, I must be able to confess
to the patient: "Yes, I agree, the Buddha may be just as right as
Jesus. Sin is only relative, and it is difficult to see how we can
feel ourselves in any way redeemed by the death of Christ." As
a doctor I can easily admit these doubts, while It is hard for the
clergyman to do so. The patient feels my attitude to be one of
understanding, while the parson's hesitation strikes him as a
traditional prejudice, and this estranges them from one another.
He asks himself: "What would the parson say if I began to tell
him of the painful details of my sexual disturbances?" He
rightly suspects that the parson's moral prejudice is even
stronger than his dogmatic bias. In this connection there is a
good story about the American president, "silent Cal" Coolidge.
When he returned after an absence one Sunday morning his
wife asked him where he had been. "To church," he replied.
"What did the minister say?" "He talked about sin." "And
what did he say about sin?" "He was against it."

5*9 It is easy for the doctor to show understanding in this re-
spect, you will say. But people forget that even doctors have
moral scruples, and that certain patients* confessions are hard
even for a doctor to swallow. Yet the patient does not feel him-
self accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too. No
one can bring this about by mere words; it comes only through
reflection and through the doctor's attitude towards himself
and his own dark side. If the doctor wants to guide another,
or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that
person's psyche. He never feels it when he passes judgment.
Whether he puts his judgments into words, or keeps them to
himself, makes not the slightest difference. To take the opposite
position, and to agree with the patient offhand, is also of no
use, but estranges him as much as condemnation. Feeling comes
only through unprejudiced objectivity. This sounds almost like

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PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

a scientific precept, and it could be confused with a purely in-
tellectual, abstract attitude of mind. But what I mean is some-
thing quite different. It is a human quality a kind of deep
respect for the facts, for the man who suffers from them, and
for the riddle of such a man's life. The truly religious person
has this attitude. He knows that God has brought all sorts of
strange and inconceivable things to pass and seeks in the most
curious ways to enter a man's heart. He therefore senses in every-
thing the unseen presence of the divine will. This is what I
mean by "unprejudiced objectivity." It is a moral achievement
on the part of the doctor, who ought not to let himself be re-
pelled by sickness and corruption. We cannot change anything
unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it op-
presses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his
friend and fellow-sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that
we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and im-
prove. But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must
be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only
when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.

520 Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are al-
ways the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art
to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the
moral problem and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life.
That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my
enemy in the name of Christ all these are undoubtedly great
virtues. What I do unto the least o my brethren, that I do unto
Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst
them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all
offenders, yea the very fiend himself that these are within me,
and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness,
that I myself am the enemy who must be loved what then?
Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed:
there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say
to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against
ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having
met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God
himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should
have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had
crowed.

521 Anyone who uses modern psychology to look behind the

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scene not only of his patients' lives but more especially of his
own life and the modern psychotherapist must do this if he is
not to be merely an unconscious fraud will admit that to
accept himself in all his wretchedness is the hardest of tasks, and
one which it is almost impossible to fulfil. The very thought
can make us sweat with fear. We are therefore only too de-
lighted to choose, without a moment's hesitation, the compli-
cated course of remaining in ignorance about ourselves while
busying ourselves with other people and their troubles and
sins. This activity lends us a perceptible air of virtue, by means
of which we benevolently deceive ourselves and others* God be
praised, we have escaped from ourselves at last! There are count-
less people who can do this with impunity, but not everyone
can, and these few break down on the road to their Damascus
and succumb to a neurosis. How can I help these people if I
myself am a fugitive, and perhaps also suffer from the morbus
sacer of a neurosis? Only he who has fully accepted himself has
"unprejudiced objectivity." But no one is justified in boasting
that he has fully accepted himself. We can point to Christ, who
sacrificed his historical bias to the god within him, and lived
his individual life to the bitter end without regard for conven-
tions or for the moral standards of the Pharisees.
522 \v e Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are
we to understand the "imitation of Christ" in the sense that we
should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his
stigmata; or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own
proper lives as truly as he lived his in its individual unique-
ness? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on
Christ's, but it is unspeakably harder to live one's own life as
truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would run
counter to the conditions of his own history, and though he
might thus be fulfilling them, he would none the less be mis-
judged, derided, tortured, and crucified. He would be a kind of
crazy Bolshevist who deserved the cross. We therefore prefer
the historically sanctioned and sanctified imitation of Christ. I
would never disturb a monk in the practice of this identifica-
tion, for he deserves our respect. But neither I nor my patients
are monks, and it is my duty as a physician to show my patients
how they can live their lives without becoming neurotic, Neu*
rosis is an inner cleavage the state of being at war with oneself.

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PSYCHOTHERAPISTS OR THE CLERGY

Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient
worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal him. What
drives people to war with themselves is the suspicion or the
knowledge that they consist o two persons in opposition to one
another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spir-
itual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust
means when he says: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart/*
A neurosis is a splitting of personality.

523 Healing may be called a religious problem. In the sphere of
social or national relations, the state o suffering may be civil
war, and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of for-
giveness and love of one's enemies. That which we recommend,
with the conviction of good Christians, as applicable to external
situations, we must also apply inwardly in the treatment of neu-
rosis. This is why modern man has heard enough about guilt
and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad conscience,
and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with
his own nature how he is to love the enemy in his own heart
and call the wolf his brother.

5 2 4 The modern man does not want to know in what way he can
imitate Christ, but in what way he can live his own individual
life, however meagre and uninteresting it may be. It is because
every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile
that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him
to well-trodden ways. All such roads, for him, lead in the wrong
direction. He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own
individual life were God's special will which must be fulfilled
at all costs. This is the source of his egoism, which is one of
the most tangible evils of the neurotic state. But the person
who tells him he is too egoistic has already lost his confidence,
and rightly so, for that person has driven him still further into
his neurosis.

5 2 5 If I wish to effect a cure for my patients I am forced to
acknowledge the deep significance of their egoism, I should be
blind, indeed, if I did not recognize it as a true will of God.
I must even help the patient to prevail in his egoism; if he suc-
ceeds in this, he estranges himself from other people. He drives
them away, and they come to themselves as they should, for
they were seeking to rob him of his "sacred" egoism. This must
be left to him, for it is his strongest and healthiest power; it is,

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

as I have said, a true will of God, which sometimes drives him
into complete isolation. However wretched this state may be, it
also stands him in good stead, for in this way alone can he get
to know himself and learn what an invaluable treasure is the
love of his fellow beings. It is, moreover, only in the state of
complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the
helpful powers of our own natures.

526 When one has several times seen this development at work
one can no longer deny that what was evil has turned to good,
and that what seemed good has kept alive the forces of evil. The
archdemon of egoism leads us along the royal road to that in-
gathering which religious experience demands. What we ob-
serve here is a fundamental law of lifeenantiodromia or
conversion into the opposite; and it is this that makes possible
the reunion of the warring halves of the personality and thereby
brings the civil war to an end.

527 I have taken the neurotic's egoism as an example because it
is one of his most common symptoms. I might equally well have
taken any other characteristic symptom to show what attitude
die physician must adopt towards the shortcomings of his pa-
tients, in other words, how he must deal with the problem
of evil.

5 28 No doubt this also sounds very simple. In reality, however,
the acceptance of the shadow-side of human nature verges on the
impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant
the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless, and
evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He
wants to live with every side of himself to know what he is.
That is why he casts history aside. He wants to break with tradi-
tion so that he can experiment with his life and determine what
value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from tradi-
tional presuppositions. Modern youth gives us astonishing ex-
amples of this attitude. To show how far this tendency may go,
I will instance a question addressed to me by a German society.
I was asked if incest is to be reprobated, and what facts can be
adduced against it!

529 Granted such tendencies, the conflicts into which people may
fall are not hard to imagine. I can well understand that one
would like to do everything possible to protect one's fellow be-
ings from such adventures. But curiously enough we find our-

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selves without means to do this. All the old arguments against
unreasonableness, self-deception, and immorality, once so po-
tent, have lost their attraction. We are now reaping the fruit
of nineteenth-century education. Throughout that period the
Church preached to young people the merit of blind faith,
while the universities inculcated an intellectual rationalism,
with the result that today we plead in vain whether for faith
or reason. Tired of this warfare of opinions, the modern man
wishes to find out for himself how things are. And though this
desire opens the door to the most dangerous possibilities, we
cannot help seeing it as a courageous enterprise and giving it
some measure of sympathy. It is no reckless adventure, but an
effort inspired by deep spiritual distress to bring meaning once
more into life on the basis of fresh and unprejudiced experi-
ence. Caution has its place, no doubt, but we cannot refuse our
support to a serious venture which challenges the whole of the
personality. If we oppose it, we are trying to suppress what is
best in manhis daring and his aspirations. And should we suc-
ceed, we should only have stood in the way of that invaluable
experience which might have given a meaning to life. What
would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked
out of his journey to Damascus?

53 The psychotherapist who takes his work seriously must come
to grips with this question. He must decide in every single case
whether or not he is willing to stand by a human being with
counsel and help upon what may be a daring misadventure. He
must have no fixed ideas as to what is right, nor must he pre-
tend to know what is right and what not otherwise he takes
something from the richness of the experience. He must keep
in view what actually happens for only that which acts is ac-
tual. 4 If something which seems to me an error shows itself to
be more effective than a truth, then I must first follow up the
error, for in it lie power and life which 1 lose if I hold to what
seems to me true. Light has need of darkness otherwise how
could it appear as light?

531 It is well known that Freudian psychoanalysis limits itself to
the task of making conscious the shadow-side and the evil within

4 [A more literal translation, which brings out the meaning more clearly while
losing the play on words, would be: "He must keep in view only what is real
(for the patient). But a thing is 'real' (wirklich) if it 'works' (wirkt)." TRANS.]

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us. It simply brings into action the civil war that was latent,
and lets it go at that. The patient must deal with it as best he
can. Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact that man
has never yet been able single-handed to hold his own against
the powers of darkness that is, of the unconscious. Man has
alxvays stood in need of the spiritual help which his particular
religion held out to him. The opening up of the unconscious
always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering; it is
as when a flourishing civilization is abandoned to invading
hordes of barbarians, or when fertile fields are exposed by the
bursting of a dam to a raging torrent. The World War was
such an invasion which showed, as nothing else could, how thin
are the walls which separate a well-ordered world from lurking
chaos. But it is the same with the individual and his rationally
ordered world. Seeking revenge for the violence his reason has
done to her, outraged Nature only awaits the moment when the
partition falls so as to overwhelm the conscious life with de-
struction. Man has been aware of this danger to the psyche
since the earliest times, even in the most primitive stages of
culture. It was to arm himself against this threat and to heal the
damage done that he developed religious and magical practices.
This is why the medicine-man is also the priest; he is the saviour
of the soul as well as of the body, and religions are systems of
healing for psychic illness. This is especially true of the two
greatest religions of humanity, Christianity and Buddhism.
Man is never helped in his suffering by what he thinks of for
himself; only suprahuman, revealed truth lifts him out of his
distress.

532 Today the tide of destruction has already reached us and
the psyche has suffered damage. That is why patients force the
psychotherapist into the role of the priest and expect and de-
mand of him that he shall free them from their suffering. That
is why we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with prob-
lems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian. But we
cannot leave these questions for theology to answer; challenged
by the urgent psychic needs of our patients, we are directly con-
fronted with them every day. Since, as a rule, every concept and
every point of view handed down from the past proves futile,
we must first tread with the patient the path of his illness the
path of his mistake that sharpens his conflicts and increases his

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loneliness till it becomes unbearable hoping that from the
psychic depths which cast up the powers of destruction the
rescuing forces will also come.

533 When I first took this path I did not know where it would
lead. I did not know what lay hidden in the depths of the psyche
that region which I have since called the "collective uncon-
scious" and whose contents I designate as "archetypes." Since
time immemorial, invasions of the unconscious have occurred,
and ever and again they repeat themselves. For consciousness
did not exist from the beginning; in every child it has to be
built up anew in the first years of life. Consciousness is very
weak in this formative period, and the same is true of the psychic
history of mankind the unconscious easily seizes power. These
struggles have left their mark. To put it in scientific terms;
instinctive defence-mechanisms have been built up which auto-
matically intervene when the danger is greatest, and their com-
ing into action during an emergency is represented in fantasy
by helpful images which are ineradicably imprinted on the
human psyche. Science can only establish the existence of these
psychic factors and attempt a rationalistic explanation by offer-
ing an hypothesis as to their source. This, however, only thrusts
the problem a stage further back without solving the riddle. We
thus come to those ultimate questions: Where does conscious-
ness come from? What is the psyche? At this point all science
ends.

534 It is as though, at the climax of the illness, the destructive
powers were converted into healing forces. This is brought
about by the archetypes awaking to independent life and taking
over the guidance of the psychic personality, thus supplanting
the ego with its futile willing and striving. As a religious-minded
person would say: guidance has come from God. With most of
my patients I have to avoid this formulation, apt though it is, for
it reminds them too much of what they had to reject in the first
place. I must express myself in more modest terms and say that
the psyche has awakened to spontaneous activity. And indeed
this formulation is better suited to the observable facts, as the
transformation takes place at that moment when, in dreams or
fantasies, motifs appear whose source in consciousness cannot be
demonstrated. To the patient it is nothing less than a revelation
when something altogether strange rises up to confront him

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from the hidden depths of the psyche something that is not his
ego and is therefore beyond the reach of his personal will. He
has regained access to the sources of psychic life, and this marks
the beginning of the cure.

535 In order to illustrate this process, I ought really to discuss
it with the help of examples. But it is almost impossible to give
a convincing example offhand, for as a rule it is an extremely
subtle and complicated matter. Often it is simply the deep im-
pression made on the patient by the independent way the
dreams deal with his problem. Or it may be that his fantasy
points to something for which his conscious mind was quite un-
prepared. But in most cases it is contents of an archetypal na-
ture, or the connections between them, that exert a strong
influence of their own whether or not they are understood by
the conscious mind. This spontaneous activity of the psyche
often becomes so intense that visionary pictures are seen or
inner voices heard a true, primordial experience of the spirit.

53 6 Such experiences reward the sufferer for the pains of the
labyrinthine way. From now on a light shines through the con-
fusion; more, he can accept the conflict within him and so come
to resolve the morbid split in his nature on a higher level.

537 The fundamental problems of modern psychotherapy are
so important and far-reaching that their discussion in an essay
precludes any presentation of details, however desirable this
might be for clarity's sake. I hope nevertheless that I have suc-
ceeded in my main purpose, which was to set forth the attitude
of the psychotherapist to his work. This may be found more
rewarding than precepts and pointers to methods of treatment,
which in any case never work properly unless they are applied
with right understanding. The attitude of the psychotherapist
is infinitely more important than the theories and methods of
psychotherapy, and that is why I was particularly concerned to
make this attitude known. I believe I have given an honest ac-
count and have, at the same time, imparted information which
will allow you to decide how far and in what way the clergyman
can join with the psychotherapist in his aspirations and en-
deavours. I believe, also, that the picture I have drawn of the
spiritual outlook of modern man corresponds to the true state

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of affairs, though I make no claim to infallibility. In any case,
what I have had to say about the cure of neurosis, and the prob-
lems involved, is the unvarnished truth. We doctors would
naturally welcome the sympathetic understanding of the clergy
in our endeavours to heal psychic suffering, but we are also
fully aware of the fundamental difficulties which stand in the
way of co-operation. My own position is on the extreme left
wing in the parliament of Protestant opinion, yet I would be
the first to warn people against uncritical generalizations of
their own point of view. As a Swiss I am an inveterate democrat,
yet I recognize that Nature is aristocratic and, what is even more,
esoteric. "Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi" is an unpleasant but
eternal truth. Who are forgiven their many sins? Those who
have loved much. But as to those who love little, their few sins
are held against them. I am firmly convinced that a vast number
of people belong to the fold of the Catholic Church and no-
where else, because they are most suitably housed there. I am as
much persuaded of this as of the fact, which I have myself ob-
served, that a primitive religion is better suited to primitive
people than Christianity, which is so incomprehensible to them
and so foreign to their blood that they can only ape it in the
most disgusting way. I believe, too, that there must be protes-
tants against the Catholic Church, and also protestants against
Protestantismfor the manifestations of the spirit are truly
wondrous, and as varied as Creation itself.

53 8 The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms
of expression; it freely chooses the men who proclaim it and in
whom it lives. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pur-
sues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the
history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms
which men have given it mean very little; they are only the
changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CURE OF SOULS

539 The question of the relations between psychoanalysis and
the pastoral cure of souls is not easy to answer, because the two
are concerned with essentially different things. The cure of
souls as practised by the clergyman or priest is a religious influ-
ence based on a Christian confession of faith. Psychoanalysis, on
the other hand, is a medical intervention, a psychological tech-
nique whose purpose it is to lay bare the contents of the uncon-
scious and integrate them into the conscious mind. This definition
of psychoanalysis applies, however, only to the methods em-
ployed by Freud's school and mine. The Adlerian method is not
an analysis in this sense, nor does it pursue the aim stated above.
It is chiefly pedagogical in intent, and works directly upon the
conscious mind without, as it were, considering the unconscious.
It is a further development of the French "reeducation de la
volont^" and of Dubois' "psychic orthopedics." The normaliza-
tion of the individual at w r hich Adlerian pedagogics aim, and his
adaptation to the collective psyche, represent a different goal
from that pursued by the pastoral cure of souls, which has for
its aim the salvation of the soul and its deliverance from the
snares of this world. Normalization and adaptation may, under
certain circumstances, even be aims which are diametrically

i [First published as "Psychoanalyse und Seelsorge," In Ethik: Sexual- und Gesell-
schafts-Ethik (Halle), V(iga8):i, 7-1 2. -EDITORS.]

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CURE OF SOULS

opposed to the Christian ideal of detachment from the world,
submission to the will of God, and the salvation of the indi-
vidual. The Adlerian method and the pastoral cure of souls,
whether Protestant or Catholic, have only one thing in common,
and that is the fact that they both apply themselves to the con-
scious mind, and in so doing appeal to a person's insight and
will.

540 Freudian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, appeals in the
first place neither to insight nor to the will, but seeks to lead
the contents of the unconscious over into the conscious mind,
thereby destroying the roots of the disturbances or symptoms.
Freud seeks, therefore, to remove the disturbance of adaptation
by an undermining of the symptoms, and not through treat-
ment of the conscious mind. That is the aim of his psycho-
analytic technique.

541 My difference with Freud begins with the interpretation of
unconscious material. It stands to reason that you cannot in-
tegrate anything into consciousness without some measure of
comprehension, i.e., insight. In order to make the unconscious
material assimilable or understandable, Freud employs his fa-
mous sexual theory, which conceives the material brought to
light through analysis mainly as sexual tendencies (or other im-
moral wishes) that are incompatible with the conscious attitude-
Freud's standpoint here is based on the rationalistic material-
ism of the scientific views current in the late nineteenth century
(of which his book The Future of an Illusion affords the plain-
est possible demonstration). With these views a fairly far-reach-
ing recognition of the animal nature of man can be effected
without too much difficulty, for the moral conflict is then ap-
parently limited to easily avoidable collisions with public opin-
ion or the penal code. At the same time Freud speaks of
"sublimation," which he understands as an application of libido
in desexualized form. I cannot enter here into a criticism of
this very delicate subject, but would merely point out that not
everything that comes out of the unconscious can be "subli-
mated."

542 For anyone who, whether by temperament, or for philosoph-
ical or religious reasons, cannot adopt the standpoint of scien-
tific materialism, the realization of unconscious contents is in
every respect a serious problem. Fortunately an instinctive

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resistance protects us from realizations that would take us too
far; hence one can often content onself with a moderate increase
of consciousness. This is particularly so in the case of simple,
uncomplicated neuroses, or rather, with people who are simple
and uncomplicated (a neurosis is never more complicated than
the person who has it). Those, on the other hand, with more
refined natures suffer mostly from a passion for consciousness
far exceeding their instinctive resistance. They want to see,
know, and understand. For these people the answer given by
the Freudian art of interpretation is unsatisfying. Here the
Church's means of grace, especially as entrusted to the Catholic
priest, are likely to come to the aid of understanding, for their
form and meaning are suited at the outset to the nature of un-
conscious contents. That is why the priest not only hears the
confession, but also asks questions indeed, it is incumbent on
him to ask them. What is more, he can ask about things which
would otherwise only come to the ears of the doctor. In view
of the means of grace at his disposal, the priest's intervention
cannot be regarded as exceeding his competence, seeing that he
is also empowered to lay the storm which he has provoked.

543 For the Protestant minister the problem is not so simple.
Apart from common prayer and Holy Communion, he has no
ritual ceremonies at his disposal, no spiritual exercises, rosaries,
pilgrimages, etc., with their expressive symbolism. He is there-
fore compelled to take his stand on moral ground, which puts
the instinctual forces coming up from the unconscious in danger
of a new repression. Any sacral action, in whatever form, works
like a vessel for receiving the contents of the unconscious. Puri-
tan simplification has deprived Protestantism of just this means
of acting on the unconscious; at any rate it has dispossessed the
clergyman of his quality as a priestly mediator, which is so
very necessary to the soul. Instead, it has given the individual
responsibility for himself and left him alone with his God.
Herein lies the advantage and also the danger of Protestantism.
From this, too, comes its inner unrest, which in the course of a
few centuries has begotten more than four hundred Protestant
denominations an indubitable symptom of individualism run
riot

544 There can be no doubt that the psychoanalytical unveiling
of the unconscious has a great effect. Equally, there can be no

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CURE OF SOULS

doubt of the tremendous effect of Catholic confession, especially
when it is not just a passive hearing, but an active intervention.
In view of this, it is truly astonishing that the Protestant
Churches have not long since made an effort to revive the insti-
tution of confession as the epitome of the pastoral bond between
the shepherd and his flock. For the Protestant, however, there
is and rightly so no going back to this primitive Catholic
form; it is too sharply opposed to the nature of Protestantism.
The Protestant minister, rightly seeing in the cure of souls the
real purpose of his existence, naturally looks round for a new
way that will lead to the souls, and not merely to the ears, of his
parishioners. Analytical psychology seems to him to provide the
key, for the meaning and purpose of his ministry are not ful-
filled with the Sunday sermon, which, though it reaches the ears,
seldom penetrates to the heart, much less to the soul, the most
hidden of all things hidden in man. The cure of souls can only
be practised in the stillness of a colloquy, carried on in the
healthful atmosphere of unreserved confidence. Soul must work
on soul, and many doors be unlocked that bar the way to the
innermost sanctuary. Psychoanalysis possesses the means of open-
ing doors otherwise tightly closed.

545 The opening of these doors, however, is often very like a
surgical operation, where the doctor, with knife poised, must be
prepared for anything the moment the cut is made. The psycho-
analyst, likewise, can discover unforeseen things that are very
unpleasant indeed, such as latent psychoses and the like. Al-
though these things, given time, often coine to the surface en-
tirely of their own accord, the blame nevertheless falls on the
analyst, who, by his intervention, releases the disturbance pre-
maturely. Only a thorough knowledge of psychiatry and its
specialized techniques can protect the doctor from such blun-
ders. A lay analyst should therefore always work in collaboration
with a doctor.

546 Fortunately, the unlucky accidents I have just mentioned
occur relatively seldom. But what psychoanalysis brings to light
is, in itself, difficult enough to cope with. It brings the patient
face to face with his life problem, and hence with some of the
ultimate, serious questions which he has hitherto evaded. As
human nature is very far from innocent, the facts that come up
are usually quite sufficient to explain why the patient avoided

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

them: he felt instinctively that he did not know a satisfactory
answer to these questions. Accordingly he expects it from the
analyst. The analyst can now safely leave certain critical ques-
tions open and to the patient's own advantage; for no sensible
patient will expect from him anything more than medical help.
More is expected from the clergyman, namely the solution of
religious questions.

547 As already said, the Catholic Church has at her disposal ways
and means which have served since olden times to gather the
lower, instinctual forces of the psyche into symbols and in this
way integrate them into the hierarchy of the spirit. The Protes-
tant minister lacks these means, and consequently often stands
perplexed before certain facts of human nature which no
amount of admonition, or insight, or goodwill, or heroic self-
castigatlon can subdue. In Protestantism good and evil are flatly
and irreconcilably opposed to one another. There is no visible
forgiveness; the human being is left alone with his sin. And
God, as we know, only forgives the sins we have conquered
ourselves. For the Protestant clergy it is a momentous psycholog-
ical difficulty that they possess no forms which would serve to
catch the lower instincts of psychic life. It is precisely the prob-
lem of the unconscious conflict brought to light by psycho-
analysis that requires solving. The doctor can on the basis of
scientific materialismtreat the problem with medical discre-
tion, that is to say he can regard the ethical problems of his
patient as lying outside his competence as a doctor. He can safely
retire behind a regretful "There you must make out as best you
can." But the Protestant clergyman cannot, in my opinion, wash
his hands in innocence; he must accompany the soul of the
person who confides in him on its dark journey. The reductive
standpoint of psychoanalysis is of little use to him here, for any
development is a building up and not a breaking down. Good
advice and moral exhortation are little if any help in serious
cases because, if followed, they dispel that intense darkness
which precedes the coming of the light. As a wise saying of the
East puts it: It is better to do good than to eschew evil. He who
is wise, therefore, will play the part of beggar, king, or criminal,
and be mindful of the gods.

548 It is easier for the Catholic clergy to employ the elements
of psychological analysis than it is for the Protestant. The latter

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE CURE OF SOULS

are faced with the harder task. Not only do the Catholics possess
a ready-made pastoral technique in the historically sanctioned
form of confession, penance, and absolution, but they also have
at their command a rich and palpably ritualistic symbolism
which fully satisfies the demands as well as the obscure passions
of simpler minds. The Protestants need a psychological tech*
nique to an even greater degree since they lack all essential
forms of ritual. I therefore hold that psychological interest on
the part of the Protestant clergy is entirely legitimate and even
necessary. Their possible encroachment upon medical territory
is more than balanced by medical incursions into religion and
philosophy, to which doctors naively believe themselves entitled
(witness the explanation of religious processes in terms of sexual
symptoms or infantile wish-fantasies). The doctor and the clergy*
man undoubtedly clash head-on in analytical psychology. This
collision should lead to co-operation and not to enmity.
549 Owing to the absence of ritual forms, the Protestant (as op-
posed to the Catholic) cure of souls develops into a personal
discussion in the sense of an "I-Thou" relationship. It cannot
translate the fundamental problem of the transference into
something impersonal, as the Catholic can, but must handle it
with confidence as a personal experience. Any contact with the
unconscious that goes at all deep leads to transference phe-
nomena. Whenever, therefore, the clergyman penetrates any
distance into the psychic background, he will provoke a transfer-
ence (with men as well as with women). This involves him per-
sonally, and on top of that he has no form which he could
substitute for his own person, as the Catholic priest can, or
rather must do. In this way he finds himself drawn into the most
personal participation for the sake of his parishioner's spiritual
welfare, more so even than the analyst, for whom the specific
salvation of the patient's soul is not necessarily a matter of burn-
ing importance. At all events he can resort to plausible excuses
which the clergyman, somewhat nervously, must repudiate for
higher reasons. Hence he stands, and must stand, in constant
danger of involving himself in serious psychic conflicts which,
to put it mildly, are not conducive to the parochial peace of
mind. This danger is no trifling one, but it has the great ad-
vantage of drawing the responsible pastor back into real life
and, at the same time, of exposing him to the tribulations of the

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

early Church (cf. the gossip against which Paul had to defend
himself).

55<> The pastor must make up his mind how far his public posi-
tion, his stipend, and considerations for his family keep him
from setting forth on the perilous mission of curing souls. I
would not think ill of him if he decided not to follow the advice
that Tertullian gave his catechumens, namely, that they should
deliberately visit the arena. Real pastoral work that is based on
modern psychology can easily expose the clergyman to the
martyrdom of public misinterpretation. Public position and re-
gard for the family, though worldly considerations, counsel a
wise reserve (for the children of this world are, as we know,
wiser than the children of light). Nevertheless, the eyes of the
soul turn longingly to those who, regardless of their worldly wel-
fare, can throw everything into the scales for the sake of some-
thing better. Nothing, certainly, is ever won by childish enthusi-
asm; yet only with daring a daring which never leaves the firm
ground of the real and the possible, and which shrinks from no
suffering can anything of greater worth be achieved.

55 1 Thus it is the Protestant minister's lack of ritual equipment
which holds him back from closer contact with the world, and
at the same time drives him towards a greater adventure be-
cause it moves him right into the firing line. I hope that the
Protestant will not be found wanting in courage for this task.

552 All intelligent psychotherapists would be glad if their en-
deavours were supported and supplemented by the work of the
clergy. Certainly the problems of the human soul, approached
from opposite ends by cleric and doctor, will cause considerable
difficulties for both, not least on account of the difference in
standpoint. But it is just from this encounter that we may expect
the most fruitful stimulation for both sides.

354

ANSWER TO JOB

[First published as a book, Antwort auf Hwb (Zurich, 1952). The present trans-
lation was first published, in book form, in London, 1954; for it, Professor Jung
made some half-dozen small alterations to the original text and added or author-
ized an occasional footnote. In 1956, it was reprinted and published by Pastoral
Psychology Book Club, Great Neck, New York. Only minor stylistic alterations
have been made in the version here published. EDITORS.]

PREFATORY NOTE

The suggestion that I should tell you how Ansioer to Job came
to be written sets me a difficult task, because the history of this
book can hardly be told in a few words. I have been occupied
with its central problem for years. Many different sources nour-
ished the stream of its thoughts, until one day and after long
reflectionthe time was ripe to put them into words.

The most immediate cause of my writing the book is perhaps
to be found in certain problems discussed in my book Aion y
especially the problems of Christ as a symbolic figure and of the
antagonism Christ-Antichrist, represented in the traditional
zodiacal symbolism of the two fishes.

In connection with the discussion of these problems and of
the doctrine of Redemption, I criticized the idea of the privatio
boni as not agreeing with the psychological findings. Psycholog-
ical experience shows that whatever we call "good" is balanced
by an equally substantial "bad" or "evil." If "evil" is non-ex-
istent, then whatever there is must needs be "good.'* Dogmati-
cally, neither "good" nor "evil" can be derived from Man, since
the "Evil One" existed before Man as one of the "Sons of God."
The idea of the privatio boni began to play a role in the Church
only after Mani. Before this heresy, Clement of Rome taught

i [Written for Pastoral Psychology (Great Neck, N. Y.), VI: 60 (January, 1956).
EDITORS.]

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

that God rules the world with a right and a left hand, the right
being Christ, the left Satan. Clement's view is clearly monothe-
istic, as it unites the opposites in one God.

Later Christianity, however, is dualistic, inasmuch as it splits
off one half of the opposites, personified in Satan, and he is
eternal in his state of damnation. This crucial question forms
the point of departure for the Christian theory of Redemption.
It is therefore of prime importance. If Christianity claims to be
a monotheism, it becomes unavoidable to assume the opposites
as being contained in God. But then we are confronted with a
major religious problem: the problem of Job. It is the aim of
my book to point out its historical evolution since the time of
Job down through the centuries to the most recent symbolic
phenomena, such as the Assumptio Mariae, etc.

Moreover, the study of medieval natural philosophy of the
greatest importance to psychology made me try to find an an-
swer to the question: what image of God did these old phi-
losophers have? Or rather: how should the symbols which
supplement their image of God be understood? All this pointed
to a complexio oppositorurn and thus recalled again the story of
Job to my mind: Job who expected help from God against God.
This most peculiar fact presupposes a similar conception of the
opposites in God.

On the other hand, numerous questions, not only from my
patients, but from all over the world, brought up the problem
of giving a more complete and explicit answer than I had given
in Awn. For many years I hesitated to do this because I was
quite conscious of the probable consequences, and knew what a
storm would be raised. But I was gripped by the urgency and
difficulty of the problem and was unable to throw it off. There-
fore I found myself obliged to deal with the whole problem, and
I did so in the form of describing a personal experience, carried
by subjective emotions. I deliberately chose this form because I
wanted to avoid the impression that I had any idea of an-
nouncing an "eternal truth." The book does not pretend to be
anything but the voice or question of a single individual who
hopes or expects to meet with thoughtfulness in the public.

358

LECTORI BENEVOLO

/ am distressed for thcc, my brother . . .
II Samuel i : 26 (AV)

553 On account of its somewhat unusual content, my little book
requires a short preface. I beg of you, dear reader, not to over-
look it. For, in what follows, I shall speak of the venerable ob-
jects of religious belief. Whoever talks of such matters inevita-
bly runs the risk of being torn to pieces by the two parties who
are in mortal conflict about those very things. This conflict is
due to the strange supposition that a thing is true only if it
presents itself as a physical fact. Thus some people believe it to
be physically true that Christ was born as the son of a virgin,
while others deny this as a physical impossibility. Everyone can
see that there is no logical solution to this conflict and that one
would do better not to get involved in such sterile disputes.
Both are right and both are wrong. Yet they could easily reach
agreement if only they dropped the word "physical." "Physical"
is not the only criterion of truth: there are also psychic truths
which can neither be explained nor proved nor contested in any
physical way. If, for instance, a general belief existed that the
river Rhine had at one time flowed backwards from its mouth
to its source, then this belief would in itself be a fact even
though such an assertion, physically understood, would be

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

deemed utterly incredible. Beliefs of this kind are psychic facts
which cannot be contested and need no proof.

554 Religious statements are of this type. They refer without ex-
ception to things that cannot be established as physical facts. If
they did not do this, they would inevitably fall into the category
of the natural sciences. Taken as referring to anything physical,
they make no sense whatever, and science would dismiss them as
non-experienceable. They would be mere miracles, which are
sufficiently exposed to doubt as it is, and yet they could not
demonstrate the reality of the spirit or meaning that underlies
them, because meaning is something that always demonstrates
itself and is experienced on its own merits. The spirit and mean-
ing of Christ are present and perceptible to us even without the
aid of miracles. Miracles appeal only to the understanding of
those who cannot perceive the meaning. They are mere substi-
tutes for the not understood reality of the spirit. This is not to
say that the living presence of the spirit is not occasionally ac-
companied by marvellous physical happenings. I only wish to
emphasize that these happenings can neither replace nor bring
about an understanding of the spirit, which is the one essential
thing.

555 The fact that religious statements frequently conflict with
the observed physical phenomena proves that in contrast to
physical perception the spirit is autonomous, and that psychic
experience is to a certain extent independent of physical data,
The psyche is an autonomous factor, and religious statements
are psychic confessions which in the last resort are based on un-
conscious, i.e., on transcendental, processes. These processes are
not accessible to physical perception but demonstrate their ex-
istence through the confessions of the psyche. The resultant
statements are filtered through the medium of human conscious-
ness: that is to say, they are given visible forms which in their
turn are subject to manifold influences from within and with-
out. That is why whenever we speak of religious contents we
move in a world of images that point to something ineffable,
We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors,
and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If,
for instance, we say "God," we give expression to an image or
verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course
of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of cer-

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ANSWER TO JOB

tainty unless it be by faith whether these changes affect only
the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all, we
can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy
that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine
him as an eternally unmoved, unchangeable essence. Our reason
is sure only of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas
which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal
and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innum-
erable times in the course of their long history. There is no
doubt that there is something behind these images that tran-
scends consciousness and operates in such a way that the state-
ments do not vary limitlessly and chaotically, but clearly all
relate to a few basic principles or archetypes. These, like the
psyche itself, or like matter, are unknowable as such. All we can
do is to construct models of them which we know to be inade-
quate, a fact which is confirmed again and again by religious
statements.

55 6 If, therefore, in what follows I concern myself with these
"metaphysical" objects, I am quite conscious that I am moving
in a world of images and that none of my reflections touches the
essence of the Unknowable. I am also too well aware of how
limited are our powers of conception to say nothing of the
feebleness and poverty of language to imagine that my remarks
mean anything more in principle than what a primitive man
means when he conceives of his god as a hare or a snake. But,
although our whole w y orld of religious ideas consists of anthropo-
morphic images that could never stand up to rational criticism,
we should never forget that they are based on numinous arche-
types, i.e., on an emotional foundation which is unassailable
by reason. We are dealing with psychic facts which logic can
overlook but not eliminate. In this connection Tertullian has
already appealed, quite rightly, to the testimony of the soul. In
his De testimonio animae, he says:

These testimonies of the soul are as simple as they are true, as ob-
vious as they are simple, as common as they are obvious, as natural
as they are common, as divine as they are natural. I think that they
cannot appear to any one to be trifling and ridiculous if he considers
the majesty of Nature, whence the authority of the soul is derived.
What you allow to the mistress you will assign to the disciple. Nature
is the mistress, the soul is the disciple; what the one has taught, or

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

the other has learned, has been delivered to them by God, who is, in
truth, the Master even of the mistress herself. What notion the soul
is able to conceive of her first teacher is in your power to judge,
from that soul which is in you. Feel that which causes you to feel;
think upon that which is in forebodings your prophet; in omens,
your augur; in the events which befall you, your foreseer. Strange
if, being given by God, she knows how to act the diviner for men!
Equally strange if she knows Him by whom she has been given! l

557 I would go a step further and say that the statements made
in the Holy Scriptures are also utterances of the soul even at
the risk of being suspected of psychologism. The statements of
the conscious mind may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or
arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of the state-
ments of the soul: to begin with they always go over our heads
because they point to realities that transcend consciousness.
These entia are the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and
they precipitate complexes of ideas in the form of mythological
motifs. Ideas of this kind are never invented, but enter the field
of inner perception as finished products, for instance in dreams.
They are spontaneous phenomena which are not subject to our
will, and we are therefore justified in ascribing to them a certain
autonomy. They are to be regarded not only as objects but as
subjects with laws of their own. From the point of view of con-
sciousness, we can, of course, describe them as objects, and even
explain them up to a point, in the same measure as we can de-
scribe and explain a living human being. But then we have to
disregard their autonomy. If that is considered, we are com-
pelled to treat them as subjects; in other words, we have to ad-
mit that they possess spontaneity and purposiveness, or a kind of
consciousness and free will. We observe their behaviour and
consider their statements. This dual standpoint, which we are
forced to adopt towards every relatively independent organism,
naturally has a dual result. On the one hand it tells me what I
do to the object, and on the other hand what it does (possibly
to me). It is obvious that this unavoidable dualism will create a
certain amount of confusion in the minds of my readers, par-
ticularly as in what follows we shall have to do with the arche-
type of Deity.

i Cap. V, In Migne, PJL, f vol. i, cols, 615! (trans, by C. Dodgson, I, pp. igSf.,
slightly modified.

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ANSWER TO JOB

55 8 Should any of my readers feel tempted to add an apologetic
"only" to the God-images as we perceive them, he would im-
mediately fall foul of experience, which demonstrates beyond
any shadow of doubt the extraordinary numinosity of these
images. The tremendous effectiveness (mana) of these images is
such that they not only give one the feeling of pointing to the
Ens realissimum, but make one convinced that they actually ex-
press it and establish it as a fact. This makes discussion uncom-
monly difficult, if not impossible. It is, in fact, impossible to
demonstrate God's reality to oneself except by using images
which have arisen spontaneously or are sanctified by tradition,
and whose psychic nature and effects the naive-minded person
has never separated from their unknowable metaphysical back-
ground. He instantly equates the effective image with the tran-
scendental x to which it points. The seeming justification for
this procedure appears self-evident and is not considered a prob-
lem so long as the statements of religion are not seriously ques-
tioned. But if there is occasion for criticism, then it must be
remembered that the image and the statement are psychic
processes which are different from their transcendental object;
they do not posit it, they merely point to it. In the realm of psychic
processes criticism and discussion are not only permissible but
are unavoidable.

559 In what follows I shall attempt just such a discussion, such a
"coming to terms" with certain religious traditions and ideas.
Since I shall be dealing with numinous factors, my feeling is
challenged quite as much as my intellect. I cannot, therefore,
write in a coolly objective manner, but must allow my emotional
subjectivity to speak if I want to describe what I feel when I read
certain books of the Bible, or when I remember the impressions
I have received from the doctrines of our faith. I do not write
as a biblical scholar (which I am not), but as a layman and physi-
cian who has been privileged to see deeply into the psychic life
of many people. What I am expressing is first of all my own
personal view, but I know that I also speak in the name of many
who have had similar experiences.

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ANSWER TO JOB

560 The Book of Job is a landmark In the long historical de-
velopment of a divine drama. At the time the book was written,
there were already many testimonies which had given a contra-
dictory picture of Yahweh the picture of a God who knew no
moderation in his emotions and suffered precisely from this lack
of moderation. He himself admitted that he was eaten up with
rage and jealousy and that this knowledge was painful to him.
Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along
with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness. Every-
thing was there, and none of these qualities was an obstacle to
the other. Such a condition is only conceivable either when no
reflecting consciousness is present at all, or when the capacity
for reflection is very feeble and a more or less adventitious phe-
nomenon. A condition of this sort can only be described as
amoral.

561 How the people of the Old Testament felt about their God
we know from the testimony of the Bible. That is not what I
am concerned with here, but rather with the way in which a
modern man with a Christian education and background comes
to terms with the divine darkness which is unveiled in the Book
of Job, and what effect it has on him. I shall not give a cool and
carefully considered exegesis that tries to be fair to every detail,
but a purely subjective reaction. In this way I hope to act as a

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

voice for many who feel the same way as I do, and to give ex-
pression to the shattering emotion which the unvarnished spec-
tacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness produces in us. Even if
we know by hearsay about the suffering and discord in the Deity,
they are so unconscious, and hence so ineffectual morally, that
they arouse no human sympathy or understanding. Instead, they
give rise to an equally ill-considered outburst of affect, and a
smouldering resentment that may be compared to a slowly heal-
ing wound. And just as there is a secret tie between the wound
and the weapon, so the affect corresponds to the violence of the
deed that caused it.

562 The Book of Job serves as a paradigm for a certain experi-
ence of God which has a special significance for us today. These
experiences come upon man from inside as well as from outside,
and it is useless to interpret them rationalistically and thus
weaken them by apotropaic means. It is far better to admit the
affect and submit to its violence than to try to escape it by all
sorts of intellectual tricks or by emotional value-judgments. Al-
though, by giving way to the affect, one imitates all the bad
qualities of the outrageous act that provoked it and thus makes
oneself guilty of the same fault, that is precisely the point of the
whole proceeding: the violence is meant to penetrate to a man's
vitals, and he to succumb to its action. He must be affected by it,
otherwise its full effect will not reach him. But he should know,
or learn to know, what has affected him, for in this way he trans-
forms the blindness of the violence on the one hand and of the
affect on the other into knowledge.

5 6 3 For this reason I shall express my affect fearlessly and ruth-
lessly in what follows, and I shall answer injustice with injustice,
that I may learn to know why and to what purpose Job was
wounded, and what consequences have grown out of this for
Yahweh as well as for man.

366

5 6 4 Job answers Yahweh thus:

Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?

I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;

twice, but I will proceed no further. 1

5 6 5 And indeed, in the immediate presence of the infinite power
of creation, this is the only possible answer for a witness who is
still trembling in every limb with the terror of almost total
annihilation. What else could a half-crushed human worm,
grovelling in the dust, reasonably answer in the circumstances?
In spite of his pitiable littleness and feebleness, this man knows
that he is confronted with a superhuman being who is personally
most easily provoked. He also knows that it is far better to with-
hold all moral reflections, to say nothing of certain moral re-
quirements which might be expected to apply to a god.

5 66 Yahweh's "justice" is praised, so presumably Job could bring
his complaint and the protestation of his innocence before him as

ijob 40:4-5. [Quotations throughout are from the Revised Standard Version
(RSV), except where the Authorized Version (AV) Is closer to the text of the
Ziircher Bibel (ZB) used hy the author in conjunction with the original Hebrew
and Greek sources. Where neither RSV nor AV fits, I have translated direct from
ZB. The poetic line-arrangement of RSV is followed in so far as possible. TRANS.]

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

the just judge. But he doubts this possibility. "How can a man
be just before God?" 2 "If I summoned him and he answered
me, I would not believe that he was listening to my voice/' 3 "If
it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?" 4 He "multi-
plies my wounds without cause." 5 "He destroys both the blame-
less and the wicked." 6 "If the scourge slay suddenly, he will
laugh at the trial of the innocent." 7 "I know," Job says to
Yahweh, "thou wilt not hold me innocent. I shall be con-
demned." 8 "If I wash myself . . . never so clean, yet shalt thou
plunge me in the ditch." 9 "For he is not a man, as I am, that I
should answer him, and we should come together in judg-
ment." 10 Job wants to explain his point of view to Yahweh,
to state his complaint, and tells him: "Thou knowest that I am
not guilty, and there is none to deliver out of thy hand." X1
"I desire to argue my case with God." 12 "I will defend my ways
to his face," 13 "I know that I shall be vindicated." 14 Yahweh
should summon him and render him an account or at least allow
him to plead his cause. Properly estimating the disproportion
between man and God, he asks: "Wilt thou break a leaf driven
to and fro? and wilt thou pursue the dry stubble?" 15 God has
put him in the wrong, but there is no justice. 16 He has "taken
away my right." 17 "Till I die I will not put away my integrity
from me. I hold fast to my righteousness, and will not let it
go." 1S His friend Elihu the Buzite does not believe the in-
justice of Yahweh: "Of a truth, God will not do wickedly, and
the Almighty will not pervert justice." 19 Illogically enough,
he bases his opinion on God's power: "Is it fit to say to a king,
Thou art wicked? and to princes, Ye are ungodly?" 20 One must
"respect the persons of princes and esteem the high more than
the low." 21 But Job is not shaken in his faith, and had already
uttered an important truth when he said: "Behold, my witness
is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high ... my eye
pours out tears to God, that he would maintain the right of a
man with God, like that of a man with his neighbour." 22 And

2Jobg:a. 3g:i6. 4 9:ig. 5 9:i7- 69:22.

79:23 (AV). 89:28,29. 9: 3 o-3i(AV). 109:32 (AV).

iijCKy. 12 13:3. is 13:15. 1413:18. 15 13:25 (AV).

1619:6-7. IT 27: 2. 1827:5-6. 19 34-i2- 20 34: 18 (AV).

3 68

ANSWER TO JOB

later: "For I know that my Vindicator lives, and at last he will
stand upon the earth." 23

567 These words clearly show that Job, in spite of his doubt as
to whether man can be just before God, still finds it difficult to
relinquish the idea of meeting God on the basis of justice and
therefore of morality. Because, in spite of everything, he cannot
give up his faith in divine justice, it is not easy for him to accept
the knowledge that divine arbitrariness breaks the law. On the
other hand, he has to admit that no one except Yahweh himself
is doing him injustice and violence. He cannot deny that he is
up against a God who does not care a rap for any moral opinion
and does not recognize any form of ethics as binding. This is
perhaps the greatest thing about Job, that, faced with this diffi-
culty, he does not doubt the unity of God. He clearly sees that
God is at odds with himself so totally at odds that he, Job, is
quite certain of finding in God a helper and an "advocate"
against God. As certain as he is of the evil in Yahweh, he is
equally certain of the good. In a human being who renders us
evil we cannot expect at the same time to find a helper. But
Yahweh is not a human being: he is both a persecutor and a
helper in one, and the one aspect is as real as the other. Yahweh
is not split but is an antinomy a. totality of inner opposites
and this is the indispensable condition for his tremendous
dynamism, his omniscience and omnipotence. Because of this
knowledge Job holds on to his intention of "defending his ways
to his face," i.e., of making his point of view clear to him, since
notwithstanding his wrath, Yahweh is also man's advocate
against himself when man puts forth his complaint.

568 One would be even more astonished at Job's knowledge of
God if this were the first time one were hearing of Yahweh's
amorality. His incalculable moods and devastating attacks of
wrath had, however, been known from time immemorial. He
had proved himself to be a jealous defender of morality and
was specially sensitive in regard to justice. Hence he had always
to be praised as "just/* which, it seemed, was very important to
him. Thanks to this circumstance or peculiarity of his, he had a
distinct personality, which differed from that of a more or less
archaic king only in scope. His jealous and irritable nature,

23 19:25. ['Vindicator* is RSV alternative reading for 'Redeemer/ and comes very
close to the ZB Anwalt, *advocate/-TRANS.]

369

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

prying mistrustfully into the faithless hearts of men and explor-
ing their secret thoughts, compelled a personal relationship be-
tween himself and man, who could not help but feel personally
called by him. That was the essential difference between Yahweh
and the all-ruling Father Zeus, who in a benevolent and some-
what detached manner allowed the economy of the universe to
roll along on its accustomed courses and punished only those
who were disorderly. He did not moralize but ruled purely in-
stinctively. He did not demand anything more from human
beings than the sacrifices due to him; he did not want to do any-
thing with human beings because he had no plans for them.
Father Zeus is certainly a figure but not a personality. Yahweh,
on the other hand, was interested in man. Human beings were
a matter of first-rate importance to him. He needed them as they
needed him, urgently and personally. Zeus too could throw
thunderbolts about, but only at hopelessly disorderly individ-
uals. Against mankind as a whole he had no objections but
then they did not interest him all that much. Yahweh, however,
could get inordinately excited about man as a species and men as
individuals if they did not behave as he desired or expected,
without ever considering that in his omnipotence he could easily
have created something better than these "bad earthenware
pots."

5 6 9 In view of this intense personal relatedness to his chosen
people, it was only to be expected that a regular covenant would
develop which also extended to certain individuals, for instance
to David. As we learn from the Eighty-ninth Psalm, Yahweh told
him:

My steadfast love I will keep for him for ever,
and my covenant will stand firm for him.

I will not violate my covenant,

or alter the word that went forth from my lips.
Once for all I have sworn by my holiness;

I will not lie to David. 24

57<> And yet it happened that he, who watched so jealously over
the fulfilment of laws and contracts, broke his own oath. Modern
man, with his sensitive conscience, would have felt the black
2^ Verses 28, 34, 35.

ANSWER TO JOB

abyss opening and the ground giving way under his feet, for the
least he expects of his God is that he should be superior to
mortal man in the sense of being better, higher, nobler but not
his superior in the kind of moral flexibility and unreliability
that do not jib even at perjury.

571 Of course one must not tax an archaic god with the require-
ments of modern ethics. For the people of early antiquity things
were rather different. In their gods there was absolutely every-
thing: they teemed with virtues and vices. Hence they could be
punished, put in chains, deceived, stirred up against one
another without losing face, or at least not for long. The man
of that epoch was so inured to divine inconsistencies that he w r as
not unduly perturbed when they happened. With Yahweh the
case was different because, from quite early on, the personal
and moral tie began to play an important part in the religious
relationship. In these circumstances a breach of contract w r as
bound to have the effect not only of a personal but of a moral
injury. One can see this from the way David answers Yahweh:

How long, Lord? wilt thou hide thyself for ever?

shall thy wrath burn like fire?
Remember how short my time is:

wherefore hast thou made all men in vain?

Lord, where are thy former lovingkindnesses,

which by thy faithfulness thou didst swear to David? 25

572 Had this been addressed to a human being it would have run
something like this: "For heaven's sake, man, pull yourself to-
gether and stop being such a senseless savage! It is really too
grotesque to get into such a rage when it's partly your own fault
that the plants won't flourish. You used to be quite reasonable
and took good care of the garden you planted, instead o tram-
pling it to pieces."

573 Certainly our interlocutor would never dare to remonstrate
with his almighty partner about this breach of contract. He
knows only too well what a row he would get into if he were the
wretched breaker of the law. Because anything else would put
him in peril of his life, he must retire to the more exalted plane

25 Psalm 89:46, 47, 49 (AV; last line from RSV).

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

of reason. In this way, without knowing it or wanting it, he
shows himself superior to his divine partner both intellectually
and morally. Yahweh fails to notice that he is being humoured,
just as little as he understands why he has continually to be
praised as just. He makes pressing demands on his people to be
praised 26 and propitiated in every possible way, for the obvious
purpose of keeping him in a good temper at any price.
574 The character thus revealed fits a personality who can only
convince himself that he exists through his relation to an object.
Such dependence on the object is absolute when the subject is
totally lacking in self-reflection and therefore has no insight into
himself. It is as if he existed only by reason of the fact that he
has an object which assures him that he is really there. If Yah-
weh, as we would expect of a sensible human being, were really
conscious of himself, he would, in view of the true facts of the
case, at least have put an end to the panegyrics on his justice.
But he is too unconscious to be moral. Morality presupposes
consciousness. By this I do not mean to say that Yahweh is im-
perfect or evil, like a gnostic demiurge. He is everything in its
totality; therefore, among other things, he is total justice, and
also its total opposite. At least this is the way he must be con-
ceived if one is to form a unified picture of his character. We
must only remember that what we have sketched is no more
than an anthropomorphic picture which is not even particularly
easy to visualize. From the way the divine nature expresses it-
self we can see that the individual qualities are not adequately
related to one another, with the result that they fall apart into
mutually contradictory acts. For instance, Yahweh regrets hav-
ing created human beings, although in his omniscience he must
have known all along what would happen to them.

575 Since the Omniscient looks into all hearts, and Yahweh's
eyes "run to and fro through the whole earth," x it were better
for the interlocutor of the Eighty-ninth Psalm not to wax

26 Or to be "blessed," which is even more captious of him.

1 Zechariah 4: 10 (AV). Cf. also the Wisdom of Solomon i : 10 (AV): "For the ear

of jealousy heareth all things: and the noise of murmurings is not hid."

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ANSWER TO JOB

too conscious of his slight moral superiority over the more
unconscious God. Better to keep it dark, for Yahweh is no
friend of critical thoughts which in any way diminish the tribute
of recognition he demands. Loudly as his power resounds
through the universe, the basis of his existence is correspond-
ingly slender, for it needs conscious reflection in order to exist
in reality. Existence is only real when it is conscious to some-
body. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even
though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent
him from becoming conscious. And that is also why Yahweh
needs the acclamation of a small group of people. One can im-
agine what would happen if this assembly suddenly decided to
stop the applause: there would be a state of high excitation, with
outbursts of blind destructive rage, then a withdrawal into
hellish loneliness and the torture of non-existence, followed by
a gradual reawakening of an unutterable longing for something
which would make him conscious of himself. It is probably for
this reason that all pristine things, even man before he be-
comes the canaille, have a touching, magical beauty, for in its
nascent state "each thing after its kind" is the most precious,
the most desirable, the tenderest thing in the world, being a
reflection of the infinite love and goodness of the Creator.
57 6 In view of the undoubted frightfulness of divine wrath, and
in an age when men still knew what they were talking about
when they said "Fear God/' it was only to be expected that
man's slight superiority should have remained unconscious. The
powerful personality of Yahweh, who, in addition to everything
else, lacked all biographical antecedents (his original relation-
ship to the Elohim had long since been sunk in oblivion), had
raised him above all the numina of the Gentiles and had im-
munized him against the influence that for several centuries had
been undermining the authority of the pagan gods. It was pre-
cisely the details of their mythological biography that had be-
come their nemesis, for with his growing capacity for judgment
man had found these stories more and more incomprehensible
and indecent. Yahweh, however, had no origin and no past,
except his creation of the world, with which all history began,
and his relation to that part of mankind whose forefather Adam
he had fashioned in his own image as the Anthropos, the orig-
inal man, by what appears to have been a special act of creation.

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One can only suppose that the other human beings who must
also have existed at that time had been formed previously on the
divine potter's wheel along with the various kinds of beasts and
cattle those human beings, namely, from whom Cain and Seth
chose their wives. If one does not approve of this conjecture,
then the only other possibility that remains is the far more
scandalous one that they incestuously married their sisters (for
whom there is no evidence in the text), as was still surmised by
the philosopher Karl Lamprecht at the end of the nineteenth
century.

577 The special providence which singled out the Jews from
among the divinely stamped portion of humanity and made
them the "chosen people" had burdened them from the start
with a heavy obligation. As usually happens with such mort-
gages, they quite understandably tried to circumvent it as much
as possible. Since the chosen people used every opportunity to
break away from him, and Yahweh felt it of vital importance to
tie this indispensable object (which he had made "godlike" for
this very purpose) definitely to himself, he proposed to the
patriarch Noah a contract between himself on the one hand,
and Noah, his children, and all their animals, both tame and
wild, on the other a contract that promised advantages to both
parties. In order to strengthen this contract and keep it fresh
in the memory, he instituted the rainbow as a token of the cove-
nant. If, in future, he summoned the thunder-clouds which hide
within them floods of water and lightning, then the rainbow
would appear, reminding him and his people of the contract.
The temptation to use such an accumulation of clouds for an
experimental deluge was no small one, and it was therefore a
good idea to associate it with a sign that would give timely warn-
ing of possible catastrophe.

57 8 In spite of these precautions the contract had gone to pieces
with David, an event which left behind it a literary deposit in
the Scriptures and which grieved some few of the devout, who
upon reading it became reflective. As the Psalms were zealously
read, it was inevitable that certain thoughtful people were un-
able to stomach the Eighty-ninth Psalm. However that may be,
the fatal impression made by the breach of contract survived. 2

2 The 8gth Psalm is attributed to David and is supposed to have been a com-
munity song written in exile.

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ANSWER TO JOB

It is historically possible that these considerations influenced
the author of the Book of Job.

579 The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heav-
ily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents
his case to the eyes and ears of the world. It is amazing to see
how easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be
influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought, 3 and made
unsure of Job's faithfulness. With his touchiness and suspicious-
ness the mere possibility of doubt was enough to infuriate him
and induce that peculiar double-faced behaviour of which he
had already given proof in the Garden of Eden, when he pointed
out the tree to the First Parents and at the same time forbade
them to eat of it. In this way he precipitated the Fall, which he
apparently never intended. Similarly, his faithful servant Job
is now to be exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously
and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job's faith-
fulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself
beyond all doubt on this point had he taken counsel with his
own omniscience. Why, then, is the experiment made at all,
and a bet with the unscrupulous slanderer settled, without a
stake, on the back of a powerless creature? It is indeed no edify-
ing spectacle to see how quickly Yahweh abandons his faithful
servant to the evil spirit and lets him fall without compunction
or pity into the abyss of physical and moral suffering. From the
human point of view Yahweh's behaviour is so revolting that
one has to ask oneself w r hether there is not a deeper motive
hidden behind it. Has Yahweh some secret resistance against
Job? That would explain his yielding to Satan. But what does
man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness,
puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses,
as we have already suggested, a somewhat keener consciousness
based on self -reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be
mindful of his impotence. God has no need of this circumspec-
tion, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable ob-
stacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him
reflect on himself. Could a suspicion have grown up in God
that man possesses an infinitely small yet more concentrated

3 Satan is presumably one of God's eyes which "go to and fro in the earth and
walk up and down in it" (Job 1:7). In Persian tradition, Ahriman proceeded
from one of Ormuzd's doubting thoughts.

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light than he, Yahweh, possesses? A jealousy of that kind might
perhaps explain his behaviour. It would be quite explicable if
some such dim, barely understood deviation from the definition
of a mere "creature" had aroused his divine suspicions. Too
often already these human beings had not behaved in the pre-
scribed manner. Even his trusty servant Job might have some-
thing up his sleeve. . . . Hence Yahweh's surprising readiness
to listen to Satan's insinuations against his better judgment.

580 Without further ado Job is robbed of his herds, his servants
are slaughtered, his sons and daughters are killed by a whirl-
wind, and he himself is smitten with sickness and brought to
the brink of the grave. To rob him of peace altogether, his wife
and his old friends are let loose against him, all of whom say
the wrong things. His justified complaint finds no hearing
with the judge who is so much praised for his justice. Job's right
is refused in order that Satan be not disturbed in his play.

5 8 * One must bear in mind here the dark deeds that follow one
another in quick succession: robbery, murder, bodily injury
with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial. This is further
exacerbated by the fact that Yahweh displays no compunction,
remorse, or compassion, but only ruthlessness and brutality.
The plea of unconsciousness is invalid, seeing that he flagrantly
violates at least three of the commandments he himself gave out
on Mount Sinai.

5 8 * Job's friends do everything in their power to contribute to
his moral torments, and instead of giving him, whom God has
perfidiously abandoned, their warm-hearted support, they mor-
alize in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fash-
ion imaginable, and "fill him with wrinkles." They thus deny
him even the last comfort of sympathetic participation and
human understanding, so that one cannot altogether suppress
the suspicion of connivance in high places.

583 Why Job's torments and the divine wager should suddenly
come to an end is not quite clear. So long as Job does not actu-
ally die, the pointless suffering could be continued indefinitely.
We must, however, keep an eye on the background of all these
events: it is just possible that something in this background will
gradually begin to take shape as a compensation for Job's un-
deserved suffering-something to which Yahweh, even if he had
only a faint inkling of it, could hardly remain indifferent. With-

376

ANSWER TO JOB

out Yahweh's knowledge and contrary to his intentions, the
tormented though guiltless Job had secretly been lifted up to a
superior knowledge of God which God himself did not possess.
Had Yahweh consulted his omniscience, Job would not have
had the advantage of him. But then, so many other things would
not have happened either.

584 Job realizes God's inner antinomy, and in the light of this
realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity. The pos-
sibility of this development lies, one must suppose, in man's
"godlikeness," which one should certainly not look for in human
morphology. Yahweh himself had guarded against this error by
expressly forbidding the making of images. Job, by his insistence
on bringing his case before God, even without hope of a hear-
ing, had stood his ground and thus created the very obstacle
that forced God to reveal his true nature. With this dramatic
climax Yahweh abruptly breaks off his cruel game of cat and
mouse. But if anyone should expect that his wrath will now be
turned against the slanderer, he will be severely disappointed.
Yahweh does not think of bringing this mischief-making son of
his to account, nor does it ever occur to him to give Job at least
the moral satisfaction of explaining his behaviour. Instead, he
comes riding along on the tempest of his almightiness and
thunders reproaches at the half-crushed human worm:

Who is this that darkens counsel
by words without insight? 4

585 In view of the subsequent words of Yahweh, one must really
ask oneself: Who is darkening what counsel? The only dark
thing here is how Yahweh ever came to make a bet with Satan.
It is certainly not Job who has darkened anything and least of
all a counsel, for there was never any talk of this nor will there
be in what follows. The bet does not contain any "counsel"
so far as one can see-unless, of course, it was Yahweh himself
who egged Satan on for the ultimate purpose of exalting Job.
Naturally this development was foreseen in omniscience, and
it may be that the word "counsel" refers to this eternal and abso-
lute knowledge. If so, Yahweh's attitude seems the more illogical
and incomprehensible, as he could then have enlightened Job
on this point-which, in view of the wrong done to him, would

4 Job 38: 2 (ZB).

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

have been only fair and equitable. I must therefore regard this
possibility as improbable.

586 Whose words are without insight? Presumably Yahweh is
not referring to the words of Job's friends, but is rebuking Job.
But what is Job's guilt? The only thing he can be blamed for
is his incurable optimism in believing that he can appeal to
divine justice. In this he is mistaken, as Yahweh's subsequent
words prove. God does not want to be just; he merely flaunts
might over right. Job could not get that into his head, because
he looked upon God as a moral being. He had never doubted
God's might, but had hoped for right as well. He had, however,
already taken back this error when he recognized God's contra-
dictory nature, and by so doing he assigned a place to God's
justice and goodness. So one can hardly speak of lack of insight.

57 The answer to Yahweh's conundrum is therefore: it is Yah-
weh himself who darkens his own counsel and who has no in-
sight. He turns the tables on Job and blames him for what he
himself does: man is not permitted to have an opinion about
him, and, in particular, is to have no insight which he himself
does not possess. For seventy-one verses he proclaims his world-
creating power to his miserable victim, who sits in ashes and
scratches his sores with potsherds, and who by now has had
more than enough of superhuman violence. Job has absolutely
no need of being impressed by further exhibitions of this power.
Yahweh, in his omniscience, could have known just how in-
congruous his attempts at intimidation were in such a situation.
He could easily have seen that Job believes in his omnipotence
as much as ever and has never doubted it or wavered in his
loyalty. Altogether, he pays so little attention to Job's real situa-
tion that one suspects him of having an ulterior motive which
is more important to him: Job is no more than the outward occa-
sion for an inward process of dialectic in God. His thunderings
at Job so completely miss the point that one cannot help but see
how much he is occupied with himself. The tremendous empha-
sis he lays on his omnipotence and greatness makes no sense in
relation to Job, who certainly needs no more convincing, but
only becomes intelligible when aimed at a listener who doubts
it. This "doubting thought" is Satan, who after completing his
evil handiwork has returned to the paternal bosom in order to
continue his subversive activity there. Yahweh must have seen

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ANSWER TO JOB

that Job's loyalty was unshakable and that Satan had lost his
bet. He must also have realized that, in accepting this bet,
he had done everything possible to drive his faithful servant to
disloyalty, even to the extent of perpetrating a whole series of
crimes. Yet it is not remorse and certainly not moral horror
that rises to his consciousness, but an obscure intimation of
something that questions his omnipotence. He is particularly
sensitive on this point, because "might" is the great argument.
But omniscience knows that might excuses nothing. The said
intimation refers, of course, to the extremely uncomfortable
fact that Yahweh had let himself be bamboozled by Satan. This
weakness of his does not reach full consciousness, since Satan is
treated with remarkable tolerance and consideration. Evidently
Satan's intrigue is deliberately overlooked at Job's expense.

5 88 Luckily enough, Job had noticed during this harangue that
everything else had been mentioned except his right. He has
understood that it is at present impossible to argue the question
of right, as it is only too obvious that Yahweh has no interest
whatever in Job's cause but is far more preoccupied with his
own affairs. Satan, that is to say, has somehow to disappear, and
this can best be done by casting suspicion on Job as a man of
subversive opinions. The problem is thus switched on to another
track, and the episode with Satan remains unmentioned and
unconscious. To the spectator it is not quite clear why Job is
treated to this almighty exhibition of thunder and lightning, but
the performance as such is sufficiently magnificent and im-
pressive to convince not only a larger audience but above all
Yahweh himself of his unassailable power. Whether Job realizes
what violence Yahweh is doing to his own omniscience by be-
having like this we do not know, but his silence and submission
leave a number of possibilities open. Job has no alternative but
formally to revoke his demand for justice, and he therefore an-
swers in the words quoted at the beginning: "I lay my hand on
my mouth."

5 8 9 He betrays not the slightest trace of mental reservation in
fact, his answer leaves us in no doubt that he has succumbed
completely and without question to the tremendous force of the
divine demonstration. The most exacting tyrant should have
been satisfied with this, and could be quite sure that his servant
from terror alone, to say nothing of his undoubted loyalty

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would not dare to nourish a single improper thought for a very
long time to come.

590 Strangely enough, Yahweh does not notice anything of the
kind. He does not see Job and his situation at all. It is rather as
if he had another powerful opponent in the place of Job, one
who was better worth challenging. This is clear from his twice-
repeated taunt:

Gird up your loins like a man;

I will question you, and you shall declare to me. 5

59 1 One would have to choose positively grotesque examples to
illustrate the disproportion between the two antagonists. Yah-
weh sees something in Job which we would not ascribe to him
but to God, that is, an equal power which causes him to bring
out his whole power apparatus and parade it before his oppo-
nent. Yahweh projects on to Job a sceptic's face which is hateful
to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an
uncanny and critical eye. He is afraid of it, for only in face of
something frightening does one let off a cannonade of references
to one's power, cleverness, courage, invincibility, etc. What has
all that to do with Job? Is it worth the lion's while to terrify a
mouse?

592 Yahweh cannot rest satisfied with the first victorious round.
Job has long since been knocked out, but the great antagonist
whose phantom is projected on to the pitiable sufferer still
stands menacingly upright. Therefore Yahweh raises his arm
again:

Will you even put me in the wrong?

Will you condemn me that you may be justified?
Have you an arm like God,

and can you thunder with a voice like his? 6

593 Man, abandoned without protection and stripped of his
rights, and whose nothingness is thrown in his face at every
opportunity, evidently appears to be so dangerous to Yahweh
that he must be battered down with the heaviest artillery. What
irritates Yahweh can be seen from his challenge to the ostensi-
ble Job:

5 Job 38 : 3 and 40 : 7. e 40 : 8-9.

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ANSWER TO JOB

Look on every one that is proud, and bring Mm low;

and tread down the wicked where they stand.
Hide them in the dust together;

bind their faces in the hidden place.
Then will I also acknowledge to you

that your own right hand can give you victory. 7

594 Job is challenged as though he himself were a god. But in
the contemporary metaphysics there was no deuteros theos, no
other god except Satan, who owns Yahweh's ear and is able to
influence him. He is the only one who can pull the wool over
his eyes, beguile him, and put him up to a massive violation o
his own penal code. A formidable opponent indeed, and, be-
cause of his close kinship, so compromising that he must be
concealed with the utmost discretion even to the point of God's
hiding him from his own consciousness in his own bosom! In
his stead God must set up his miserable servant as the bugbear
whom he has to fight, in the hope that by banishing the dreaded
countenance to "the hidden place" he will be able to maintain
himself in a state of unconsciousness.

595 The stage-managing of this imaginary duel, the speechify-
ing, and the impressive performance given by the prehistoric
menagerie would not be sufficiently explained if we tried to
reduce them to the purely negative factor of Yahweh's fear of
becoming conscious and of the relativization which this entails.
The conflict becomes acute for Yahweh as a result of a new
factor, which is, however, not hidden from omniscience though
in this case the existing knowledge is not accompanied by any
conclusion. The new factor is something that has never occurred
before in the history of the world, the unheard-of fact that, with-
out knowing it or wanting it, a mortal man is raised by his moral
behaviour above the stars in heaven, from which position of ad-
vantage he can behold the back of Yahweh, the abysmal world
of "shards." 8

740: 12-14 ("in the hidden place'* is RSV alternative reading for "in the world

below").

8 This is an allusion to an idea found in the later cabalistic philosophy. [These

"shards," also called "shells" (Heb. kclipot), form ten counterpoles to the ten

seftroth, which are the ten stages in the revelation of God's creative power. The

shards, representing the forces of evil and darkness, were originally med with

the light of the sefiroth. The Zohar describes evil as the by-product of the life

981

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

59<5 Does Job know what he has seen? If he does, he is astute or
canny enough not to betray it. But his words speak volumes:

I know that them canst do all things,

and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted. 9

597 Truly, Yahweh can do all things and permits himself all
things without batting an eyelid. With brazen countenance he
can project his shadow side and remain unconscious at man's
expense. He can boast of his superior power and enact laws
which mean less than air to him. Murder and manslaughter are
mere bagatelles, and if the mood takes him he can play the
feudal grand seigneur and generously recompense his bondslave
for the havoc wrought in his wheat-fields. "So you have lost
your sons and daughters? No harm done, I will give you new and
better ones."

598 Job continues (no doubt with downcast eyes and in a low
voice):

"Who is this that hides counsel without insight?"
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,

things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
"Hear, and I will speak;

I will question you, and you declare to me."
I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,

but now my eye sees thee;
therefore I abhor myself,

and repent in dust and ashes. 10

599 Shrewdly, Job takes up Yahweh's aggressive words and pros-
trates himself at his feet as if he were indeed the defeated an-
tagonist. Guileless as Job's speech sounds, it could just as well
be equivocal. He has learnt his lesson well and experienced
"wonderful things" which are none too easily grasped. Before,
he had known Yahweh "by the hearing of the ear," but now
he has got a taste of his reality, more so even than David an

process of the sefiroth. Therefore the seftroth had to be cleansed of the evil ad-
mixture of the shards. This elimination of the shards took place in what is de-
scribed in the cabalistic writingsparticularly of Luria and his school as the
"breaking of the vessels/' Through this the powers of evil assumed a separate
and real existence. Cf. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 267.
EDITORS.] 9 42 : 2. 10 42 : 3-6 (modified).

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ANSWER TO JOB

incisive lesson that had better not be forgotten. Formerly he was
naive, dreaming perhaps of a "good" God, or of a benevolent
ruler and just judge. He had imagined that a ''covenant" was a
legal matter and that anyone who was party to a contract could
insist on his rights as agreed; that God would be faithful and
true or at least just, and, as one could assume from the Ten
Commandments, would have some recognition of ethical values
or at least feel committed to his own legal standpoint. But, to
his horror, he has discovered that Yahweh is not human but, in
certain respects, less than human, that he is just what Yahweh
himself says of Leviathan (the crocodile):

He beholds everything that is high:
He is king over all proud beasts. 11

600 Unconsciousness has an animal nature. Like all old gods
Yahweh has his animal symbolism with its unmistakable borrow-
ings from the much older theriomorphic gods of Egypt, espe-
cially Horus and his four sons. Of the four animals of Yahweh
only one has a human face. That is probably Satan, the god-
father of man as a spiritual being. EzekieFs vision attributes
three-fourths animal nature and only one-fourth human nature
to the animal deity, while the upper deity, the one above the
"sapphire throne," merely had the "likeness" of a man. 12 This
symbolism explains Yahweh's behaviour, which, from the
human point of view, is so intolerable: it is the behaviour of
an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is
a phenomenon and, as Job says, "not a man." 13

601 One could, without too much difficulty, impute such a mean-
ing to Job's speech. Be that as it may, Yahweh calmed down at
last. The therapeutic measure of unresisting acceptance had
proved its value yet again. Nevertheless, Yahweh is still some-

11 Job 41 : 25 (ZB); cf. 41 : 34 (AV and RSV). 12 Ezekiel i : 26.

13 The naive assumption that the creator of the world Is a conscious being must
be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible
dislocations of logic. For example, the nonsensical doctrine of the privatio boni
would never have been necessary had one not had to assume in advance that it
is impossible for the consciousness of a good God to produce evil deeds. Divine
unconsciousness and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a
conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows no
conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness.

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what nervous of Job's friends they "have not spoken of me what
is right." 14 The projection of his doubt-complex extends
comically enough, one must say to these respectable and
slightly pedantic old gentlemen, as though God-knows- what de-
pended on what they thought. But the fact that men should
think at all, and especially about him, is maddeningly disquiet-
ing and ought somehow to be stopped. It is far too much like
the sort of thing his vagrant son is always springing on him, thus
hitting him in his weakest spot. How often already has he bit-
terly regretted his unconsidered outbursts!

602 One can hardly avoid the impression that Omniscience is
gradually drawing near to a realization, and is threatened with
an insight that seems to be hedged about with fears of self-
destruction. Fortunately, Job's final declaration is so formu-
lated that one can assume with some certainty that, for the
protagonists, the incident is closed for good and all.

603 \Ve, the commenting chorus on this great tragedy, which has
never at any time lost its vitality, do not feel quite like that.
For our modern sensibilities it is by no means apparent that
with Job's profound obeisance to the majesty of the divine
presence, and his prudent silence, a real answer has been given
to the question raised by the Satanic prank of a wager with God.
Job has not so much answered as reacted in an adjusted way. In
so doing he displayed remarkable self-discipline, but an un-
equivocal answer has still to be given.

&>4 To take the most obvious thing, what about the moral wrong
Job has suffered? Is man so worthless in God's eyes that not even
a tort moral can be inflicted on him? That contradicts the fact
that man is desired by Yahweh and that it obviously matters to
him whether men speak "right" of him or not. He needs Job's
loyalty, and it means so much to him that he shrinks at nothing
in carrying out his test. This attitude attaches an almost divine
importance to man, for what else is there in the whole wide
world that could mean anything to one who has everything?
Yahweh's divided attitude, which on the one hand tramples on
human life and happiness without regard, and on the other hand
must have man for a partner, puts the latter in an impossible
position. At one moment Yahweh behaves as irrationally as a
cataclysm; the next moment he wants to be loved, honoured,

i* Job 42 : 7.

384

ANSWER TO JOB

worshipped, and praised as just. He reacts irritably to every
word that has the faintest suggestion of criticism, while he him-
self does not care a straw for his own moral code if his actions
happen to run counter to its statutes.

605 One can submit to such a God only with fear and trembling,
and can try indirectly to propitiate the despot with unctuous
praises and ostentatious obedience. But a relationship of trust
seems completely out of the question to our modern way of
thinking. Nor can moral satisfaction be expected from an un-
conscious nature god of this kind. Nevertheless, Job got his
satisfaction, without Yahweh's intending it and possibly with-
out himself knowing it, as the poet would have it appear. Yah-
weh's allocutions have the unthinking yet none the less
transparent purpose of showing Job the brutal power of the
demiurge: "This is I, the creator of all the ungovernable, ruth-
less forces of Nature, which are not subject to any ethical laws*
I, too, am an amoral force of Nature, a purely phenomenal
personality that cannot see its own back."

&>6 This is, or at any rate could be, a moral satisfaction of the
first order for Job, because through this declaration man, in
spite of his impotence, is set up as a judge over God himself.
We do not know whether Job realizes this, but we do know from
the numerous commentaries on Job that all succeeding ages
have overlooked the fact that a kind of Moira or Dike rules over
Yahweh, causing him to give himself away so blatantly. Anyone
can see how he unwittingly raises Job by humiliating him in the
dust. By so doing he pronounces judgment on himself and gives
man the moral satisfaction whose absence we found so painful
in the Book of Job.

607 The poet of this drama showed a masterly discretion in ring-
ing down the curtain at the very moment when his hero gave
unqualified recognition to the dxo^acm iityaXy of the Demiurge
by prostrating himself at the feet of His Divine Majesty. No
other impression was permitted to remain. An unusual scandal
was blowing up in the realm of metaphysics, with supposedly
devastating consequences, and nobody was ready with a saving
formula which would rescue the monotheistic conception of
God from disaster. Even in those days the critical intellect of a
Greek could easily have seized on this new addition to Yahweh's
biography and used it in his disfavour (as indeed happened,

385

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

though very much later) 15 so as to mete out to him the fate that
had already overtaken the Greek gods. But a relativization of
God was utterly unthinkable at that time, and remained so for
the next two thousand years.

608 The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when con-
scious reason is blind and impotent. The drama has been con-
summated for all eternity: Yahweh's dual nature has been
revealed, and somebody or something has seen and registered
this fact. Such a revelation, whether it reached man's conscious-
ness or not, could not fail to have far-reaching consequences.

Ill

609 Before turning to the question of how the germ of unrest
developed further, we must turn back to the time when the
Book of Job was written. Unfortunately the dating is uncer-
tain. It is generally assumed that it was written between 600
and 300 B.C. not too far away, therefore, from the time of the
Book of Proverbs (4th to grd century). Now in Proverbs we en-
counter a symptom of Greek influence which, if an earlier date
is assigned to it, reached the Jewish sphere of culture through
Asia Minor and, if a later date, through Alexandria. This is
the idea of Sophia, or the Sapientia Dei, which is a coeternal
and more or less hypostatized pneuma of feminine nature that
existed before the Creation:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way,

before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,

or ever the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth;

when there were no fountains abounding with water.

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was by him, as a master workman,

is [Cf. "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," par. 350, above; Aion, par. 128
(Swiss edn., pp. 11 48:. ) .EDITORS.]

386

ANSWER TO JOB

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing always before him,
rejoicing in his habitable earth;

and my delights were with the sons of men. 1

610 This Sophia, who already shares certain essential qualities
with the Johannine Logos, is on the one hand closely associated
with the Hebrew Chochma, but on the other hand goes so far
beyond it that one can hardly fail to think of the Indian Shakti.
Relations with India certainly existed at that time (the time of
the Ptolemys). A further source is the Wisdom of Jesus the Son
of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, written around 200 B.C. Here Wis-
dom says of herself:

I came out of the mouth of the most High,

and covered the earth as a cloud.
I dwelt in high places,

and my throne is in a cloudy pillar.
1 alone encompassed the circuit of heaven,

and walked in the bottom of the deep.
I had power over the waves of the sea, and over all the
earth,

and over every people and nation.

He created me from the beginning before the world,

and I shall never fail.
In the holy tabernacle I served before him;

and so was I established in Sion.
Likewise in the beloved city he gave me rest,

and in Jerusalem was my power.

I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus,

and as a cypress tree upon the mountains of Herman.

I was exalted like a palm tree in En-gaddi,
and as a rose plant in Jericho,
as a fair olive tree in a pleasant field,
and grew up as a plane tree by the water.

I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon and aspalathus,
and I yielded a pleasant odour like the best myrrh . . .

As the turpentine tree I stretched out my branches,
and my branches are the brandies of honour and grace.

l Proverbs 8:22-24 (AV), 27, 29-31 (AV mod.).

387

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

As the vine brought I forth pleasant savour,

and my flowers are the fruit of honour and riches.

I am the mother of fair love,

and fear, and knowledge, and holy hope:
I therefore, being eternal, am given to all my children
which are chosen of him. 2

611 It is worth while to examine this text more closely. Wisdom
describes herself, in effect, as the Logos, the Word of God ("I
came out of the mouth of the most High"). As Ruach, the spirit
of God, she brooded over the waters of the beginning. Like God,
she has her throne in heaven. As the cosmogonic Pneuma she
pervades heaven and earth and all created things. She corre-
sponds in almost every feature to the Logos of St. John. We
shall see below how far this connection is also important as
regards content.

612 She is the feminine numen of the "metropolis" par ex-
cellence, of Jerusalem the mother-city. She is the mother-be-
loved, a reflection of Ishtar, the pagan city-goddess. This is
confirmed by the detailed comparison of Wisdom with trees,
such as the cedar, palm, terebinth ("turpentine-tree"), olive,
cypress, etc. All these trees have from ancient times been sym-
bols of the Semitic love- and mother-goddess. A holy tree always
stood beside her altar on high places. In the Old Testament oaks
and terebinths are oracle trees. God or angels are said to appear
in or beside trees. David consulted a mulberry-tree oracle. 3 The
tree in Babylon represented Tammuz, the son-lover, just as it
represented Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Dionysus, the young dying
gods of the Near East. All these symbolic attributes also occur
in the Song of Songs, as characteristics of the sponsus as well as
the sponsa. The vine, the grape, the vine flower, and the vine-
yard play a significant role here. The Beloved is like an apple-
tree; she shall come down from the mountains (the cult places
of the mother-goddess), "from the lions' dens, from the moun-
tains of the leopards"; 4 her womb is "an orchard of pomegran-
ates, with pleasant fruits, camphire with spikenard, spikenard and
saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense,
myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices." 5 Her hands "dropped

2 Ecclesfasticus 24:3-18 (AV mod.).

311 Samuel 5 : 23!. 4 $ O ng of Solomon 4 : 8 (AV). 54:13-15.

388

ANSWER TO JOB

with myrrh'* 6 (Adonis, we may remember, was born of the
myrrh). Like the Holy Ghost, Wisdom is given as a gift to
the elect, an idea that is taken up again in the doctrine o the
Paraclete.

613 The pneumatic nature of Sophia as well as her world-build-
ing Maya character come out still more clearly in the apocryphal
Wisdom of Solomon. 'Tor wisdom is a loving spirit/' 7 "kind
to man." 8 She is "the worker of all things/' "in her is an under-
standing spirit, holy." 9 She is "the breath of the power of God/'
"a pure effluence flowing from the glory of the Almighty/' 10
"the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of
the power of God/' n a being "most subtil/' who "passeth and
goeth through all things by reason of her pureness." 12 She is
"conversant with God/' and "the Lord of all things himself
loved her." 13 "Who of all that are is a more cunning workman
than she?" 14 She is sent from heaven and from the throne of
glory as a "Holy Spirit." 15 As a psychopomp she leads the way
to God and assures immortality. 16

614 The Wisdom of Solomon is emphatic about God's justice
and, probably not without pragmatic purpose, ventures to sail
very close to the wind: "Righteousness is immortal, but ungodly
men with their works and words call death upon themselves/' 17
The unrighteous and the ungodly, however, say:

Let us oppress the poor righteous man,

let us not spare the widow,

nor reverence the ancient gray hairs of the aged.
Let our strength be the law of justice:

for that which is feeble is found to be nothing worth.
Therefore let us lie in wait for the righteous;

because ... he upbraideth us with our offending the law,

and objecteth to our infamy. . . .
He professeth to have the knowledge of God:

and he calleth himself the child of the Lord.
He was made to reprove our thoughts.

6 Song of Solomon 5 : 5.

7 Wisdom of Solomon i : 6. (4>i\&p&fx*vQp rm^a o-o^a.) 8 7 : 23.

9 7 : 22. (iravTcav Texvir^./TTPev^a votpto frytov.) 10 7 -* 25 (AV mod.). C&

11 7 1 26. 12 7 ; 23, 24. 18 8 : 3. (wjifiluMnw l%oixra./xaFTwr SetnnSnj

1*8:6. 159:10,17. I66:8and8:i3. IT i : 15-16 (mod.).

389

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION ! WEST

Let us see if his words be true:

and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him.

Let us examine him with despitefulness and torture,

that we may know his meekness, and prove his patience. 18

615 Where did we read but a short while before: "And the Lord
said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job, that there
is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man,
who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his
integrity, although you moved me against him, to destroy him
without cause"? "Wisdom is better than might/ 1 saith the
Preacher. 19

616 Not from mere thoughtfulness and unconsciousness, but
from a deeper motive, the Wisdom of Solomon here touches on
the sore spot In order to understand this more fully, we would
have to find out in what sort of relation the Book of Job stands
to the change that occurred in the status of Yahweh at about the
same time, i.e., its relation to the appearance of Sophia. It is not
a question of literary history, but of Yahweh's fate as it affects
man. From the ancient records we know that the divine drama
was enacted between God and his people, who were betrothed to
him, the masculine dynamis, like a woman, and over whose
faithfulness he watched jealously. A particular instance of this is
Job, whose faithfulness is subjected to a savage test. As I have
said, the really astonishing thing is how easily Yahweh gives in
to the insinuations of Satan. If it were true that he trusted Job
perfectly, it would be only logical for Yahweh to defend him,
unmask the malicious slanderer, and make him pay for his defa-
mation of God's faithful servant. But Yahweh never thinks of
it, not even after Job's innocence has been proved. We hear
nothing of a rebuke or disapproval of Satan. Therefore, one can-
not doubt Yahweh's connivance. His readiness to deliver Job
into Satan's murderous hands proves that he doubts Job pre-
cisely because he projects his own tendency to unfaithfulness
upon a scapegoat. There is reason to suspect that he is about to
loosen his matrimonial ties with Israel but hides this intention
from himself. This vaguely suspected unfaithfulness causes him,
with the help of Satan, to seek out the unfaithful one, and he
18 2 ; 10-19. 19 Job 2 : 3; Ecclesiastes 9:16.

ANSWER TO JOB

infallibly picks on the most faithful of the lot, who is forthwith
subjected to a gruelling test. Yahweh has become unsure of his
own faithfulness.

617 At about the same time, or a little later, it is rumoured what
has happened: he has remembered a feminine being who is no
less agreeable to him than to man, a friend and playmate from
the beginning of the world, the first-born of all God's creatures,
a stainless reflection of his glory and a master workman, nearer
and dearer to his heart than the late descendants of the proto-
plast, the original man, who was but a secondary product
stamped in his image. There must be some dire necessity re-
sponsible for this anamnesis of Sophia: things simply could not
go on as before, the "just'* God could not go on committing in-
justices, and the "Omniscient 11 could not behave any longer like
a clueless and thoughtless human being. Self-reflection becomes
an imperative necessity, and for this Wisdom is needed. Yahweh
has to remember his absolute knowledge; for, if Job gains knowl-
edge of God, then God must also learn to know himself. It just
could not be that Yahweh's dual nature should become public
property and remain hidden from himself alone. Whoever
knows God has an effect on him. The failure of the attempt to
corrupt Job has changed Yahweh's nature.

618 We shall now proceed to reconstruct, from the hints given
in the Bible and from history, what happened after this change.
For this purpose we must turn back to the time of Genesis, and
to the protoplast before the Fall. He, Adam, produced Eve, his
feminine counterpart, from his rib with the Creator's help, in
the same way as the Creator had produced the hermaphroditic
Adam from the prima materia and, along with him, the divinely
stamped portion of humanity, namely the people of Israel and
the other descendants of Adam. 20 Mysteriously following the
same pattern, it was bound to happen that Adam's first son, like
Satan, was an evildoer and murderer before the Lord, so that the
prologue in heaven was repeated on earth. It can easily be sur-
mised that this was the deeper reason why Yahweh gave special
protection to the unsuccessful Cain, for he was a faithful repro-
duction of Satan in miniature. Nothing is said about a proto-
type of the early-departed Abel, who was dearer to God than

20 [As to that portion of humanity not divinely stamped, and presumably de-
scended from the pre-Adamic anthropoids, see par. 576, above.-EDiroRS.]

39 1

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Cain, the go-ahead husbandman (who was no doubt instructed
in these arts by one of Satan's angels). Perhaps this prototype
was another son of God of a more conservative nature than
Satan, no rolling stone with a fondness for new and black-
hearted thoughts, but one who was bound to the Father in child-
like love, who harboured no other thoughts except those that
enjoyed paternal approval, and who dwelt in the inner circle of
the heavenly economy. That would explain why his earthly
counterpart Abel could so soon "hasten away from the evil
world/' in the words of the Book of Wisdom, and return to the
Father, while Cain in his earthly existence had to taste to the
full the curse of his progressiveness on the one hand and of his
moral inferiority on the other.

619 If the original father Adam is a copy of the Creator, his son
Cain is certainly a copy of God's son Satan, and this gives us
good reason for supposing that God's favourite, Abel, must also
have his correspondence in a "supracelestial place," The omi-
nous happenings that occur right at the beginning of a seem-
ingly successful and satisfactory Creation the Fall and the frat-
ricidecatch our attention, and one is forced to admit that the
initial situation, when the spirit of God brooded over the tohu-
bohu, hardly permits us to expect an absolutely perfect result.
Furthermore the Creator, who found every other day of his work
"good," failed to give good marks to what happened on Mon-
day. He simply said nothing a circumstance that favours an
argument from silence! What happened on that day was the final
separation of the upper from the lower waters by the interposed
"plate" of the firmament. It is clear that this unavoidable dual-
ism refused, then as later, to fit smoothly into the concept of
monotheism, because it points to a metaphysical disunity. This
split, as we know from history, had to be patched up again and
again through the centuries, concealed and denied. It had made
itself felt from the very beginning in Paradise, through a strange
inconsequence which befell the Creator or was put over on him.
Instead of following his original programme of letting man ap-
pear on the last day as the most intelligent being and lord of all
creatures, he created the serpent who proved to be much more
intelligent and more conscious than Adam, and, in addition,
had been created before him. We can hardly suppose that Yah-
weh would have played such a trick on himself; it is far more

ANSWER TO JOB

likely that his son Satan had a hand in it. He is a trickster and
spoilsport who loves nothing better than to cause annoying acci-
dents. Although Yahweh had created the reptiles before Adam,
they were common or garden snakes, highly unintelligent, from
among whom Satan selected a tree-snake to use as his disguise.
From then on the rumour spread that the snake was "the most
spiritual animal." 21 Later the snake became the favourite sym-
bol of the Nous, received high honours and was even permitted
to symbolize God's second son, because the latter was interpreted
as the world-redeeming Logos, which frequently appears as iden-
tical with the Nous. A legend of later origin maintains that the
snake in the Garden of Eden was Lilith, Adam's first wife, with
whom he begot a horde of demons. This legend likewise sup-
poses a trick that can hardly have been intended by the Creator.
Consequently, the Bible knows only of Eve as Adam's legitimate
wife. It nevertheless remains a strange fact that the original man
who was created in the image of God had, according to tradi-
tion, two wives, just like his heavenly prototype. Just as Yahweh
is legitimately united with his wife Israel, but has a feminine
pneuma as his intimate playmate from all eternity, so Adam first
has Lilith (the daughter or emanation of Satan) to wife, as a
Satanic correspondence to Sophia. Eve would then correspond
to the people of Israel. We naturally do not know why we should
hear at such a late date that the Ruach Elohim, the "spirit of
God," is not only feminine but a comparatively independent
being who exists side by side with God, and that long before the
marriage with Israel Yahweh had had relations with Sophia.
Nor do we know why, in the older tradition, the knowledge
of this first alliance had been lost. Likewise it was only quite
late that one heard of the delicate relationship between Adam
and Lilith. Whether Eve was as troublesome a wife for Adam
as the children of Israel, who were perpetually flirting with un-
faithfulness, were for Yahweh, is equally dark to us. At any rate
the family life of our first parents was not all beer and skittles:
their first two sons are a typical pair of hostile brothers, for at
that time it was apparently still the custom to live out mytholog-
ical motifs in reality. (Nowadays this is felt to be objectionable
and is denied whenever it happens.) The parents can share the
blame for original sin: Adam has only to remember his demon-
si r b moiMTu&raTo* tffcp.-A view that is found in Philo Judaeus.

393

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

princess, and Eve should never forget that she was the first to
fall for the wiles of the serpent. Like the Fall, the Cain-Abel
intermezzo can hardly be listed as one of Creation's shining
successes. One must draw this conclusion because Yahweh him-
self did not appear to be informed in advance of the above-
mentioned incidents. Here as later there is reason to suspect
that no conclusions were ever drawn from Omniscience: Yahweh
did not consult his total knowledge and was accordingly sur-
prised by the result. One can observe the same phenomenon
in human beings, wherever in fact people cannot deny them-
selves the pleasure of their emotions. It must be admitted that
a fit of rage or a sulk has its secret attractions. Were that not so,
most people would long since have acquired a little wisdom.

From this point of view we may be in a better position to
understand what happened to Job. In the pleromatic or (as the
Tibetans call it) Bardo state, 22 there is a perfect interplay of
cosmic forces, but with the Creationthat is, with the division
of the world into distinct processes in space and time events
begin to rub and jostle one another. Covered by the hem of the
paternal mantle, Satan soon starts putting a right touch here
and a wrong touch there, thus giving rise to complications
which were apparently not intended in the Creator's plan and
which come as surprises. While unconscious creation animals,
plants, and crystals functions satisfactorily so far as we know,
things are constantly going wrong with man. At first his con-
sciousness is only a very little higher than that of the animals,
for which reason his freedom of will is also extremely limited.
But Satan takes an interest in him and experiments with him
in his own way, leading him into all sorts of wickedness while
his angels teach him the arts and sciences, which until now had
been reserved for the perfection of the pleroma. (Even in those
days Satan would have merited the name of "Lucifer"!) The
peculiar, unforeseen antics of men arouse Yahweh's wrath and
thereby involve him in his own creation. Divine interventions
become a compelling necessity. Irritatingly enough, they only
meet with temporary success. Even the Draconian punishment
of drowning all life with a few choice exceptions (a fate which,
according to old Johann Jacob Scheuchzer on the evidence of

22 [Cf, the commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, par. 833, below.
EDITORS.]

394

ANSWER TO JOB

the fossils, not even the fishes escaped), had no lasting effect.
Creation remained just as tainted as before. The strange thing
is that Yahweh invariably seeks the reason for this in man, who
apparently refuses to obey, but never in his son, the father of
all tricksters. This false orientation cannot fail to exasperate
his already touchy nature, so that fear of God is regarded by
man in general as the principle and even as the beginning of all
wisdom. While mankind tried, under this hard discipline, to
broaden their consciousness by acquiring a modicum of wisdom,
that is, a little foresight and reflection, 23 it is clear from the his-
torical development that Yahweh had lost sight of his plero-
matic coexistence with Sophia since the days of the Creation.
Her place was taken by the covenant with the chosen people,
who were thus forced into the feminine role. At that time the
people consisted of a patriarchal society in which women w r ere
only of secondary importance. God's marriage with Israel was
therefore an essentially masculine affair, something like the
founding of the Greek polls, which occurred about the same
time. The inferiority of women was a settled fact. Woman was
regarded as less perfect than man, as Eve's weakness for the
blandishments of the serpent amply proved. Perfection is a
masculine desiderattim, while woman inclines by nature to
completeness. And it is a fact that, even today, a man can stand
a relative state of perfection much better and for a longer period
than a woman, while as a rule it does not agree with women
and may even be dangerous for them. If a woman strives for
perfection she forgets the complementary role of completeness,
which, though imperfect by itself, forms the necessary counter-
part to perfection. For, just as completeness is always imperfect,
so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a
final state w r hich is hopelessly sterile. "Ex perfecto nihil fit," say
the old masters, whereas the imperfectum carries within it the
seeds of its own improvement. Perfectionism always ends in a
blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values.
62 * At the bottom of Yahweh's marriage with Israel is a perfec-
tionist intention which excludes that kind of relatedness we
know as "Eros." The lack of Eros, of relationship to values, is
painfully apparent in the Book of Job: the paragon of all crea-
tion is not a man but a monster! Yahweh has no Eros, no

23 Cf. ^poptjuws in the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16: 8}.

395

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

relationship to man, but only to a purpose man must help
him fulfil. But that does not prevent him from being jealous and
mistrustful like any other husband, though even here he has his
purpose in mind and not man.

The faithfulness of his people becomes the more important
to him the more he forgets Wisdom. But again and again they
slip back into unfaithfulness despite the many proofs of his
favour* This behaviour naturally does nothing to mollify Yah-
weh's jealousy and suspicions, hence Satan's insinuations fall on
fertile ground when he drips his doubt about Job's faithfulness
into the paternal ear. Against his own convictions Yahweh
agrees without any hesitation to inflict the worst tortures on
him. One misses Sophia's "love of mankind" more than ever.
Even Job longs for the Wisdom which is nowhere to be found. 24

Job marks the climax of this unhappy development. He
epitomizes a thought which had been maturing in mankind
about that time a dangerous thought that makes great demands
on the wisdom of gods and men. Though conscious of these
demands, Job obviously does not know enough about the Sophia
who is coeternal with God. Because man feels himself at the
mercy of Yahweh's capricious will, he is in need of wisdom;
not so Yahweh, who up to now has had nothing to contend with
except man's nothingness. With the Job drama, however, the
situation undergoes a radical change. Here Yahweh comes up
against a man who stands firm, who clings to his rights until he
is compelled to give way to brute force. He has seen God's face
and the unconscious split in his nature. God was now known,
and this knowledge went on working not only in Yahweh but
in man too. Thus it was the men of the last few centuries before
Christ who, at the gentle touch of the pre-existent Sophia, com-
pensate Yahweh and his attitude, and at the same time complete
the anamnesis of Wisdom. Taking a highly personified form
that is clear proof of her autonomy, Wisdom reveals herself to
men as a friendly helper and advocate against Yahweh, and
shows them the bright side, the kind, just, and amiable aspect
of their God.

At the time when Satan's practical joke with the snake com-
promised the paradise that was planned to be perfect, Yahweh

24 Job 28:12: "But where shall wisdom be found?" Whether this is a later in-
terpolation or not makes no difference.

396

ANSWER TO JOB

banished Adam and Eve, whom he had created as images of his
masculine essence and its feminine emanation, to the extra-
paradisal world, the limbo of "shards." It is not clear how much
of Eve represents Sophia and how much of her is Lilith. At any
rate Adam has priority in every respect. Eve was taken out of
his body as an afterthought. I mention these details from
Genesis only because the reappearance of Sophia in the heavenly
regions points to a coming act of creation. She is indeed the
"master workman"; she realizes God's thoughts by clothing
them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine
beings. Her coexistence with Yahweh signifies the perpetual
hieros gamos from which worlds are begotten and born. A
momentous change is imminent: God desires to regenerate
himself in the mystery of the heavenly nuptialsas the chief gods
of Egypt had done from time immemorial and to become man.
For this he uses the Egyptian model of the god's incarnation in
Pharaoh, which in its turn is but a copy of the eternal hieros
gamos in the pleroma. It would, however, be wrong to suppose
that this archetype is merely repeating itself mechanically. So
far as we know, this is never the case, since archetypal situations
only return when specifically called for. The real reason for
God's becoming man is to be sought in his encounter with Job.
Later on we shall deal with this question in more detail.

625 Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of
the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process
itself will follow certain prefigurations. The approach of Sophia
betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that
is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own
nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved.
In this decision we can discern the "philanthropic" influence of
Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one,
the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be
employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed
directly from the hand of the Creator, but shall be bom of a
human woman. So this time priority falls to the Second Eve, not
only in a temporal sense but in a material sense as well. On the

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basis of the so-called Proto-Evangelium, the Second Eve corre-
sponds to "the woman and her seed" mentioned in Genesis
3: 15, which shall bruise the serpent's head. And just as Adam
was believed to be originally hermaphroditic, so "the woman
and her seed" are thought of as a human pair, as the Queen of
Heaven and Mother of God and as the divine son who has no
human father. Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure
vessel for the coming birth of God. Her independence of the
male is emphasized by her virginity as the sine qua non of the
process. She is a "daughter of God" who, as a later dogma will
establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an
immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of orig-
inal sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state be-
fore the Fall. This posits a new beginning. The divine immacu-
lateness of her status makes it immediately clear that she not
only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the
bride of God, is also the incarnation of her prototype, namely
Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasized in the ancient
writings, suggests that in this newest creation of his Yahweh has
allowed himself to be extensively influenced by Sophia. For
Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for
sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who
leads the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her
Assumption is therefore the prototype of man's bodily resurrec-
tion. As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she holds the
place of the Old Testament Sophia.

626 Remarkable indeed are the unusual precautions which sur-
round the making of Mary: immaculate conception, extirpation
of the taint of sin, everlasting virginity. The Mother of God is
obviously being protected against Satan's tricks. From this we
can conclude that Yahweh has consulted his own omniscience,
for in his omniscience there is a clear knowledge of the perverse
intentions which lurk in the dark son of God. Mary must at all
costs be protected from these corrupting influences. The in-
evitable consequence of all these elaborate protective measures
is something that has not been sufficiently taken into account in
the dogmatic evaluation of the Incarnation: her freedom from
original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose
common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of
redemption. The status ante lapsum is tantamount to a para-

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disal, i.e., pleromatic and divine, existence. By having these
special measures applied to her, Mary is elevated to the status of
a goddess and consequently loses something of her humanity:
she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers,
and therefore he also will never be a human being, but a god.
To my knowledge at least, no one has ever perceived that this
queers the pitch for a genuine Incarnation of God, or rather,
that the Incarnation was only partially consummated. Both
mother and son are not real human beings at all, but gods.
627 This arrangement, though it had the effect of exalting Mary's
personality in the masculine sense by bringing it closer to the
perfection of Christ, was at the same time injurious to the
feminine principle of imperfection or completeness, since this
was reduced by the perfectionizing tendency to the little bit of
imperfection that still distinguishes Mary from Christ. Phoebo
propior lumina perdit! Thus the more the feminine ideal is bent
in the direction of the masculine, the more the woman loses her
power to compensate the masculine striving for perfection, and
a typically masculine, ideal state arises which, as we shall see, is
threatened with an enantiodromia. No path leads beyond per-
fection into the future there is only a turning back, a collapse
of the ideal, which could easily have been avoided by paying
attention to the feminine ideal of completeness. Yahweh's per-
fectionism is carried over from the Old Testament into the
New, and despite all the recognition and glorification of the
feminine principle this never prevailed against the patriarchal
supremacy. We have not, therefore, by any means heard the
last of it

628 The older son of the first parents was corrupted by Satan
and not much of a success. He was an eidolon of Satan, and only
the younger son, Abel, was pleasing to God. In Cain the God-im-
age was distorted, but in Abel it was considerably less dimmed.
If Adam is thought of as a copy of God, then God's successful
son, who served as a model for Abel (and about whom, as we
have seen, there are no available documents), is the prefigura-
tion of the God-man. Of the latter we know positively that, as

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the Logos, he is preexistent and coeternal with God, indeed of
the same substance (a/woforws) as he. One can therefore regard
Abel as the imperfect prototype of God's son who is about to be
begotten in Mary. Just as Yahweh originally undertook to create
a chthonic equivalent of himself in the first man, Adam., so
now he intends something similar, but much better. The ex-
traordinary precautionary measures above-mentioned are de-
signed to serve this purpose. The new son, Christ, shall on the
one hand be a chthonic man like Adam, mortal and capable of
suffering, but on the other hand he shall not be, like Adam, a
mere copy, but God himself, begotten by himself as the Father,
and rejuvenating the Father as the Son. As God he has always
been God, and as the son of Mary, who is plainly a copy of
Sophia, he is the Logos (synonymous with Nous), who, like
Sophia, is a master workman, as stated by the Gospel according
to St. John. 1 This identity of mother and son is borne out over
and over again in the myths.

629 Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but
once in history, it has always existed in eternity. For the layman
in these matters, the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event
with a unique historical occurrence is something that is ex-
tremely difficult to conceive. He must, however, accustom him-
self to the idea that "time" is a relative concept and needs to
be complemented by that of the "simultaneous" existence, in
the Bardo or pleroma, of all historical processes. What exists in
the pleroma as an eternal process appears in time as an aperiodic
sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular
pattern. To take but one example: Yahweh had one good son
and one who was a failure. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, cor-
respond to this prototype, and so, in all ages and in all parts of
the world, does the motif of the hostile brothers, which in in-
numerable modern variants still causes dissension in families
and keeps the psychotherapist busy. Just as many examples, no
less instructive, could be found for the two women prefigured
in eternity. When these things occur as modern variants, there-
fore, they should not be regarded merely as personal episodes,
moods, or chance idiosyncrasies in people, but as fragments of
the pleromatic process itself, which, broken up into individual

l John 1:3: "All things were made through him, and without him was not any-
thing made that was made."

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events occurring in time, is an essential component or aspect
of the divine drama.

630 When Yahweh created the world from his prima materia,
the "Void," he could not help breathing his own mystery into
the Creation which is himself in every part, as every reasonable
theology has long been convinced. From this comes the belief
that it is possible to know God from his Creation. When I say
that he could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation
of his omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment
that all possibilities are contained in him, and that there are in
consequence no other possibilities than those which express
him.

631 All the world is God's, and God is in all the world from the
very beginning. Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation?
one asks oneself, astonished. God is in everything already, and
yet there must be something missing if a sort of second entrance
into Creation has now to be staged with so much care and cir-
cumspection. Since Creation is universal, reaching to the re-
motest stellar galaxies, and since it has also made organic life
infinitely variable and capable of endless differentiation, we can
hardly see where the defect lies. The fact that Satan has every-
where intruded his corrupting influence is no doubt regrettable
for many reasons, but it makes no difference in principle. It is
not easy to give an answer to this question. One would like to
say that Christ had to appear in order to deliver mankind from
evil. But when one considers that evil was originally slipped
into the scheme of things by Satan, and still is, then it would
seem much simpler if Yahweh would, for once, call this "prac-
tical joker" severely to account, get rid of his pernicious influ-
ence, and thus eliminate the root of all evil. He would then not
need the elaborate arrangement of a special Incarnation with
all the unforeseeable consequences which this entails. One
should make clear to oneself what it means when God becomes
man. It means nothing less than a world-shaking transformation
of God. It means more or less what Creation meant in the begin-
ning, namely an objectivation of God. At the time of the Crea-
tion he revealed himself in Nature; now he wants to be more
specific and become man. It must be admitted, however, that
there was a tendency in this direction right from the start. For,
when those other human beings, who had evidently been created

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before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mam-
mals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of
creation, a man who was the image of God. This was the first
prefiguration of his becoming man. He took Adam's descend-
ants, especially the people of Israel, into his personal possession,
and from time to time he filled this people's prophets with his
spirit. All these things were preparatory events and symptoms o
a tendency within God to become man. But in omniscience
there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human
nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long
before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies
in the ancient Egyptian records. These intimations and prefigura-
tions of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely in-
comprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo is
God's and consists of nothing but God, with the result that man,
like the rest of creation, is simply God become concrete. Pre-
figurations, however, are not in themselves creative events, but
are only stages in the process of becoming conscious. It was only
quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize)
that God is Reality itself and therefore last but not least man.
This realization is a millennial process.

632 In view of the immense problem which we are about to dis-
cuss, this excursus on pleromatic events is not out of place as an
introduction.

633 What, then, is the real reason for the Incarnation as an his-
torical event?

654 In order to answer this question we have to go rather far
back. As we have seen, Yahweh evidently has a disinclination to
take his absolute knowledge into account as a counterbalance
to the dynamism of omnipotence. The most instructive example
of this is his relation to Satan: it always looks as if Yahweh were
completely uninformed about his son's intentions. That is be-
cause he never consults his omniscience. We can only explain
this on the assumption that Yahweh was so fascinated by his
successive acts of creation, so taken up with them, that he forgot
about his omniscience altogether. It is quite understandable

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that the magical bodying forth of the most diverse objects, which
had never before existed in such pristine splendour, should have
caused God infinite delight. Sophia's memory is not at fault
when she says:

when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was by him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight. 1

635 The Book of Job still rings with the proud joy of creating
when Yahweh points to the huge animals he has successfully
turned out:

Behold, Behemoth,
which I made as I made you.

He is the first of the works of God,
made to be lord over his companions. 2

636 So even in Job's day Yahweh is still intoxicated with the
tremendous power and grandeur of his creation. Compared with
this, what are Satan's pinpricks and the lamentations of human
beings who were created with the behemoth, even if they do
bear God's image? Yahweh seems to have forgotten this fact
entirely, otherwise he would never have ridden so roughshod
over Job's human dignity.

^37 It is only the careful and farsighted preparations for Christ's
birth which show us that omniscience has begun to have a
noticeable effect on Yahweh's actions. A certain philanthropic
and universalistic tendency makes itself felt The "children of
Israel" take something of a second place in comparison with
the "children of men." After Job, we hear nothing further about
new covenants. Proverbs and gnomic utterances seem to be the
order of the day, and a real novum now appears on the scene,
namely apocalyptic communications. This points to metaphysi-
cal acts of cognition, that is, to "constellated" unconscious con-
tents which are ready to irrupt into consciousness. In all this, as
we have said, we discern the helpful hand of Sophia.

3 8 If we consider Yahweh's behaviour, up to the reappearance
of Sophia, as a whole, one indubitable fact strikes us the fact

i Proverbs 8 : 29-30. 2 job 40 : 15, 19 (last line, ZB).

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION .* WEST

that his actions are accompanied by an inferior consciousness.
Time and again we miss reflection and regard for absolute
knowledge. His consciousness seems to be not much more than
a primitive "awareness" which knows no reflection and no
morality. One merely perceives and acts blindly, without con-
scious inclusion of the subject, whose individual existence raises
no problems. Today we would call such a state psychologically
"unconscious," and in the eyes of the law it would be described
as nan compos mentis. The fact that consciousness does not per-
form acts of thinking does not, however, prove that they do not
exist. They merely occur unconsciously and make themselves
felt indirectly in dreams, visions, revelations, and "instinctive"
changes of consciousness, whose very nature tells us that they
derive from an "unconscious" knowledge and are the result of
unconscious acts of judgment or unconscious conclusions.

639 Some such process can be observed in the curious change
which comes over Yahweh's behaviour after the Job episode.
There can be no doubt that he did not immediately become
conscious of the moral defeat he had suffered at Job's hands. In
his omniscience, of course, this fact had been known from all
eternity, and it is not unthinkable that the knowledge of it un-
consciously brought him into the position of dealing so harshly
with Job in order that he himself should become conscious of
something through this conflict, and thus gain new insight.
Satan who, with good reason, later on received the name of
"Lucifer," knew how to make more frequent and better use of
omniscience than did his father. 3 It seems he was the only one
among the sons of God who developed that much initiative. At
all events, it was he who placed those unforeseen incidents in
Yahweh's way, which omniscience knew to be necessary and
indeed indispensable for the unfolding and completion of the
divine drama. Among these the case of Job was decisive, and it
could only have happened thanks to Satan's initiative.

64 The victory of the vanquished and oppressed is obvious:

3 In Christian tradition, too, there is a belief that God's intention to become man
was known to the Devil many centuries before, and that this was why he instilled
the Dionysus myth into the Greeks, so that they could say, when the joyful tidings
reached them in reality: "So what? We knew all that long ago." When the con-
quistadores later discovered the crosses of the Mayas in Yucatan, the Spanish
bishops used the same argument.

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ANSWER TO JOB

Job stands morally higher than Yahweh. In this respect the crea-
ture has surpassed the creator. As always when an external event
touches on some unconscious knowledge, this knowledge can
reach consciousness. The event is recognized as a deja vu, and
one remembers a pre-existent knowledge about it. Something
of the kind must have happened to Yahweh. Job's superiority
cannot be shrugged off. Hence a situation arises in w r hich real
reflection is needed. That is why Sophia steps in. She reinforces
the much needed self-reflection and thus makes possible Yah-
weh's decision to become man. It is a decision fraught with con-
sequences: he raises himself above his earlier primitive level of
consciousness by indirectly acknowledging that the man Job is
morally superior to him and that therefore he has to catch up
and become human himself. Had he not taken this decision he
would have found himself in flagrant opposition to his omnis-
cience. Yahweh must become man precisely because he has done
man a wrong. He, the guardian of justice, knows that every
wrong must be expiated, and Wisdom knows that moral law is
above even him. Because his creature has surpassed him he
must regenerate himself.

As nothing can happen without a pre-existing pattern, not
even creation ex nihilo, which must always resort to the treasure-
house of eternal images in the fabulous mind of the "master
workman/' the choice of a model for the son who is now about
to be begotten lies between Adam (to a limited extent) and Abel
(to a much greater extent). Adam's limitation lies in the fact
that, even if he is the Anthropos, he is chiefly a creature and a
father. Abel's advantage is that he is the son well pleasing to
God, begotten and not directly created. One disadvantage has
to be accepted: he met with an early death by violence, too
early to leave behind him a widow and children, which ought
really to be part of human fate if lived to the full. Abel is not the
authentic archetype of the son well pleasing to God; he is a
copy, but the first of the kind to be met with in the Scriptures.
The young dying god is also well known in the contemporary
pagan religions, and so is the fratricide motif. We shall hardly
be wrong in assuming that Abel's fate refers back to a meta-
physical event which was played out between Satan and another
son of God with a "light" nature and more devotion to his
father. Egyptian tradition can give us information on this point

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(Horus and Set). As we have said, the disadvantage prefigured
in the Abel type can hardly be avoided, because it is an integral
part of the mythical-son drama, as the numerous pagan variants
of this motif show. The short, dramatic course of Abel's fate
serves as an excellent paradigm for the life and death of a God
become man.

To sum up: the immediate cause of the Incarnation lies in
Job's elevation, and its purpose is the differentiation of Yah-
weh's consciousness. For this a situation of extreme gravity was
needed, a peripeteia charged with affect, without which no
higher level of consciousness can be reached.

VII

6 43 In addition to Abel, we have to consider, as a model for the
impending birth of the son of God, the general pattern of the
hero's life which has been established since time immemorial
and handed down by tradition. Since this son is not intended
merely as a national Messiah, but as the universal saviour of
mankind, we have also to consider the pagan myths and revela-
tions concerning the life of one who is singled out by the gods.

644 The birth of Christ is therefore characterized by all the usual
phenomena attendant upon the birth of a hero, such as the an-
nunciation, the divine generation from a virgin, the coinci-
dence of the birth with the thrice-repeated coniunctio maxima
(01 & b ) in the sign of Pisces, which at that precise moment
inaugurated the new era, the recognition of the birth of a king,
the persecution of the newborn, his flight and concealment, his
lowly birth, etc. The motif of the growing up of the hero is dis-
cernible in the wisdom of the twelve-year-old child in the
temple, and there are several examples in the gospels of the
breaking away from the mother.

645 It goes without saying that a quite special interest attaches
to the character and fate of the incarnate son of God. Seen from
a distance of nearly two thousand years, it is uncommonly diffi-
cult to reconstruct a biographical picture of Christ from the
traditions that have been preserved. Not a single text is extant
which would fulfil even the minimum modern requirements
for writing a history, The historically verifiable facts are ex-

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ANSWER TO JOB

tremely scanty, and the little biographically valid material that
exists is not sufficient for us to create out of it a consistent career
or an even remotely probable character. Certain theologians
have discovered the main reason for this in the fact that Christ's
biography and psychology cannot be separated from eschatology.
Eschatology means in effect that Christ is God and man at the
same time and that he therefore suffers a divine as well as a
human fate. The two natures interpenetrate so thoroughly that
any attempt to separate them mutilates both. The divine over-
shadows the human, and the human being is scarcely graspable
as an empirical personality. Even the critical procedures of mod-
ern psychology do not suffice to throw light on all the obscuri-
ties. Every attempt to single out one particular feature for clar-
ity's sake does violence to another which is just as essential either
with respect to his divinity or with respect to his humanity. The
commonplace is so interwoven with the miraculous and the
mythical that we can never be sure of our facts. Perhaps the most
disturbing and confusing thing of all is that the oldest writings,
those of St. Paul, do not seem to have the slightest interest in
Christ's existence as a concrete human being. The synoptic gos-
pels are equally unsatisfactory as they have more the character
of propaganda than of biography.

646 With regard to the human side of Christ, if we can speak of
a "purely human" aspect at all, what stands out particularly
clearly is his love of mankind. This feature is already implied
in the relationship of Mary to Sophia, and especially in his
genesis by the Holy Ghost, whose feminine nature is personified
by Sophia, since she is the preliminary historical form of the
ayiov Tvevna, who is symbolized by the dove, the bird belonging
to the love-goddess. Furthermore, the love-goddess is in most
cases the mother of the young dying god. Christ's love of man-
kind is, however, limited to a not inconsiderable degree by a
certain predestinarian tendency which sometimes causes him to
withhold his salutary message from those who do not belong to
the elect. If one takes the doctrine of predestination literally, it
is difficult to see how it can be fitted into the framework of the
Christian message. But taken psychologically, as a means to
achieving a definite effect, it can readily be understood that
these allusions to predestination give one a feeling of distinc-
tion. If one knows that one has been singled out by divine choice

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and intention from the beginning of the world, then one feels
lifted beyond the transitoriness and meaninglessness of ordinary
human existence and transported to a new state of dignity and
importance, like one who has a part in the divine world drama.
In this way man is brought nearer to God, and this is in entire
accord with the meaning of the message in the gospels.
647 Besides his love of mankind a certain irascibility is notice-
able in Christ's character, and, as is often the case with people
of emotional temperament, a manifest lack of self-reflection.
There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself,
or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only
one significant exception the despairing cry from the Cross:
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Here his
human nature attains divinity; at that moment God experiences
what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what
he made his faithful servant Job suffer. Here is given the answer
to Job, and, clearly, this supreme moment is as divine as it is
human, as "eschatologicar as it is "psychological." And at this
moment, too, where one can feel the human being so absolutely,
the divine myth is present in full force. And both mean one
and the same thing. How, then, can one possibly "demytholo-
gize" the figure of Christ? A rationalistic attempt of that sort
would soak all the mystery out of his personality, and what re-
mained would no longer be the birth and tragic fate of a God
in time, but, historically speaking, a badly authenticated re-
ligious teacher, a Jewish reformer who was hellenistically inter-
preted and misunderstood a kind of Pythagoras, maybe, or, if
you like, a Buddha or a Mohammed, but certainly not a son of
God or a God incarnate. Nor does anybody seem to have realized
what would be the consequences of a Christ disinfected of all
trace of eschatology. Today we have an empirical psychology,
which continues to exist despite the fact that the theologians
have done their best to ignore it, and with its help we can put
certain of Christ's statements under the microscope. If these
statements are detached from their mythical context, they can
only be explained personalistically. But what sort of conclusion
are we bound to arrive at if a statement like "I am the way, and
the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me" *
is reduced to personal psychology? Obviously the same con-

* [ohn 14 : 6.

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ANSWER TO JOB

elusion as that reached by Jesus* relatives when, in their igno-
rance o eschatology, they said, "He is beside himself/' 2 What
is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means,
if anything at all, precisely that function which links us back to
the eternal myth?

648 In view of these portentous impossibilities, it has been as-
sumed, perhaps as the result of a growing impatience with the
difficult factual material, that Christ was nothing but a myth, in
this case no more than a fiction. But myth is not fiction: it con-
sists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed
over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and
men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do.
The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely
nothing to disprove its factual truth quite the contrary. I would
even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just
what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly pos-
sible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to
take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate
down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-
psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the
archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype
fulfils itself not only psychically in the individual, but objec-
tively outside the individual. My own conjecture is that Christ
was such a personality. The life of Christ is just what it had to
be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a
symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather
as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality.
Yahweh's intention to become man, which resulted from his
collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ's life and suffering.

VIII

649 When one remembers the earlier acts of creation, one won-
ders what has happened to Satan and his subversive activities.
Everywhere he sows his tares among the wheat. One suspects he
had a hand in Herod's massacre of the innocents. What is cer-
tain is his attempt to lure Christ into the role of a worldly ruler.
Equally obvious is the fact, as is evidenced by the remarks of

2 Mark 3: 21.

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the man possessed o devils, that he is very well informed about
Christ's nature. He also seems to have inspired Judas,^ without,
however, being able to influence or prevent the sacrificial death.
650 His comparative ineffectiveness can be explained on the one
hand by the careful preparations for the divine birth, and on
the other hand by a curious metaphysical phenomenon which
Christ witnessed: he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 1
In this vision a metaphysical event has become temporal; it indi-
cates the historic and-so far as we know-final separation of
Yahweh from his dark son, Satan is banished from heaven and
no longer has any opportunity to inveigle his father into dubi-
ous undertakings. This event may well explain why he plays
such an inferior role wherever he appears in the history of the
Incarnation. His role here is in no way comparable to his for-
mer confidential relationship to Yahweh. He has obviously for-
feited the paternal affection and been exiled. The punishment
which we missed in the story of Job has at last caught up with
him, though in a strangely limited form. Although he is ban-
ished from the heavenly court he has kept his dominion over
the sublunary world. He is not cast directly into hell, but upon
earth. Only at the end of time shall he be locked up and made
permanently ineffective. Christ's death cannot be laid at his
door, because, through its prefiguration in Abel and in the
young dying gods, the sacrificial death was a fate chosen by Yah-
weh as a reparation for the wrong done to Job on the one hand,
and on the other hand as a fillip to the spiritual and moral
development of man. There can be no doubt that man's impor-
tance is enormously enhanced if God himself deigns to become

one.

651 As a result of the partial neutralization of Satan, Yahweh
identifies with his light aspect and becomes the good God and
loving father. He has not lost his wrath and can still mete out
punishment, but he does it with justice. Cases like the Job
tragedy are apparently no longer to be expected. He proves
himself benevolent and gracious. He shows mercy to the sinful
children of men and is defined as Love itself. But although
Christ has complete confidence in his father and even feels at
one with him, he cannot help inserting the cautious petition
and warning into the Lord's Prayer: "Lead us not into tempta-

iLuke 10 : 18.

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ANSWER TO JOB

tion, but deliver us from evil." God is asked not to entice us
outright into doing evil, but rather to deliver us from it The
possibility that Yahweh, in spite of all the precautionary meas-
ures and in spite of his express intention to become the Sum-
mum Bonum, might yet revert to his former ways is not so
remote that one need not keep one eye open for it. At any rate,
Christ considers it appropriate to remind his father of his de-
structive inclinations towards mankind and to beg him to desist
from them. Judged by any human standards it is after all unfair,
indeed extremely immoral, to entice little children into doing
things that might be dangerous for them, simply in order to test
their moral stamina! Especially as the difference between a child
and a grown-up is immeasurably smaller than that between God
and his creatures, whose moral weakness is particularly well
known to him. The incongruity of it is so colossal that if this
petition were not in the Lord's Prayer one would have to call it
sheer blasphemy, because it really will not do to ascribe such
contradictory behaviour to the God of Love and Summum
Bonum.

65* The sixth petition indeed allows a deep insight, for in face
of this fact Christ's immense certainty with regard to his father's
character becomes somewhat questionable. It is, unfortunately,
a common experience that particularly positive and categorical
assertions are met with wherever there is a slight doubt in the
background that has to be stifled. One must admit that it would
be contrary to all reasonable expectations to suppose that a God
who, for all his lavish generosity, had been subject to intermit-
tent but devastating fits of rage ever since time began could
suddenly become the epitome of everything good. Christ's
unadmitted but none the less evident doubt in this respect is
confirmed in the New Testament, and particularly in the Apoca-
lypse. There Yahweh again delivers himself up to an unheard-of
fury of destruction against the human race, of whom a mere
hundred and forty-four thousand specimens appear to survive. 2

653 One is indeed at a loss how to bring such a reaction into line
with the behaviour of a loving father, whom we would expect to
glorify his creation with patience and love. It looks as if the
attempt to secure an absolute and final victory for good is bound
to lead to a dangerous accumulation of evil and hence to catas-

2 Revelation 7 : 4.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

trophe. Compared with the end of the world, the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrah and even the Deluge are mere child's
play; for this time the whole of creation goes to pieces. As Satan
was locked up for a time, then conquered and cast into a lake of
fire, 3 the destruction of the world can hardly be the work of the
devil, but must be an "act of God'* not influenced by Satan.
6 54 The end of the world is, however, preceded by the circum-
stance that even Christ's victory over his brother Satan Abel's
counterstroke against Cain is not really and truly won, because,
before this can come to pass, a final and mighty manifestation
of Satan is to be expected. One can hardly suppose that God's
incarnation in his son Christ would be calmly accepted by
Satan. It must certainly have stirred up his jealousy to the high-
est pitch and evoked in him a desire to imitate Christ (a role
for which he is particularly well suited as the wvevfia wrliJLtfjLov),
and to become incarnate in his tuni as the dark God. (As we
know, numerous legends were later woven round this theme.)
This plan will be put into operation by the figure of the Anti-
christ after the preordained thousand years are over, the term
allotted by astrology to the reign of Christ. This expectation,
which is already to be found in the New Testament, reveals a
doubt as to the immediate finality or universal effectiveness of
the work of salvation. Unfortunately it must be said that these
expectations gave rise to thoughtless revelations which were
never even discussed with other aspects of the doctrine of salva-
tion, let alone brought into harmony with them.

6 55 I mention these future apocalyptic events only to illustrate
the doubt which is indirectly expressed in the sixth petition of
the Lord's Prayer, and not in order to give a general interpreta-
tion of the Apocalypse. I shall come back to this theme later on.
But, before doing so, we must turn to the question of how mat-
ters stood with the Incarnation after the death of Christ. We
have always been taught that the Incarnation was a unique his-
torical event. No repetition of it was to be expected, any more
than one could expect a further revelation of the Logos, for this

3 Revelation 19 : 20.

412

ANSWER TO JOB

too was included in the uniqueness of God's appearance on
earth, in human form, nearly two thousand years ago. The sole
source of revelation, and hence the final authority, is the Bible.

God is an authority only in so far as he authorized the writings
in the New Testament, and with the conclusion of the New
Testament the authentic communications of God cease. Thus

far the Protestant standpoint. The Catholic Church, the direct
heir and continuator of historical Christianity, proves to be
somewhat more cautious in this regard, believing that with the
assistance of the Holy Ghost the dogma can progressively de-
velop and unfold. This view is in entire agreement with Christ's
own teachings about the Holy Ghost and hence with the further
continuance of the Incarnation. Christ is of the opinion that
whoever believes in him believes, that is to say, that he is the
son of God can "do the works that I do, and greater works than
these." * He reminds his disciples that he had told them they
were gods. 2 The believers or chosen ones are children of God
and "fellow heirs with Christ." 3 When Christ leaves the earthly
stage, he will ask his father to send his flock a Counsellor (the
"Paraclete"), who will abide with them and in them for ever. 4
The Counsellor is the Holy Ghost, who will be sent from the
father. This "Spirit of truth" will teach the believers "all things"
and guide them "into all truth." 5 According to this, Christ
envisages a continuing realization of God in his children, and
consequently in his (Christ's) brothers and sisters in the spirit,
so that his own works need not necessarily be considered the
greatest ones.

656 Since the Holy Ghost is the Third Person of the Trinity and
God is present entire in each of the three Persons at any time,
the indwelling of the Holy Ghost means nothing less than an
approximation of the believer to the status of God's son. One
can therefore understand what is meant by the remark "you are
gods." The deifying effect of the Holy Ghost is naturally as-
sisted by the imago Dei stamped on the elect. God, in the shape
of the Holy Ghost, puts up his tent in man, for he is obviously
minded to realize himself continually not only in Adam's de-
scendants, but in an indefinitely large number of believers, and
possibly in mankind as a whole. Symptomatic of this is the
i John 14: 12. 210:34- 3 Romans 8: 17. * John 14: i6f.

5 14:26 and 16: 13.

413

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

significant fact that Barnabas and Paul were identified in Lystra
with Zeus and Hermes; "The gods have come down to us in
the likeness o men/' 6 This was certainly only the more naive,
pagan view of the Christian transmutation, but precisely for that
reason it convinces. Tertullian must have had something of the
sort in mind when he described the "sublimiorem Deum" as a
sort of lender of divinity <4 who has made gods of men." 7

657 God's Incarnation in Christ requires continuation and com-
pletion because Christ, owing to his virgin birth and his sinless-
ness, was not an empirical human being at all. As stated in the
first chapter of St. John, he represented a light which, though
it shone in the darkness, was not comprehended by the darkness.
He remained outside and above mankind. Job, on the other
hand, was an ordinary human being, and therefore the wrong
done to him, and through him to mankind, can, according to
divine justice, only be repaired by an incarnation of God in an
empirical human being. This act of expiation is performed by
the Paraclete; for, just as man must suffer from God, so God
must suffer from man. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation
between the two.

65 8 The continuing, direct operation of the Holy Ghost on those
who are called to be God's children implies, in fact, a broaden-
ing process of incarnation. Christ, the son begotten by God, is
the first-born who is succeeded by an ever-increasing number of
younger brothers and sisters. These are, however, neither begot-
ten by the Holy Ghost nor born of a virgin. This may be preju-
dicial to their metaphysical status, but their merely human birth
will in no sense endanger their prospects of a future position of
honour at the heavenly court, nor will it diminish their capacity
to perform miracles. Their lowly origin (possibly from the mam-
mals) does not prevent them from entering into a close kinship
with God as their father and Christ as their brother. In a meta-
phorical sense, indeed, it is actually a "kinship by blood," since
they have received their share of the blood and flesh of Christ,
which means more than mere adoption. These profound changes
in man's status are the direct result of Christ's work of redemp-
tion. Redemption or deliverance has several different aspects,

6 Acts 14; ii.

7"Mancipem quendam divinitatis qui ex hominibus deos fecerit." Apologeticus,

XI, In Migne, PX., vol. i, col. 333.

414

ANSWER TO JOB

the most important of which is the expiation wrought by Christ's
sacrificial death for the misdemeanours of mankind. His blood
cleanses us from the evil consequences of sin. He reconciles God
with man and delivers him from the divine wrath, which hangs
over him like doom, and from eternal damnation. It is obvious
that such ideas still picture God the father as the dangerous
Yahweh who has to be propitiated. The agonizing death of his
son is supposed to give him satisfaction for an affront he has
suffered, and for this "moral injury" he would be inclined to
take a terrible vengeance. Once more we are appalled by the
incongruous attitude of the world creator towards his creatures,
who to his chagrin never behave according to his expectations.
It is as if someone started a bacterial culture which turned out
to be a failure. He might curse his luck, but he would never
seek the reason for the failure in the bacilli and want to punish
them morally for it. Rather, he would select a more suitable cul-
ture medium. Yahweh's behaviour towards his creatures contra-
dicts all the requirements of so-called "divine" reason whose
possession is supposed to distinguish men from animals. More-
over, a bacteriologist might make a mistake in his choice of a
culture medium, for he is only human. But God in his omnis-
cience would never make mistakes if only he consulted with it.
He has equipped his human creatures with a modicum of con-
sciousness and a corresponding degree of free will, but he must
also know that by so doing he leads them into the temptation of
falling into a dangerous independence. That would not be too
great a risk if man had to do with a creator who was only kind
and good. But Yahweh is forgetting his son Satan, to whose wiles
even he occasionally succumbs. How then could he expect man
with his limited consciousness and imperfect knowledge to do
any better? He also overlooks the fact that the more ^conscious-
ness a man possesses the more he is separated from his ^instincts
(which at least give him an inkling of the hidden ^ wisdom of
God) and the more prone he is to error. He is certainly not up
to Satan's wiles if even his creator is unable, or unwilling, to
restrain this powerful spirit.

4*5

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

659 The fact of God's "unconsciousness" throws a peculiar light
on the doctrine of salvation. Man is not so much delivered from
his sins, even if he is baptized in the prescribed manner and thus
washed clean, as delivered from fear of the consequences of sin,
that is, from the wrath of God. Consequently, the work of sal-
vation is intended to save man from the fear of God. This is
certainly possible where the belief in a loving father, who has
sent his only-begotten son to rescue the human race, has re-
pressed the persistent traces of the old Yahweh and his dangerous
affects. Such a belief, however, presupposes a lack of reflection
or zsacrificium intellect, and it appears questionable whether
either of them can be morally justified. We should never forget
that it was Christ himself who taught us to make usurious use of
the talents entrusted to us and not hide them in the ground. One
ought not to make oneself out to be more stupid and more un-
conscious than one really is, for in all other aspects we are called
upon to be alert, critical, and self-aware, so as not to fall into
temptation, and to "examine the spirits" who want to gain influ-
ence over us and "see whether they are of God/' 1 so that we may
recognize the mistakes we make. It even needs superhuman in-
telligence to avoid the cunning snares of Satan. These obliga-
tions inevitably sharpen our understanding, our love of truth,
and the urge to know, which as well as being genuine human
virtues are quite possibly effects of that spirit which "searches
everything, even the depths of God." 2 These intellectual and
moral capacities are themselves of a divine nature, and therefore
cannot and must not be cut off. It is just by following Christian
morality that one gets into the worst collisions of duty. Only
those who habitually make five an even number can escape them.
The fact that Christian ethics leads to collisions of duty speaks in
its favour. By engendering insoluble conflicts and consequently
an afflictio animae, it brings man nearer to a knowledge of God.
All opposites are of God, therefore man must bend to this bur-
den; and in so doing he finds that God in his "oppositeness" has
taken possession of him, incarnated himself in him. He becomes
a vessel filled with divine conflict. We rightly associate the idea
1 1 John 4 : i (mod.). 2 1 Corinthians 2 : 10.

416

ANSWER TO JOB

of suffering with a state in which the opposites violently collide
with one another, and we hesitate to describe such a painful
experience as being "redeemed." Yet it cannot be denied that
the great symbol o the Christian faith, the Cross, upon which
hangs the suffering figure of the Redeemer, has been emphati-
cally held up before the eyes of Christians for nearly two thou-
sand years. This picture is completed by the two thieves, one of
whom goes down to hell, the other into paradise. One could
hardly imagine a better representation of the "oppositeness"
of the central Christian symbol. Why this inevitable product
of Christian psychology should signify redemption is difficult
to see, except that the conscious recognition of the opposites,
painful though it may be at the moment, does bring with it a
definite feeling of deliverance. It is on the one hand a deliver-
ance from the distressing state of dull and helpless unconscious-
ness, and on the other hand a growing awareness of God's oppo-
siteness, in which man can participate if he does not shrink from
being wounded by the dividing sword which is Christ. Only
through the most extreme and most menacing conflict does the
Christian experience deliverance into divinity, always provided
that he does not break, but accepts the burden of being marked
out by God. In this way alone can the imago Dei realize itself in
him, and God become man. The seventh petition in the Lord's
Prayer, "But deliver us from evil," is to be understood in the
same sense as Christ's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane:
"My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." s In
principle it does not seem to fit God's purpose to exempt a man
from conflict and hence from evil. It is altogether human to ex-
press such a desire but it must not be made into a principle,
because it is directed against God's will and rests only on human
weakness and fear. Fear is certainly justified up to a point, for,
to make the conflict complete, there must be doubt and uncer-
tainty as to whether man's strength is not being overtaxed.
660 Because the imago Dei pervades the whole human sphere
and makes mankind its involuntary exponent, it is just possible
that the four-hundred-year-old schism in the Church and the
present division of the political world into two hostile camps
are both expressions of the unrecognized polarity of the domi-
nant archetype.

3 Matthew 26 : 39.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

661 The traditional view of Christ's work of redemption reflects
a one-sided way of thinking, no matter whether we regard that
one-sidedness as purely human or as willed by God. The other
view, which regards the atonement not as the payment of a hu-
man debt to God, but as reparation for a wrong done by God to
man, has been briefly outlined above. This view seems to me to
be better suited to the power situation as it actually exists. The
sheep can stir up mud in the wolfs drinking water, but can do
him no other harm. So also the creature can disappoint the
creator, but it is scarcely credible that he can do him a painful
wrong. This lies only in the power of the creator with respect to
the powerless creature. On this view, a wrong is imputed to God,
but it is certainly no worse than what has already been imputed
to him if one assumes that it was necessary to torture the son to
death on the Cross merely in order to appease the father's wrath.
What kind of father is it who would rather his son were slaugh-
tered than forgive his ill-advised creatures who have been cor-
rupted by his precious Satan? What is supposed to be demon-
strated by this gruesome and archaic sacrifice of the son? God's
love, perhaps? Or his implacability? We know from chapter 22
of Genesis 4 and from Exodus 22:29 that Yahweh has a tendency
to employ such means as the killing of the son and the first-born
in order to test his people's faith or to assert his will, despite
the fact that his omniscience and omnipotence have no need
whatever of such savage procedures, which moreover set a bad
example to the mighty ones of the earth. It is very understand-
able, therefore, that a nai've mind is apt to run away from such
questions and excuse this manoeuvre as a beautiful sacrifidum
intellectus. If one prefers not to read the Eighty-ninth Psalm,
the matter will not end there. He who cheats once will cheat
again, particularly when it comes to self-knowledge. But self-
knowledge, in the form of an examination of conscience, is de-
manded by Christian ethics. They were very pious people who
maintained that self-knowledge paves the way to knowledge of
God.

* Abraham and Isaac.

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ANSWER TO JOB

662 To believe that God is the Summum Bonum is impossible
for a reflecting consciousness. Such a consciousness does not feel
in any way delivered from the fear of God, and therefore asks
itself, quite rightly, what Christ means to it. That, indeed, is the
great question: can Christ still be interpreted in our day and
age, or must one be satisfied with the historical interpretation?

663 One thing, anyway, cannot be doubted: Christ is a highly
numinous figure. The interpretation of him as God and the son
of God is in full accord with this. The old view, which is based
on Christ's own view of the matter, asserts that he came into the
world, suffered, and died in order to save mankind from the
wrath to come. Furthermore he believed that his own bodily
resurrection would assure all God's children of the same future.

664 We have already pointed out at some length how curiously
God's Salvationist project works out in practice. All he does is,
in the shape of his own son, to rescue mankind from himself.
This thought is as scurrilous as the old rabbinical view of Yah-
weh hiding the righteous from his wrath under his throne,
where of course he cannot see them. It is exactly as if God the
father were a different God from the son, which is not the mean-
ing at all. Nor is there any psychological need for such an as-
sumption, since the undoubted lack of reflection in God's con-
sciousness is sufficient to explain his peculiar behaviour. It is
quite right, therefore, that fear of God should be considered the
beginning of all wisdom. On the other hand, the much-vaunted
goodness, love, and justice of God should not be regarded as
mere propitiation, but should be recognized as a genuine experi-
ence, for God is a coinddentia oppositorurn. Both are justified,
the fear of God as well as the love of God.

665 A more differentiated consciousness must, sooner or later,
find it difficult to love, as a kind father, a God whom on account
of his unpredictable fits of wrath, his unreliability, injustice,
and cruelty, it has every reason to fear. The decay of the gods
of antiquity has proved to our satisfaction that man does not
relish any all-too-human inconsistencies and weaknesses in his
gods. Likewise, it is probable that Yahweh's moral defeat in his
dealings with Job had its hidden effects: man's unintended

419

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

elevation on the one hand, and on the other hand a disturb-
ance o the unconscious. For a while the first-mentioned effect
remains a mere fact, not consciously realized though regis-
tered by the unconscious. This contributes to the disturbance in
the unconscious, which thereby acquires a higher potential than
exists in consciousness. Man then counts for more in the uncon-
scious than he does consciously. In these circumstances the po-
tential starts flowing from the unconscious towards conscious-
ness, and the unconscious breaks through in the form of dreams,
visions, and revelations. Unfortunately the Book of Job cannot
be dated with any certainty. As mentioned above, it was written
somewhere between 600 and 300 B.C. During the first half of
the sixth century, Ezekiel, 1 the prophet with the so-called "path-
ological" features, appears on the scene. Although laymen are
inclined to apply this epithet to his visions, I must, as a psychia-
trist, emphatically state that visions and their accompanying
phenomena cannot be uncritically evaluated as morbid. Visions,
like dreams, are unusual but quite natural occurrences which
can be designated as "pathological" only when their morbid
nature has been proved. From a strictly clinical standpoint
Ezekiel's visions are of an archetypal nature and are not
morbidly distorted in any way. There is no reason to regard
them as pathological. 2 They are a symptom of the split which
already existed at that time between conscious and unconscious.
The first great vision is made up of two well-ordered compound
quaternities, that is, conceptions of totality, such as we fre-
quently observe today as spontaneous phenomena. Their quinta
essentia is represented by a figure which has "the likeness of a
human form." 3 Here Ezekiel has seen the essential content
of the unconscious, namely the idea of the higher man by whom
Yahweh was morally defeated and who he was later to become.
666 In India, a more or less simultaneous symptom of the same
tendency was Gautama the Buddha (b. 562 B.C.), who gave the
maximum differentiation of consciousness supremacy even over
the highest Brahman gods. This development was a logical con-

1 The vision in which he received his call occurred in 592 B.C.

2 It is altogether wrong to assume that visions as such are pathological. They
occur with normal people also not very frequently, it is true, but they are by no
means rare.

8 Ezekiel i : 26.

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ANSWER TO JOB

sequence of the purusha-atman doctrine and derived from the
inner experience of yoga practice.

667 Ezekiel grasped, in a symbol, the fact that Yahweh was draw-
ing closer to man. This is something which came to Job as an
experience but probably did not reach his consciousness. That
is to say, he did not realize that his consciousness was higher
than Yahweh's, and that consequently God wants to become
man. What is more, in Ezekiel we meet for the first time the
title "Son of Man/' which Yahweh significantly uses in address-
ing the prophet, presumably to indicate that he is a son of the
"Man" on the throne, and hence a prefiguration of the much
later revelation in Christ. It is with the greatest right, therefore,
that the four seraphim on God's throne became the emblems of
the evangelists, for they form the quaternity which expresses
Christ's totality, just as the four gospels represent the four pillars
of his throne.

668 The disturbance of the unconscious continued for several
centuries. Around 165 B.C., Daniel had a vision of four beasts
and the "Ancient of Days," to whom "with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man." 4 Here the "son of man" is
no longer the prophet but a son of the "Ancient of Days" in his
own right, and a son whose task it is to rejuvenate the father.

669 The Book of Enoch, written around 100 B.C., goes into con-
siderably more detail. It gives a revealing account of the advance
of the sons of God into the world of men, another prefiguration
which has been described as the "fall of the angels." Whereas,
according to Genesis, 5 Yahweh resolved that his spirit should
not "abide in man for ever," and that men should not live to be
hundreds of years old as they had before, the sons of God, by
way of compensation, fell in love with the beautiful daughters
of men. This happened at the time of the giants. Enoch relates
that after conspiring with one another, two hundred angels
under the leadership of Samiazaz descended to earth, took the
daughters of men to wife, and begat with them giants three
thousand ells long. 6 The angels, among whom Azazel particu-
larly excelled, taught mankind the arts and sciences. They
proved to be extraordinarily progressive elements who broad-
ened and developed man's consciousness, just as the wicked
Cain had stood for progress as contrasted with the stay-at-home
4 Daniel 7:13. 5 Genesis 6:3!. 6 Enoch 7 : s.

PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

Abel. In this way they enlarged the significance of man to
"gigantic" proportions, which points to an inflation of the cul-
tural consciousness at that period. An inflation, however, is
always threatened with a counter-stroke from the unconscious,
and this actually did happen in the form of the Deluge. So
corrupt was the earth before the Deluge that the giants "con-
sumed all the acquisitions of men" and then began to devour
each other, while men in their turn devoured the beasts, so
that "the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones." 7
670 The invasion of the human world by the sons of God there-
fore had serious consequences, which make Yahweh's precau-
tions prior to his appearance on the earthly scene the more
understandable. Man was completely helpless in face of this
superior divine force. Hence it is of the greatest interest to see
how Yahweh behaves in this matter. As the later Draconian
punishment proves, it was a not unimportant event in the
heavenly economy when no less than two hundred of the sons
of God departed from the paternal household to carry out ex-
periments on their own in the human world. One would have
expected that information concerning this mass exodus would
have trickled through to the court (quite apart from the fact
of divine omniscience). But nothing of the sort happened. Only
after the giants had long been begotten and had already started
to slaughter and devour mankind did four archangels, apparent-
ly by accident, hear the weeping and wailing of men and dis-
cover what was going on on earth. One really does not know
which is the more astonishing, the bad organization of the an-
gelic hosts or the faulty communications in heaven. Be that as
it may, this time the archangels felt impelled to appear before
God with the following peroration:

All things are naked and open in Thy sight, and Thou seest all
things, and nothing can hide itself from Thee. Thou seest what
Azazel hath done, who taught all unrighteousness on earth and re-
vealed the eternal secrets which were preserved in heaven. . . .
[And enchantments hath Samiazaz taught], to whom Thou hast
given authority to bear rule over his associates. . . . And Thou

7 Enoch 7:3-6. [The translations of the Book of Enoch are from Charles, ed., The
Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, II, sometimes
slightly modified. TRANS.]

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ANSWER TO JOB

knowest all things before they come to pass, and Thou seest these
things and Thou dost suffer them, and Thou dost not say to us what
we are to do to them in regard to these. 8

671 Either all that the archangels say is a lie, or Yahweh, for
some incomprehensible reason, has drawn no conclusions from
his omniscience, or what is more likely the archangels must
remind him that once again he has preferred to know nothing
of his omniscience. At any rate it is only on their intervention
that retaliatory action is released on a global scale, but it is not
really a just punishment, seeing that Yahweh promptly drowns
all living creatures with the exception of Noah and his relatives.
This intermezzo proves that the sons of God are somehow more
vigilant, more progressive, and more conscious than their father.
Yahweh's subsequent transformation is therefore to be rated all
the higher. The preparations for his Incarnation give one the
impression that he has really learnt something from experi-
ence and is setting about things more consciously than be-
fore. Undoubtedly the recollection of Sophia has contributed
to this increase of consciousness. Parallel with this, the revela-
tion of the metaphysical structure becomes more explicit.
Whereas in Ezekiel and Daniel we find only vague hints about
the quaternity and the Son of Man, Enoch gives us clear and
detailed information on these points. The underworld, a sort
of Hades, is divided into four hollow places which serve as
abodes for the spirits of the dead until the Last Judgment.
Three of these hollow 7 places are dark, but one is bright and
contains a "fountain of water." 9 This is the abode of the
righteous.

672 With statements of this type we enter into a definitely psy-
chological realm, namely that of mandala symbolism, to which
also belong the ratios i : 3 and 3 : 4. The quadripartite Hades of
Enoch corresponds to a chthonic quaternity, which presumably
stands in everlasting contrast to a pneumatic or heavenly one.
The former corresponds in alchemy to the quaternio of the ele-
ments, the latter to a fourfold, or total, aspect of the deity, as for
instance Barbelo, Kolorbas, Mercurius quadratus, and the four-
faced gods all indicate.

673 In fact, Enoch in his vision sees the four faces of God. Three

8 Enoch 9 : 5-1 1 . 9 22 : 2.

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o them are engaged in praising, praying, and supplicating, but
the fourth in "fending off the Satans and forbidding them to
come before the Lord of Spirits to accuse them who dwell on
earth." 10

6?4 The vision shows us an essential differentiation of the God-
image: God now has four faces, or rather, four angels of his face,
who are four hypostases or emanations, of which one is ex-
clusively occupied in keeping his elder son Satan, now changed
into many, away from him, and in preventing further experi-
ments after the style of the Job episode. 11 The Satans still dwell
in the heavenly regions, since the fall of Satan has not yet oc-
curred. The above-mentioned proportions are also suggested
here by the fact that three of the angels perform holy or bene-
ficial functions, while the fourth is a militant figure who has
to keep Satan at bay.

6 75 This quaternity has a distinctly pneumatic nature and is
therefore expressed by angels, who are generally pictured with
wings, i.e., as aerial beings. This is the more likely as they are
presumably the descendants of Ezekiel's four seraphim. 12 The
doubling and separation of the quaternity into an upper and a
lower one, like the exclusion of the Satans from the heavenly
court, points to a metaphysical split that had already taken
place. But the pleromatic split is in its turn a symptom of a
much deeper split in the divine will: the father wants to become
the son, God wants to become man, the amoral wants to become
exclusively good, the unconscious wants to become consciously
responsible. So far everything exists only in statu nascendi.

6 7 6 Enoch's unconscious is vastly excited by all this and its con-
tents burst out in a spate of apocalyptic visions. It also causes
him to undertake the peregrinatio, the journey to the four
quarters of heaven and to the centre of the earth, so that he
draws a mandala with his own movements, in accordance with
the "journeys" of the alchemistic philosophers and the corre-
sponding fantasies of our modern unconscious.

6 77 When Yahweh addressed Ezekiel as "Son of Man," this was
no more at first than a dark and enigmatic hint. But now it be-

10 Enoch 40 : 7.

11 Cf. also ch. $7f. Of the four "beings who were like white men," three take
Enoch by the hand, while the other seizes a star and hurls it into the abyss.

12 Three had animal faces, one a human face.

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ANSWER TO JOB

comes clear: the man Enoch is not only the recipient of divine
revelation but is at the same time a participant in the divine
drama, as though he were at least one of the sons of God him-
self. This can only be taken as meaning that in the same measure
as God sets out to become man, man is immersed in the plero-
matic process. He becomes, as it were, baptized in it and is made
to participate in the divine quaternity (i.e., is crucified with
Christ). That is why even today, in the rite of the benedictio
fontiS; the water is divided into a cross by the hand of the priest
and then sprinkled to the four quarters.

678 Enoch is so much under the influence of the divine drama,
so gripped by it, that one could almost suppose he had a quite
special understanding of the coming Incarnation. The "Son of
Man" who is with the "Head [or Ancient] of Days" looks like
an angel (i.e., like one of the sons of God). He "hath righteous-
ness"; "with him dwelleth righteousness"; the Lord of Spirits
has "chosen him"; "his lot hath the preeminence before the
Lord of Spirits in uprightness." 13 It is probably no accident
that so much stress is laid on righteousness, for it is the one
quality that Yahweh lacks, a fact that could hardly have re-
mained hidden from such a man as the author of the Book of
Enoch. Under the reign of the Son of Man "... the prayer of
the righteous has been heard, and the blood of the righteous
. . . [avenged] before the Lord of Spirits." u Enoch sees a
"fountain of righteousness which was inexhaustible/' 15 The
Son of Man

. . . shall be a staff to the righteous. . . .

For this reason hath he been chosen and hidden before

him,

Before the creation of the world and for evermore.
And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed

him . . . ,

Eor he hath preserved the lot of the righteous. 16
For wisdom is poured out like water. . . .
He is mighty in all the secrets of righteousness,
And unrighteousness shall disappear as a shadow. . . .
In him dwells the spirit of wisdom,

13 Enoch 46: 1-3. 1^47:4. IS 48:1. 1648:4,6-7.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

And the spirit which gives insight,

And the spirit of understanding and of might. 17

6 79 Under the reign of the Son of Man

. . . shall the earth also give back that which has been

entrusted to it,

And Sheol also shall give back that which it has received,
And hell 18 shall give back that which it owes. . . .

The Elect One shall in those days sit on My throne,
And his mouth shall pour forth all the secrets of
wisdom and counsel. 19

680 "All shall become angels in heaven." Azazel and his hosts
shall be cast into the burning fiery furnace for "becoming sub-
ject to Satan and leading astray those who dwell on the earth." 20

681 At the end of the world the Son of Man shall sit in judgment
over all creatures. "The darkness shall be destroyed, and the
light established for ever." 21 Even Yahweh's two big exhibits,
Leviathan and Behemoth, are forced to succumb: they are
carved up and eaten. In this passage 22 Enoch is addressed by
the revealing angel with the title "Son of Man," a further indica-
tion that he, like Ezekiel, has been assimilated by the divine
mystery, is included in it, as is already suggested by the bare
fact that he witnesses it. Enoch is wafted away and takes his seat
in heaven. In the "heaven of heavens" he beholds the house of
God built of crystal, with streams of living fire about it, and
guarded by winged beings that never sleep. 23 The "Head of
Days" comes forth with the angelic quaternity (Michael, Ga-
briel, Raphael, Phanuel) and speaks to him, saying: "This is the
Son of Man who is born unto righteousness, and righteousness
abides over him, and the righteousness of the Head of Days for-
sakes him not." 24

682 It is remarkable that the Son of Man and what he means
should be associated again and again with righteousness. It
seems to be his leitmotif, his chief concern. Only where injustice

17 Enoch 49 : 1-3. 18 Synonym for Sheol. 19 51 : i, 3.

20 54 ; 6. Here at last we hear that the exodus of the two hundred angels was a
prank of Satan's.

21 58: 6 (mod.). 22 60: 10. 23 7 i: 5 _6. 24 7i:i4 .

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ANSWER TO JOB

threatens or has already occurred does such an emphasis on
righteousness make any sense. No one, only God, can dispense
justice to any noticeable degree, and precisely with regard to
him there exists the justifiable fear that he may forget his justice.
In this case his righteous son would intercede with him on man's
behalf. Thus "the righteous shall have peace." 25 The justice
that shall prevail under the son is stressed to such an extent that
one has the impression that formerly, under the reign of the
father, injustice was paramount, and that only with the son is
the era of law and order inaugurated. It looks as though, with
this, Enoch had unconsciously given an answer to Job.

683 The emphasis laid on God's agedness is logically connected
with the existence of a son, but it also suggests that he himself
will step a little into the background and leave the government
of the human world more and more to the son, In the hope that
a juster order will emerge. From all this we can see the after-
effects of some psychological trauma, the memory of an injustice
that cries to heaven and beclouds the Intimate relationship with
God. God himself wants a son, and man also wants a son to take
the place of the father. This son must, as we have conclusively
seen, be absolutely just, and this quality is given priority over all
other virtues. God and man both want to escape from blind
injustice.

684 Enoch, in his ecstasy, recognizes himself as the Son of Man,
or as the son of God, although neither by birth nor by predesti-
nation does he seem to have been chosen for such a role. 26 He
experiences that godlike elevation which, In the case of Job, we
merely assumed, or rather Inferred as the inevitable outcome.
Job himself seems to have suspected something of the sort when
he declares: "I know that my Vindicator lives." 2T This highly
remarkable statement can, under the circumstances, only refer
to the benevolent Yahweh. The traditional Christian interpre-
tation of this passage as an anticipation of Christ Is correct In so
far as Yahweh's benevolent aspect Incarnates Itself, as Its own
hypostasls, in the Son of Man, and In so far as the Son of Man

25 tji : i 7 .

26 The author of the Book of Enoch chose, as the hero of his tale, Enoch the son
of Jared, the seventh after Adam, who "walked with God/* and, instead of dying.
simply disappeared, ie., was carried away by God (". . . and he was not, for God
took him."-Genesis 5 : 24). 27 Job 19 : 85.

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proves in Enoch to be a representative of justice and, in Chris-
tianity, the justifier of mankind. Furthermore, the Son of Man
is pre-existent, and therefore Job could very well appeal to him.
Just as Satan plays the role of accuser and slanderer, so Christ,
God's other son, plays the role of advocate and defender.

685 Despite the contradiction, certain scholars have wished to
see Enoch's Messianic ideas as Christian interpolations. For
psychological reasons this suspicion seems to me unjustified. One
has only to consider what Yahweh's injustice, his downright im-
morality, must have meant to a devout thinker. It was no laugh-
ing matter to be burdened with such an idea of God. A much
later document tells us of a pious sage who could never read the
Eighty-ninth Psalm, "because he could not bear it." When one
considers with what intensity and exclusiveness not only Christ's
teaching, but the doctrines of the Church in the following cen-
turies down to the present day, have emphasized the goodness
of the loving Father in heaven, the deliverance from fear, the
Summum Bonum, and the privatio boni, one can form some
conception of the incompatibility which the figure of Yahweh
presents, and see how intolerable such a paradox must appear
to the religious consciousness. And this has probably been so
ever since the days of Job.

686 Xhe inner instability of Yahweh is the prime cause not only
of the creation of the world, but also of the pleromatic drama
for which mankind serves as a tragic chorus. The encounter with
the creature changes the creator. In the Old Testament writ-
ings we find increasing traces of this development from the sixth
century B.C. on. The two main climaxes are formed firstly by the
Job tragedy, and secondly by Ezekiel's revelation. Job is the
innocent sufferer, but Ezekiel witnesses the humanization and
differentiation of Yahweh. By being addressed as "Son of Man,"
it is intimated to him that Yahweh's incarnation in the quater-
nity is, so to speak, the pleromatic model for what is going to
happen, through the transformation and humanization of God,
not only to God's son as foreseen from all eternity, but to man
as such. This is fulfilled as an intuitive anticipation in Enoch.
In his ecstasy he becomes the Son of Man in the pleroma, and
his wafting away in a chariot (like Elijah) prefigures the resur-
rection of the dead. To fulfil his role as minister of justice he
must get into immediate proximity to God, and as the pre-
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ANSWER TO JOB

existing Son of Man he is no longer subject to death. But in so
far as he was an ordinary human being and therefore mortal,
other mortals as well as he can attain to the vision of God; they
too can become conscious of their saviour, and consequently
immortal.

687 All these ideas could easily have become conscious at the
time on the basis of the assumptions then current, if only some-
one had seriously reflected on them. For that no Christian
interpolations were needed. The Book of Enoch was an anticipa-
tion in the grand manner, but everything still hung in mid air
as mere revelation that never came down to earth. In view of
these facts one cannot, with the best will in the world, see how
Christianity, as we hear over and over again, is supposed to have
burst upon world history as an absolute novelty. If ever any-
thing had been historically prepared, and sustained and sup-
ported by the existing Weltanschauung, Christianity would be
a classic example.

XII

688 Jesus first appears as a Jewish reformer and prophet of an ex-
clusively good God. In so doing he saves the threatened re-
ligious continuity, and in this respect he does in fact prove
himself a o-wr^p, a saviour. He preserves mankind from loss of
communion with God and from getting lost in mere conscious-
ness and rationality. That would have brought something like a
dissociation between consciousness and the unconscious, an un-
natural and even pathological condition, a "loss of soul" such as
has threatened man from the beginning of time. Again and
again and in increasing measure he gets into danger of overlook-
ing the necessary irrationalities of his psyche, and of imagining
that he can control everything by will and reason alone, and thus
paddle his own canoe. This can be seen most clearly in the great
socio-political movements, such as Socialism and Communism:
under the former the state suffers, and under the latter, man.

689 Jesus, it is plain, translated the existing tradition into his
own personal reality, announcing the glad tidings: "God has
good pleasure in mankind. He is a loving father and loves you
as I love you, and has sent me as his son to ransom you from the

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old debt." He offers himself as an expiatory sacrifice that shall
effect the reconciliation with God. The more desirable a real
relationship of trust between man and God, the more astonish-
ing becomes Yahweh's vindictiveness and irreconcilability to-
wards his creatures. From a God who is a loving father, who is
actually Love itself, one would expect understanding and for-
giveness. So it comes as a nasty shock when this supremely good
God only allows the purchase of such an act of grace through a
human sacrifice, and, what is worse, through the killing of his
own son. Christ apparently overlooked this anticlimax; at any
rate all succeeding centuries have accepted it without opposi-
tion. One should keep before one's eyes the strange fact that the
God of goodness is so unforgiving that he can only be appeased
by a human sacrifice! This is an insufferable incongruity which
modern man can no longer swallow, for he must be blind if he
does not see the glaring light it throws on the divine character,
giving the lie to all talk about love and the Summum Bonum.
6 9 Christ proves to be a mediator in two ways: he helps men
against God and assuages the fear which man feels towards this
being. He holds an important position midway between the two
extremes, man and God, which are so difficult to unite. Clearly
the focus of the divine drama shifts to the mediating God-man.
He is lacking neither in humanity nor in divinity, and for this
reason he was long ago characterized by totality symbols, because
he was understood to be all-embracing and to unite all opposites.
The quaternity of the Son of Man, indicating a more differen-
tiated consciousness, was also ascribed to him (vide Cross and
tetramorph). This corresponds by and large to the pattern in
Enoch, but with one important deviation: Ezekiel and Enoch,
the two bearers of the title "Son of Man/' were ordinary human
beings, whereas Christ by his descent, 1 conception, and birth is
a hero and half-god in the classical sense. He is virginally be-
gotten by the Holy Ghost and, as he is not a creaturely human
being, has no inclination to sin. The infection of evil was in his
case precluded by the preparations for the Incarnation. Christ
therefore stands more on the divine than on the human level.
He incarnates God's good will to the exclusion of all else and
therefore does not stand exactly in the middle, because the essen-

l As a consequence of her immaculate conception Mary is already different from
other mortals, and this fact is confirmed by her assumption.

ANSWER TO JOB

tial thing about the creaturely human being, sin, does not touch
him. Sin originally came from the heavenly court and entered
into creation with the help of Satan, which enraged Yahweh to
such an extent that in the end his own son had to be sacrificed
in order to placate him. Strangely enough, he took no steps to
remove Satan from his entourage. In Enoch a special archangel,
Phanuel, was charged with the task of defending Yahweh from
Satan's insinuations, and only at the end of the world shall
Satan, in the shape of a star, 2 be bound hand and foot, cast into
the abyss, and destroyed. (This is not the case in the Book of
Revelation, where he remains eternally alive in his natural
element.)

691 Although it is generally assumed that Christ's unique sacri-
fice broke the curse of original sin and finally placated God,
Christ nevertheless seems to have had certain misgivings in this
respect. What will happen to man, and especially to his own
followers, when the sheep have lost their shepherd, and when
they miss the one who interceded for them with the father? He
assures his disciples that he will always be with them, nay more,
that he himself abides within them. Nevertheless this does not
seem to satisfy him completely, for in addition he promises to
send them from the father another Trapd/cX^ros (advocate, "Coun-
sellor"), in his stead, who will assist them by word and deed and
remain with them forever. 3 One might conjecture from this
that the 'legal position" has still not been cleared up beyond
a doubt, or that there still exists a factor of uncertainty.

692 The sending of the Paraclete has still another aspect. This
Spirit of Truth and Wisdom is the Holy Ghost by whom Christ
was begotten. He is the spirit of physical and spiritual procrea-
tion who from now on shall make his abode in creaturely man.
Since he is the Third Person of the Deity, this is as much as to
say that God will be begotten in maturely man. This implies
a tremendous change in man's status, for he Is now raised to son-
ship and almost to the position of a man-god. With this the pre-
figuration in Ezekiel and Enoch, where, as we saw, the title "Son
of Man" was already conferred on the creaturely man, is ful-
filled. But that puts man, despite his continuing sinfulness, in

2 Presumably the "morning star" (cf. Revelation 2:28 and 22:16). This is the
planet Venus in her psychological implications and not, as one might think, either
of the two malefici, Saturn and Mars. 3 John 14: 16.

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the position of the mediator, the unifier of God and creature.
Christ probably had this incalculable possibility in mind when
he said: ". . . . he who believes in me, will also do the works
that I do; and greater works than these will he do," * and, re-
ferring to the sixth verse of the Eighty-second Psalm, "I say,
'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you/ " he added,
"and scripture cannot be broken/' 5

693 The future indwelling of the Holy Ghost in man amounts
to a continuing incarnation of God. Christ, as the begotten son
of God and pre-existing mediator, is a first-born and a divine
paradigm which will be followed by further incarnations of the
Holy Ghost in the empirical man. But man participates In the
darkness of the world, and therefore, with Christ's death, a
critical situation arises which might well be a cause for anxiety.
When God became man all darkness and evil were carefully kept
outside. Enoch's transformation into the Son of Man took place
entirely in the realm of light, and to an even greater extent this
is true of the Incarnation in Christ. It is highly unlikely that the
bond between God and man was broken with the death ot
Christ; on the contrary, the continuity of this bond is stressed
again and again and is further confirmed by the sending of the
Paraclete. But the closer this bond becomes, the closer becomes
the danger of a collision with evil. On the basis of a belief that
had existed quite early, the expectation grew up that the light
manifestation would be followed by an equally dark one, and
Christ by an Antichrist. Such an opinion is the last thing one
would expect from the metaphysical situation, for the power ol
evil is supposedly overcome, and one can hardly believe that a
loving father, after the whole complicated arrangement of salva-
tion in Christ, the atonement and declaration of love for man-
kind, would again let loose his evil watch-dog on his children
in complete disregard of all that had gone before. Why this
wearisome forbearance towards Satan? Why this stubborn pro-
jection of evil on man, whom he has made so weak, so faltering,
and so stupid that we are quite incapable of resisting his wicked
sons? Why not pull up evil by the roots?

694 God, with his good intentions, begot a good and helpful son
and thus created an image of himself as the good father unfor-
tunately, we must admit, again without considering that there

4 John 14: 12. 5 10:35,

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ANSWER TO JOB

existed in him a knowledge that spoke a very different truth.
Had he only given an account of his action to himself, he would
have seen what a fearful dissociation he had got into through his
incarnation. Where, for instance, did his darkness go that dark-
ness by means of which Satan always manages to escape his well-
earned punishment? Does he think he is completely changed
and that his amorality has fallen from him? Even his 'light" son,
Christ, did not quite trust him in this respect. So now he sends
to men the "spirit of truth," with whose help they will discover
soon enough what happens when God incarnates only in his
light aspect and believes he is goodness itself, or at least wants
to be regarded as such. An enantiodromia in the grand style is
to be expected. This may well be the meaning of the belief in
the coming of the Antichrist, which we owe more than anything
else to the activity of the "spirit of truth.'*

695 Although the Paraclete is of the greatest significance meta-
physically, it was, from the point of view of the organization of
the Church, most undesirable, because, as is authoritatively
stated in scripture, the Holy Ghost is not subject to any control.
In the interests of continuity and the Church the uniqueness of
the incarnation and of Christ's work of redemption has to be
strongly emphasized, and for the same reason the continuing
indwelling of the Holy Ghost is discouraged and ignored as
much as possible. No further individualistic digressions can be
tolerated. Anyone who is inclined by the Holy Ghost towards
dissident opinions necessarily becomes a heretic, whose persecu-
tion and elimination take a turn very much to Satan's liking.
On the other hand one must realize that If everybody had tried
to thrust the intuitions of his own private Holy Ghost upon
others for the improvement of the universal doctrine, Christian-
ity would rapidly have perished in a Babylonian confusion of
tongues a fate that lay threateningly close for many centuries.

696 It is the task of the Paraclete, the "spirit of truth," to
dwell and work in individual human beings, so as to remind
them of Christ's teachings and lead them into the light. A good
example of this activity is Paul, who knew not the Lord and
received his gospel not from the apostles but through revelation.
He is one of those people w r hose unconscious was disturbed and
produced revelatory ecstasies. The life of the Holy Ghost reveals
itself through its own activity, and through effects which not

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION : WEST

only confirm the things we all know, but go beyond them. In
Christ's sayings there are already indications o ideas which go
beyond the traditionally "Christian" morality for instance the
parable of the unjust steward, the moral of which agrees with
the Logion of the Codex Bezae, 6 and betrays an ethical standard
very different from what is expected. Here the moral criterion
is consciousness, and not law or convention. One might also
mention the strange fact that it is precisely Peter, who lacks self-
control and is fickle in character, whom Christ wishes to make
the rock and foundation of his Church. These seem to me to be
ideas which point to the inclusion of evil in what I would call a
differential moral valuation. For instance, it is good if evil is
sensibly covered up, but to act unconsciously is evil. One might
almost suppose that such views were intended for a time when
consideration is given to evil as well as to good, or rather, when
it is not suppressed below the threshold in the dubious assump-
tion that we always know exactly what evil is.

$97 Again, the expectation of the Antichrist is a far-reaching
revelation or discovery, like the remarkable statement that de-
spite his fall and exile the devil is still "prince of this world"
and has his habitation in the all-surrounding air. In spite of his
misdeeds and in spite of God's work of redemption for mankind,
the devil still maintains a position of considerable power and
holds all sublunary creatures under his sway. This situation can
only be described as critical; at any rate it does not correspond
to what could reasonably have been expected from the "glad
tidings/' Evil is by no means fettered, even though its days are
numbered. God still hesitates to use force against Satan. Presum-
ably he still does not know how much his own dark side favours
the evil angel. Naturally this situation could not remain in-
definitely hidden from the "spirit of truth" who has taken up his
abode in man. He therefore created a disturbance in man's un-
conscious and produced, at the beginning of the Christian era,
another great revelation which, because of its obscurity, gave
rise to numerous interpretations and misinterpretations in the
centuries that followed. This is the Revelation of St. John.

6 An apocryphal Insertion at Luke 6 : 4. ["Man, If indeed thou knowest what thou
doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed, and a trans-
gressor of the law" (trans, in James, The Apocryphal New Testament, p. 33).

TRANS.]

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ANSWER TO JOB

XIII

698 One could hardly imagine a more suitable personality for
the John of the Apocalypse than the author of the Epistles of
John. It was he who declared that God is light and that "in him
is no darkness at all." l (Who said there was any darkness in
God?) Nevertheless, he knows that when we sin we need an
''advocate with the Father," and this is Christ, "the expiation
for our sins," 2 even though for his sake our sins are already for-
given. (Why then do we need an advocate?) The Father has be-
stowed his great love upon us (though it had to be bought at the
cost of a human sacrifice!), and we are the children of God. He
who is begotten by God commits no sin. s (Who commits no sin?)
John then preaches the message of love. Gocl himself is love;
perfect love casteth out fear. But he must warn against false
prophets and teachers of false doctrines, and it is he who an-
nounces the coming of the Antichrist. 4 His conscious attitude is
orthodox, but he has evil forebodings. He might easily have
dreams that are not listed on his conscious programme. He talks
as if he knew not only a sinless state but also a perfect love,
unlike Paul, who was not lacking in the necessary self-reflection.
John is a bit too sure, and therefore he runs the risk of a dissocia-
tion. Under these circumstances a counterposition is bound to
grow up in the unconscious, which can then irrupt into con-
sciousness in the form of a revelation. If this happens, the revela-
tion will take the form of a more or less subjective myth, because,
among other things, it compensates the one-sidedness of an indi-
vidual consciousness. This contrasts with the visions of Ezekiel
or Enoch, whose conscious situation was mainly characterized
by an ignorance (for which they were not to blame) and was
therefore compensated by a more or less objective and uni-
versally valid configuration of archetypal material.

699 So far as we can see, the Apocalypse conforms to these con-
ditions. Even in the initial vision a fear-inspiring figure appears:
Christ blended with the Ancient of Days, having the likeness
of a man and the Son of Man. Out of his mouth goes a "sharp
two-edged sword," which would seem more suitable for fighting
and the shedding of blood than for demonstrating brotherly
HJohni:5. 2 8:i -. 3 3 : 9 , 4 S :i8f.,4:3-

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PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION I WEST

love. Since this Christ says to him, 'Tear not," we must as-
sume that John was not overcome by love when he fell "as
though dead," 5 but rather by fear. (What price now the perfect
love which casts out fear?)

700 Christ commands him to write seven epistles to the churches
in the province of Asia. The church in Ephesus is admonished
to repent; otherwise it is threatened with deprivation of the
light ("I will come . . . and remove your candlestick from its
place"). 6 We also learn from this letter that Christ "hates" the
Nicolaitans. (How does this square with love of your neigh-
bour?)

70* The church in Smyrna does not come off so badly. Its
enemies supposedly are Jews, but they are "a synagogue of
Satan," which does not sound too friendly.

702 Pergamum is censured because a teacher of false doctrines
is making himself conspicuous there, and the place swarms with
Nicolaitans. Therefore it must repent "if not, I will come to
you soon." This can only be interpreted as a threat.

73 Thyatira tolerates the preaching of "that woman Jezebel,
who calls herself a prophetess." He will "throw her on a sick-
bed" and "strike her children dead." But "he who . . . keeps
my works until the end, I will give him power over the nations,
and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as when earthen pots
are broken in pieces, even as I myself have received power from
my Father; and I will give him the morning star/' 7 Christ, as
we know, teaches "Love your enemies," but here he threatens
a massacre of children all too reminiscent of Bethlehem!

74 The works of the church in Sardis are not perfect before
God. Therefore, "repent." Otherwise he will come like a thief,
"and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you" 8
a none too friendly warning.

705 In regard to Philadelphia, there is nothing to be censured.
But Laodicea he will spew out of his mouth, because they are
lukewarm. They too must repent. His explanation is character-
istic: "Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten." 9 It would
be quite understandable if the Laodiceans did not want too
much of this "love."

76 Five of the seven churches get bad reports. This apocalyptic
"Christ" behaves rather like a bad-tempered, power-conscious
5 Cf. Rev. i : 16-17. 6 Rev. 2:5. Tgisof. 8 3-3- 9 3 :1 9-

436

ANSWER TO JOB

"boss" who very much resembles the "shadow" o a love-preach-
ing bishop.

707 As if in confirmation o what I have said, there now follows
a vision in the style of Ezekiel. But he who sat upon the throne
did not look like a man, but was to look upon "like jasper and
carnelian." 10 Before him was "a sea of glass, like crystal";
around the throne, four "living creatures" (fa), which were
"full of eyes in front and behind ... all round and within/* u
The symbol of Ezekiel appears here strangely modified: stone,
glass, crystaldead and rigid things deriving from the inorganic
realm characterize the Deity. One is inevitably reminded o
the preoccupation of the alchemists during the following cen-
turies, when the mysterious "Man," the homo altus, was named
Xi0os ou \L8os, 'the stone that is no stone/ and multiple eyes
gleamed in the ocean of the unconscious. 12 At any rate, some-
thing of John's psychology comes in here, which has caught a
glimpse of things beyond the Christian cosmos.

7 8 Hereupon follows the opening of the Book with Seven Seals
by the "Lamb." The latter has put off the human features of the
"Ancient of Days'* and now appears in purely theriomorphic
but monstrous form, like one of the many other horned animals
in the Book of Revelation. It has seven eyes and seven horns,
and is therefore more like a ram than a lamb. Altogether it must
have looked pretty awful. Although it is described as "standing,
as though it had been slain," 1S it does not behave at all like an
innocent victim, but in a very lively manner indeed. From the
first four seals it lets loose the four sinister apocalyptic horse-
men. With the opening of the fifth seal, we hear the martyrs
crying for vengeance ("O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how
long before thou wilt judge and avenge our blood on those who
dwell upon the earth?"). 14 The sixth seal brings a cosmic catas-
trophe, and everything hides from the "wrath of the Lamb/'
"for the great day of his wrath is come." 15 We no longer recog-
nize the meek Lamb who lets himself be l