Reference
Jung, C. G. (1956) Symbols of Transformation , The collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 5. Bollingen Series XX, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J.

oneiric
adjective formal, of or relating to dreams or dreaming.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek oneiros '‘dream'’

I Introduction 1 - 3

§1 “…will not fail to be deeply impressed at that point1 where Freud reminds us that an individual conflict, which he calls the incest fantasy, lies at the root of that monumental drama of the ancient world, the Oedipus legend.”
1 The Interpretation of Dreams , pp. 260-261.

“By penetrating into the blocked subterranean passages of our own psyches we grasp the living meaning of classical civilization, and at the same time we establish a firm foothold outside our own culture from which alone it is possible to gain an objective understanding of its foundations.”
What Jung is saying here that is so interesting is that if we can open up to expose these myths we provide ourselves the objective stance needed to understand our own cultures. That objective positioning is invaluable as the instrument of observation and the object = ourselves, having this Archimedean point from which to investigate is fantastic.

This first paragraph referencing Oedipus is interesting in that it brings home how we are not 'new' in our psyche compared to ancient civilisations - we are not different. I don't disagree with Jung when he says Oedipus is still alive in us, but I question whether - if the psyche and the objective unconscious grows with us - we created Oedipus or Oedipus created the mother complex in us. I don't doubt the mother complex, i.e. that we have a strong 'archetypal mother' within us, but as to the incest, I struggle with this…is it the return to the mother, not necessarily incestuous?…perhaps that is it. I must here perhaps separate my objective conscious knowledge and emotional value-judgments, to allow for 'intellectual comprehension' of the discussion.

§2 “The leitmotiv of all these works is to find a clue to historical problems through the application of insights derived from the activity of the unconscious psyche in modern man.
Δ §3 “But, as things are at present, it seems to me imperative that they should broaden the basis of this analysis by a comparative study of the historical material, … For, just as psychological knowledge furthers our understanding of the historical material, so, conversely, the historical material can throw new light on individual psychological problems.”
It great here how Jung explains why he directs his attention to the historical material to 'gain fresh insight' into the psychological material. Hence the living hell that is trying to follow the encyclopaedic material that is Jung :)

§3 “In my later writings [post 1912] I have concerned myself chiefly with the question of historical and ethnological parallels…” The reason why Jung got into the historical context of things so much :) Cf. the closing comment of paragraph 336.

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II Two Kinds of Thinking 4 - 46

Directed or logical thinking.
Symbolic thinking.

§4 “As most people know, one of the basic principles of analytical psychology is that dream-images are to be understood symbolically…”

So here the question of the two kinds of thinking is asked
§11 “How is it that dreams are symbolical at all? In other words, whence comes this capacity for symbolic representation, of which we can discover no trace in our conscious thinking?”

§11 “To that extent, directed or logical thinking is reality-thinking, a thinking that is adapted to reality,3 by means of which we imitate the successiveness of objectively real things, so that the images inside our mind follow one another in the same strictly causal sequence as the events taking place outside it.4 We also call this “thinking with directed attention.””

hahahaha :) …hilarious!
§11 “The whole laborious achievement of our lives is adaptation to reality, part of which consists of direct thinking.”

Of language…

§13 “Thus, language, in its origin and essence, is simply a system of signs or symbols that denote real occurrences or their echo in the human soul.”
He goes on, and I really like this too, Jung quoting Anatole France…

“Have no fear that the succession of little cries, extinct or enfeebled, that composes a book of philosophy will teach us so much about the universe that we can no longer go on living in it.8

8 Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Epicure , p. 80.
That is just lovely - what is going on inside us cannot be exhausted by words…how wonderful that is!
Worth noting, as Jung points out later in §14, words and language are not to be confused with speech. Also, directed thinking is no “only a matter of words” …there is more to it as he explains.

Jung on philosophy ;)
§14 “The most abstract system of philosophy is, in its method and purpose, nothing more than an extremely ingenious combination of natural sounds.9
9It is difficult to estimate how great is the seductive influence of primitive word meanings on our thinking. “Everything that has ever been in consciousness remains as an active element in the unconscious,” says Hermann Paul ( Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, p. 25) ….
This is very interesting, particularly the point of all that was conscious being now an element of the unconscious. It isn't clear from this text - and I don't have the reference - whether this is a statement about the collective or an individual. At the very least, it must be on the microcosmic level, i.e. the individual.

p14, §14 …a really nice quote about language and the development/impact on thought. How language and words evolve to mean more than just their 'concrete significance' turning into 'signs for general ideas expressive of the apperceptive functions' …etc. Leading to the development of 'abstract thought'.
More comments here on language and speech - they are not the same thing - and the development of meaning and thoughts through language. In the light of symbolic thinking therefore, language - and speech - are ultimately limited in expression.

§17 “Directed thinking or, as we might also call it, thinking in words, is manifestly an instrument of culture, and we shall not be wrong in saying that the tremendous work of education which past centuries have devoted to directed thinking, thereby forcing it to develop from the subjective, individual sphere to the objective, social sphere, has produced a readjustment of the human mind to which we owe our modern empiricism and technics.”
Interesting comments here on the lack of directed thinking in ancient times.

§18-19 “Flow” …or non-directed thinking, when we do not think directedly….(day) dreaming.

§20 “We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. The one produces innovations and adaptation, copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality, sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive.”
I would add here that directed thinking offers repeatability, the copying of reality, the ability to re-produce, and thus communicate clearly - see footnote 22, p19. Fantasy thinking on the other hand is not easily - if possible at all - to reproduce, let alone communicate clearly - as Jung points out in footnote 19, p17-18.
Cross reference here a recent (2011) book 'Thinking, fast and slow' by Daniel Kahneman. Although he never refers to Jung. Kahneman refers to fantasy thinking as system 1, and directed or 'rational' thinking system 2. He too agrees with the difficulty of sys 2 thinking, and the fluidity of sys 1 thinking.

In reading this it occurred to me that computer programming language is a not like normal speech - language. It is a means to get everyone talking the same language - yes, but it is also very very structured. I.e. you may only talk in a certain way. Although I do not think it will ever replace language, it is interesting to me that coding, that I sometimes read like poetry, is perhaps missing something of the spiritual element that may imbue language in the typical sense. I still think computer science is beautiful at times, and it is what you may create with the coded language still - it is different to normal language. Code would be like writing a whole book in idioms. Computer code provides building blocks - idioms - that mean and do certain things. The coder then puts them together to form meaning and function. It is different for sure…not sure how to reckon it alongside normal language.

§21 Scholastic training gave the mind 'a dialectical training in directed thinking.' …I like that. With this training:
“The one goal of success that shone before the thinker was rhetorical victory in disputation, and not the visible transformation of reality.”
…very interesting. The seduction was more in the dialectic and rhetoric and the ability to reason than it was to reason about sensible things…in the first instance.

§22 “The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology.”

Culture is mentioned here…interesting:
§23 “The culture-creating mind is ceaselessly employed in stripping experience of everything subjective, and in devising formulas to harness the forces of nature and express them in the best way possible.”
Reading further, Jung makes it clear we are no more intelligent than the men of the past - we know more, and have more knowledge, but that doesn't make us any more intelligent, or wise for that matter. He goes on…
“To the classical mind everything was still saturated with mythology, even though classical philosophy and the beginnings of natural science undeniably prepared the way for the work of “enlightenment.”“
Worth reading on as Jung goes on to discuss how the fantastical, mythological bias of ancient mans thinking enabled him to renew the myths (of Greece for e.g.) and not get caught up in a pure rational definition of the world…they still retained their fantasy thinking as they moved towards the pure rationality of enlightenment - that ultimately predominated.
§24 “Thus there arose a picture of the universe which was completely removed from reality, but which corresponded exactly to man's subjective fantasies. It needs no very elaborate proof to show that children think in much the same way.”

§25-27 Interesting comments here on Freud's ideas about how dreaming - or fantasy thinking - may be a regression to a more primitive method of thinking. Freud says that dreams elucidate memories and wish fulfillment, repressed (regressed) memories in most casts (I think?) …utilise psychical primary - archaic - apparatus for working, 'a method abandoned' now as 'being inefficient'. This is extrapolated to myths, legends and fairytales.
§28 “In the same way Rank31 regards myth as the collective dream of a whole people.32.”
§29 “Riklin has drawn attention to the dream mechanism in fairytales,33 and Abraham has done the same for myths. He says: “The myth is a fragment of the superseded infantile psychic life of the race”; and again: “The myth is therefore a gragment preserved from the infantile (although Jung goes on to say he doesn't agree with the term 'infantile'.)psychic life of the race, and dreams are the myths of the individual.”34
On a side note - it's interesting how often Jung refers to children's thinking in these paragraphs in relation to myth and fantasy. Cf para 32 below.

Σ §30 (Needs reading in the context of this passage) “Everyone who has his eyes and wits about him can see that the world is dead, cold, and unending. Never yet has he beheld a God, or been compelled to require the existence of such a God from the evidence of his senses. On the contrary, it needed the strongest inner compulsion, which can only be explained by the irrational force of instinct, for man to invent those religious beliefs whose absurdity was long since pointed out by Tertullian. … One could almost say that if all the world's traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation. Only a very few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in epochs of exceptional intellectual exuberance - the masses never. Enlightenment avails nothing, it merely destroys a transitory manifestation, but not the creative impulse.”

Children
Here again Jung mentions children - I like this statement for some reason…picking up from the earlier discussion,
§32 We were speaking of the ontogenetic recapitulation of phylogenetic psychology in children, and we saw that archaic thinking is a peculiarity of children and primitives. We now know that this same thinking also occupies a large place in modern man and appears as soon as directed thinking ceases. Any lessening of interest, or the slightest fatigue, is enough to put an end to the delicate psychological adaptation to reality which is expressed through directed thinking, and to replace it by fantasies. We wander from the subject and let our thoughts go their own way; if the slackening of attention continues, we gradually lose all sense of the present, and fantasy gains the upper hand.”
§33 “At this point the important question arises: How are fantasies made, and what is their nature? … All seek compensation through fantasy.”
§34 “But just where do the fantasies get their material? … With a normal child the fantasy stops short at the fleeting idea, which is soon over and forgotten. There was a time, however, in the ancient world, when the fantasy was a legitimate truth that enjoyed universal recognition.” Perhaps, but in ancient times, these fantasies were accepted as truths by adults, not just children - so what has changed? Much of this discussion ties in to Kerényi's essay “The Primordial Child” in Essays on a Science of Mythology and in particular the prologue to the essay where Károly (Carl, Karl) Kerényi discusses mythology. Jung references this article in footnote 35, page 26.
This idea of mythology and how important it is is a very valuable question. I think it is very important, for a number of reasons:
I do not think we can re-create or again produce myths as were done in ancient times. We know too much. I think of the comment by Jung about religion:

We cannot un-do what we know. The development of rational thinking in modern man has made it impossible for him to develop and produce myths as they were once produced. That is why children are a good example - before their rational 'training' from modern society kicks in.
Looking back - see the comment from Jung above, §'s 2 & 3. We can look back at history and thus see - in the myths (and that is why alchemy is so valuable) the development of psyche. This is so valuable as we can learn how mans psyche developed over time in the world through myth and alchemy. We can see the growth of psyche basically.
I should add that we still have the capacity for myth, to understand it, but we can never 'own' them, or live them as the ancients did. We know we still have the capacity in our dreams and what they teach us - they are like myths. We should listen to them. Cf §36

Para 34 continues, and is worth a read. Jung elucidates how themes of modern fantasies echo mythological themes, like hero's, lost children, erotic fantasies too….etc.

§35 “One could give countless examples of this kind. They would all prove the same thing, namely that what, with us, is a subterranean fantasy was once open to the light of day. What, with us, crops up only in dreams and fantasies was once either a conscious custom or a general belief.” (i.e. myths, the gods etc.)

Jung doesn't readily mention 'myths' here and I think this is important. He starts para 37 with a mention of 'symbolical expression'. It is important that my comments on myth above are not misread with the idea of symbolical thinking or expression as this is certainly still available to us. Cf para 38

§37 'fantasy' or ”…subjective thinking, …judged from the standpoint of adaptation, is inferior to that of directed thinking. … Non-directed thinking is in the main subjectively motivated, and not so much by conscious motives as - far more - by unconscious ones. It certainly produces a world-picture very different from that of conscious, directed thinking. But there is no real ground for assuming that it is nothing more than a distortion of the objective world-picture, for it remains to be asked whether the mainly unconscious inner motive which guides these fantasy-processes is not itself an objective fact.” (Emphasis mine)

§38 “The unconscious bases of dreams and fantasies are only apparently infantile reminiscences. In reality we are concerned with primitive or archaic thought-forms, based on instinct, which naturally emerge more clearly in childhood than they do later. but they are not in themselves infantile, much less pathological. … So also the myth, which is likewise based on unconscious fantasy-processes, is, in meaning, substance, and form, far from being infantile or the expression of an autoerotic or autistic attitude …
Th instinctive, archaic basis of the mind is a matter of plain objective fact and is no more dependent upon individual experience or personal choice than is the inherited structure and functioning of the brain or any other organ. Just as the body has its evolutionary history and shows clear traces of the various evolutionary stages, so too does the psyche.38
38See my paper ” On the Nature of the Psyche” (1955 edn., pp. 411f.).

§39 “The fantasy-products directly engaging the conscious mind are;
(1) Waking dreams, conscious fantasies.
(2) Sleep dreams
(3) Split off complexes.

§40 “All this shows how much the products of the unconscious have in common with mythology. We should therefore have to conclude that any introversion occurring in later life regresses back to infantile reminiscences which, though derived from the individual's past, generally have a slight archaic tinge. With stronger introversion and regression the archaic features become more pronounced.”

§41 and further Jung discusses Abbé Oegger and his musings about the figure of Judas and his role in the betrayal - sacrifice - of Christ, and thus himself (by suicide)…and whether or not Judas received salvation or whether he was damned. The motif of the betrayal of the hero. Interesting comment in footnote 44, p31 about the historical credibility of the Christ figure.

§45 “Conscious fantasies therefore illustrate, thought the use of mythological material, certain tendencies in the personality which are either not yet recognised or are recognised no longer. …it is mostly a question of things which we regard as immoral or impossible, and whose conscious realisation meets with the strongest resistances.” (Basically, the fantasy content does not fit with our reality at all, or we struggle to see how it possibly could.)
…“There must, then, be typical myths which serve to work out our racial and national complexes.”
Interesting comment here about there being a little Oedipus in every Greek and a bit of Faust in every German.

I like this…worth reading in context. The idea that understanding of a 'myth' like Faust must first, or should be discovered intuitively….
45…What you are destined to discover in Faust, you will have to discover intuitively …

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III The Miller Fantasies: Anamnesis 47 - 55

This first 'section' deals primarily with Miss Millers autosuggestibility.

Footnote 1 on p34, a recount by Bernoulli of Nietzsche at a dinner party where Nietzsche tells a young woman of a vision he has, he sees his hand, transparent on the table and a toad sitting on his hand that he was compelled to eat. Jung relates this vision to the illness that overtook and killed Nietzsche.

§47-50 Jung talks of Miss Millers identification with the wounded Christian de Neuvillette in Cyrano de Bergerac (by Edmond Rostand). Interesting is Jung's explanation on what the identification means and also the 'unaesthetic' description of theatre/drama and what it means in as much as it is acting out complexes and thus too the audiences relation to this. He (Jung) then goes on to discuss the episode when Cyrano dies. Its important he says to get in to the play a bit to understand Miss Miller.

Just an interesting point…
§54 “Miss Miller evidently has an unspoken need to emphasize her almost magical influence over another person. This, too, could not have happened without an inner compulsion, such as is particularly noticeable in one who often does not succeed in establishing a real emotional relationship.”
And another interesting point…
§55 ”…Miss Miller was to succumb to the powers of suggestion, how the libido gained control of certain impressions and intensified them, which would naturally not have been possible but for the free-floating energy placed at her disposal by her lack of relation to reality.”

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IV The Hymn of Creation 56 - 114

§58 Interesting bit here on schizophrenia (dementia praecox) - see footnote 2. Jung talks here of prolonged introversion and shutting out reality, sinking further in to fantasy. This is important from the perspective, for e.g. of someone who daydreams and then returns to reality - in normality.

§60 ”…because experience has shown that an impression which comes after an introversion of that kind has a profound effect…”

Not directly related to Miss Miller but an interesting point nonetheless… §62 “We know from analytical experience that the initial dreams of patients at the beginning of an analysis are of especial interest, not least because they often bring out a critical evaluation of the doctor's personality which previously he would have asked for in vain. …
A further peculiarity, which seems due to the historical stratification of the unconscious, is that when an impression is denied conscious recognition it reverts to an earlier form of relationship. … 4
4Here I purposely give preference to the term “imago” rather than to “complex,” in order to make clear, by this choice of a technical term, that the psychological factor which I sum up under “imago” has a living independence in the psychic hierarchy, i.e., possesses that autonomy which wide experience has shown to be the essential feature of feeling-toned complexes. …(Cf. my “Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” chs. 2 and 3.) … In my later writings, I use the term “archetype” instead, in order to bring out the fact that we are dealing with impersonal collective forces.
5The idea that the masculine deity is derived from the father-imago need be taken literally only within the limits of a personalistic psychology. Closer investigation of the father-imago has shown that certain collective components are contained in it from the beginning and cannot be reduced to personal experiences. Cf. my essay, ” The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” pp. 129ff. In CW 7.
Cf. this with §92, and §263

Laughter in the creation of the world from a Leiden Papyrus, footnote 8…
8Pap. J395, in Dieterich, Abraxas, p.17: “And God laughed seven times Cha Cha Cha Cha Cha Cha Cha, and as God laughed, there arose seven gods.”

Some Greek in footnote 9, p45…

And also λόγος σπερματικός

§67 “The allusions to Anaxagoras and Leibniz both refer to creation through thought, …“
Cf. 176, footnote 2 about the god Rudra and creation through wind.

Jung makes his view on associations and coincidence clear here…
§69 “The criticism levelled at the association method generally operates with arguments of this kind. The misunderstanding arises from the fact that the law of psychic causality is never taken seriously enough: there are no accidents, no “just as wells.” It is so, …” (Bold mine)

§75 “The unconscious is, in fact, the condensation of the average run of historical experience.”

Very interesting comment on creation and nature …although, needs reading in the context of course…
§76 “Miss Miller's problem at this age was the common human problem: How am I to be creative? Nature knows only one answer to that: Through a child (the gift of love). …Here arises the problem which, as experience has shown, is connected with the father,15 …The strong natural love that binds the child to the father turns away, during the years when the child is outgrowing the family, circle, to the higher forms of the father, to authority, to the “Fathers” of the Church and to the father-god visibly represented by them, where there is even less possibility of coming to grips with the problem.”
What follows is a very interesting comment about the 'Immaculate Mother' and divine conception and the attraction to this, “Idea spontaneously creating its own object.” …the word become flesh, the divine pneuma entering the virgins womb. All these, are 'creation', of the pneuma becoming flesh.

§77 “Everything psychic has a lower and a higher meaning, as in the profound saying of late classical mysticism: “Heaven above, Heaven below, stars above, stars below, all that is above also is below, know this and rejoice.”16 Here we lay our finger on the secret symbolical significance of everything psychic.”

Very interesting footnote where Jung talks of the 'prophetic' aspect of the psyche, more specifically, of the unconscious…I quote just a snippet here of the long footnote, p50-51.
16 … This we cannot do, or only badly; but it happens easily enough in the unconscious, and it seems as if from time to time, under certain conditions, important fragments of this work come to light, at least in dreams, thus accounting for the prophetic significance of dreams long claimed by superstition. …

§81-83 Jung mentions and discusses here a little bit the poem “The Raven”, by Edgar Allan Poe.
21 …Cf. the significance of the raven in alchemy, where it is a synonym for the nigredo Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 218f.

§86-89 As Jung talks here of Job, the Behemoth and Leviathan, and the power of nature it pricks a thought I've had and wondered about when it comes to Job - specifically, Jung's comment: §89 “What was it that destroyed Job's earthly paradise? The unchained power of Nature.”
My thought on Job that I mention is that I think the book of Job has quite a lot to do with the body, and suffering and the unfairness of life - like getting cancer. In this regard, it is nature being nature…the 'unchained power of nature' just doing what it does. The ability for nature to shine on the wicked and good, to strike down the good and the wicked. In fact, there is no good and bad in pure nature…consciousness brings knowledge of good and evil, and morality. This is a very hard thing for a conscious mind to swallow, that there is no good and bad per se…but that there is. Nature, in its unchained power has no sense of good and bad.

Σ §89 “Since, psychologically speaking, the God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in projection.29 (Very interesting:) In most of the existing religions it seems that the formative factor which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in the older religions it was the mother-imago. … The God-concept is not only an image, but an elemental force. …” Interesting further read…especially the reference to Romans 3:19
29This proposition has caused much offence, because people have failed to see that it is a psychological view and not a metaphysical statement. The psychic fact “God” is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype, as I later called it. … The existence of the archetype neither postulates a God, nor does it deny that he exists.

§90 Interesting - and towards the end of the paragraph now we get to - in part - the intention of the investigation by Jung; to understand the meaning and purposive aspect of libido… “There are no “purposeless” psychic processes; that is to say, it is a hypothesis of the greatest heuristic value that the psyche is essentially purposive and directed.”
This is an interesting juncture to take stock for a second. Jung has presented part of the Miller fantasy, highlighting the amplification of the creation and God imago as a theme connected to the father-imago as energy directed internally, to the unconscious. This energy was not recognised consciously by Miss Miller as an erotic energy associated with the sailor, or rather, was underestimated. In the last couple of paragraphs Jung amplifies the God connection with the father imago, and drifts then to the religious theme. I think it important to note his view on the instinctual aspect of this force, the God archetype. Further, that the real interest for him is not to answer how the erotic or relationship question about the encounter, but to understand the flow of the energy which was - in his opinion - inevitable, instinctual. What is the reason for this teleological flow of energy?…assuming the teleological aspect of the unconscious energy hypothesis, as he mentions at the end of §90.

§92 “As we have seen already, the repression leads to regressive reactivation of an earlier relationship or type of relatedness, in this case the reactivation of the father-imago. (Cf. with footnotes 4 & 5, §62) “Constellated” (i.e., activated) unconscious contents are, so far as we know, always projected, that is, they are either discovered in external objects, or are said to exist outside one's own psyche. A repressed conflict and its affective tone must reappear somewhere.”

Σ §94 is interesting in my view due to Jung's comparison of a physical creation phenomenon = the birth or a child, in comparison to a psychic act of creation, i.e., repressed content leading to a creative product like art or ideas (like the Miss Miller poem). The one due to repression & projection, the other a physical consequence = the baby. Can a baby (physical) be a psychic projection…no. It can be the object on to which we project, but as an act of nature, of creation, it is not. So psychically, we can have natural acts of creation without repression or projection. Here Jung brings in God, religion - where religion and God(s) were created not through projection, is of course valid, but where is that line?? …very interesting thoughts. Read on in §95, whether the god image is created or created itself in us? Cf. here too, towards the end of §95 ”…the religious figures show a marked tendency to appear in the most varied forms; they often clothe themselves so convincingly in the stuff of the individual psyche that it remains a moot point whether they are not in the last resort produced by the subject himself.”

Praying…
§95 “In the psychological sense this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the God-image. This, it should be noted, is the direct opposite of an act of repression, …” Interesting read here…

Σ Jung here - without saying so - compares or aligns confession of sin with key aspects of the psychoanalytic process…
§95 “These measures aim at keeping the conflicts conscious, and that is also a sine qua non of the psychotherapeutic procedure. … The conscious projection at which Christian education aims therefore brings a double psychic benefit: firstly, one keeps oneself conscious of the conflict (“sin”) … secondly, one lightens one's burden by surrendering it to God, to whom all solutions are known.”

§95 ” But the unconscious is nature, which never deceives: only we deceive ourselves.”

§97-101 Jung discussing love in the context of God and also, the need for community, to love one-another. Christianity relates God = love. But 1 John 4:12 would require us to have love first to see God…interesting. And then he also says something funny about love and hunger - 'the immemorial psychic driving-force of humanity' :) Very interesting comment at the end of this paragraph, and in this comment the rub is captured I think when you Cf. §90-95…this idea of creating the god image, or the autonomous god image creating itself (the latter being associated to the collective unconscious, notwithstanding that an autonomous, objective God exists outside of us.) §97 “…so that the greatest care is needed to differentiate the collective type, at least conceptually, from the personal psyche.”

§99 “Now, since a man's spiritual vocation in the widest sense has been thrust upon him to an increasing degree by the unconscious,47 …“
47One cannot of one's own free will choose and desire something that one does not know. Hence a spiritual goal cannot consciously be striven for if it does not yet exist.

§101 ”…since, as a rule, the energy of an archetype is not at the disposal of the conscious mind. …
It is a psychological fact that an archetype can seize hold of the ego and even compel it to act as it - the archetype - wills.”
In this paragraph, Jung talks here of divine love - of the archetypal force taking over consciousness - to manifest in divine love potential. As, consciously, we are not able to direct the power of the unconscious libido and where God = love, it must be the archetypal power that shows divine love, not conscious 'human' love. It is not hard then to see how love may be a numinous experience - true love, as it is in its purest form, archetypal and a gift from the unconscious. But, then we must ask with caution, is it coming from the right place…is it a projection?…hence the comment above about the 'rub', Cf. §97. Other instincts too, power and sex are likely to be closely available…Cf. §102 : some comments on religion and sexuality.

Σ §102 The discussion takes an interesting turn here off the segue of sexuality and the driving force of these instinctual powers, the libido. Region in much of its guise has been - with divine love that is followed closely, as we've seen by sex and power instincts - to release us from these compulsions. Here Jung draws on the early mysteries and the religious intentions of Christianity and Mithraism. Some interesting footnotes too then…
“These religions strove after precisely that higher form of social intercourse symbolised by a projected (“incarnate”) idea (the Logos [Cf. §99]), whereby all the strongest impulses of man - which formerly had flung him from one passion to another and seemed to the ancients like the compulsion of evil stars, Heimarmene,51 or like what we psychologists would call the compulsion of libido 52 - could be made available for the maintenance of society.”
51Cf. the prayers of the so-called Mithras liturgy … Altogether, the purpose of the mysteries (pl. IVb) was to break the “compulsion of the stars” by magic power.
52The power of fate makes itself felt unpleasantly only when everything goes against our will, that is to say, when we are no longer in harmony with ourselves. The ancients, accordingly, brought είμαρμένη into relation with the “primal light” or “primal fire”, the Stoic conception of the ultimate cause, or all-pervading warmth which produced everything and is therefore fate. … This warmth, as will be shown later, is a libido-image…Another conception of Ananke (Necessity), according to Zoroaster's book ΙΙερί Φύσεως (“On Nature”), is air, which in the form of wind is again connected with the fertilizing agent.

Σ §104 latching on to an Idea greater than oneself, a μεσίτης = mediator. (It seems to me, even in footnote 57, quoting Augustine' Confessions, that a lot of this need was to overcome the basic carnal instinct that had man living in 'licentiousness' as Jung put it.) …sex was becoming a problem :) …or as Jung puts it:
“The meaning of these cults - Christianity and Mithraism - is clear: moral subjugation of the animal instincts.58Cf. this with footnote 51, “Altogether, the purpose of the mysteries (pl. IVb) was to break the “compulsion of the stars” by magic power”
… “The civilized man of today seems very far from that. He has merely become neurotic. For us the needs of the Christian community have gone by the board; we no longer understand their meaning. We do not even know against what it is meant to protect us.59
…“For enlightened people, the need for religion is next door to neurosis.60 It must be admitted that the Christian emphasis on spirit inevitably leads to an unbearable depreciation of man's physical side, and thus produces a sort of optimistic caricature of human nature. …“
60Unfortunately Freud, too, has made himself guilty of this error.
i.e. For many people, those who 'need' religion are consequently thought to live side-by-side to neuroticism, are themselves neurotic.

§106 For modern man, ”…religion and its prime object - original sin - have mostly vanished into the unconscious.”
…“The unconscious conversion of instinctual impulses into religious activity is ethically worthless, and often no more than an hysterical outburst, even though its products may be aesthetically valuable. Ethical decision is possible only when one is conscious of the conflict in all its aspects. (A brief interjection here - what about Oedipus then?) The same is true of the religious attitude: it must be fully conscious of itself and of its foundations if it is to signify anything more than unconscious imitation.61

Σ §107 “Through centuries of educational training, Christianity subdued the animal instincts of antiquity and of the ensuing ages of barbarism to the point where a large amount of instinctual energy could be set free for the building of civilization. … It was an age that strove after inwardness and spiritual abstraction. Nature was abhorrent to man. …”
§108 “But it was not only the aesthetic beauty of the world … There were also daemonic or magical influences emanating from nature herself.”

§109-110 & §111 Quotes from Franz Cumont and Seneca about the nature worship in the Mithraic cult…of the many 'gods that were everywhere, and they mingled in all the events of daily life.' …compared with the Christian view of nature in §111. Because, in the Christian view, §112 ”…love of created nature soon makes man its slave.” But then, as Jung goes on to say; “One would certainly think it possible to love something, to have a positive attitude towards it, without supinely succumbing to it and losing one's power of rational judgment. But Augustine knew his contemporaries, and knew furthermore how much godliness and god-like power dwelt in the beauty of the world.”

§113 Following on from the previous three §'s, Christianity… “it is not merely a question of sensuality and of aesthetic corruption, but - and this is the point - of paganism and nature worship.”
Worth reading on, about man's break from the world of senses to the birth of thinking 'independent of external factors' …
“Through the shifting of interest from the inner to the outer world our knowledge of nature was increased a thousandfold in comparison with earlier ages, but knowledge and experience of the inner world were correspondingly reduced. …”

§114 “ Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness.”

Footnote 73, p.78 …very nice. 41st Letter of Seneca to Lucilius…

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V The Song of the Moth 115 - 175

Λ There is a really nice quote from Faust :
“…
Ah me, the pinions by the spirit won
Bring us no flight that mortal clay can know.2
2Faust Tans. by Wayne, pp. 66-67

Where it has been some time since the last installment from Miss Miller, Jung mentions, that with regards her complexes that we just discussed,
1Complexes are usually of great stability even though their outward manifestations change kaleidoscopically. …
He mentions this idea again in §122. Evidently this is quite important - that a complex left within the unconscious will not lose its intention or energy although may manifest differently.

Random extract, p81
5… Asceticism occurs whenever the animal instincts are so strong that they need to be violently exterminated. …..

Very interesting…
§121 “What makes Goethe's Faust so profoundly significant is that it formulates a problem that had been brewing for centuries, just as Oedipus did for the Greek sphere of culture: how to extricate ourselves from between the Sculla (See monster) of world-renunciation and the Charybdis (whirlpool) of its acceptance.”

§125 Sex, or 'human passion' and the desire for God, for religion …are these the same 'emotional process'? As Miss Miller has effectively written two poems stemming from the same complex as Jung presents it. The first a more whimsical number about love…and Jung spent some time on that. Now this second one has a religious bias. Now, coming from the same complex, ”…it remains to be seen whether the nature of the object (God/religion or Lover) alters the quality of the libido, or whether it is the same desire in both cases, i.e., the same emotional process.”

Σ §128 “Psychologically, however, God is the name for a complex of ideas grouped round a powerful feeling; the feeling-tone is what really gives the complex its characteristic efficacy,12 for it represents an emotional tension which can be formulated in terms of energy. … If one worships God, sun, or fire (cf. fig. 4), one is worshipping intensity and power, in other words the phenomenon of psychic energy as such, the libido.”
This all seems to continue the discussion started in the previous paragraphs about Miss Millers love for God being confused with her more human passion, so sex and religion again. Although, thats not quite right, its more about the psychic energy and where it is coming from and how it manifests as libido. (CF §125)

From about here, with the antecedent of the Miss Miller poem, Jung takes us on an associations journey around the moth and the sun ; Light, Fire, Sun worship, the serpent, Mithras, Christ, God…and more, to about §165 where we rejoin Miss Miller.

There is an interesting discussion in §128 similar to the line of does 'function follow form, or form follow function'. Jung here, in this discussion, puts forward his opinion that much of what we experience and the resultant affect and efficacy of the image, the shape, the form, is psycho-energic. This places the power man places on objective firmly in the subjective sphere. In addition, this view will naturally support Jung's view of the archetypal antecedent in as much as there is a collective attitude across boundaries and continents…and this could only be achieved with a common collective consciousness as the well spring for this psycho-energic material. This stance on Jung's part, however, does make me wonder about what he says later about Paracelsus. As he goes on to say:
Σ §129 “I am therefore of the opinion that, in general, psychic energy or libido creates the God-image by making use of archetypal patterns, and that man in consequence worships the psychic force active within him as something divine. (Pl. va) We thus arrive at the objectionable conclusion that, from the psychological point of view, the God-image is a real but subjective phenomenon.” (Emphasis mine)

I really like this comment, that must be read in context, but I'll snippet it out here: §130 “… To carry a god around in yourself means a great deal; …”

p88
18Cf. the coronation rite mentioned above (§130). Feathers symbolise power. The feather crown = crown of sun rays, halo. Crowing is in itself an identification with the sun. …“
(Emphasis mine). Cf §268.

Σ So these paragraphs are about 'man becoming God'. Jung quotes Hippolytus in §132 “He says of the deification: “That is the 'Know thyself.'”. So 'knowing yourself' is akin, or heading in the right direction to realising God within you in as much as God here refers to the subjective view of God. This serves a number of purposes;
§134 “When man becomes God, … But the strengthening of his power-consciousness is only the outward effect of his becoming God; far more important are the deeper lying processes in the realm of feeling. For whoever introverts libido, i.e., withdraws it from the external object, suffers the necessary consequences of introversion: the libido which is turned inwards, into the subject, reverts to the individual past and digs up from the treasure-house of memory …“
Cf. here where Jung talks of the energy withdraw from the projected object will then find other content to latch on to - namely memories. He mentions this in the context repressed feelings for the sailor so its perhaps not the same thing exactly, cf. §95. as these ceremonies are a conscious act. He goes on…and here brings in the paternal elements again:
“The regressive reactivation of the father- and mother-imagos plays an important role in religion.” Cf. §62 above

§135 “The visible father of the world is the sun, the heavenly fire, for which reason father, God, sun, and fire are mythologically synonymous. … that in God we honour the energy of the archetype.”
This seems pretty significant to me. Cf the comments above about the psychogenic element of our subjective God experience. Cf. §128. Jung is saying here that the psychogenic view is that the individual derives the idea from God from the numinous feelings the vision of the sun generates in them, whereas another would say that the sun is god like due to its form, i.e. the energy of the sun…so objective. Now, not excluding the fact of an external God what Jung is saying here is that the experience of God is subjective and that the vision of nature stimulates these already present complexes/archetypes within man. It is a little confusing but important to hold on to the psychogenic aspect of this view.

§'s 135…139, on light, fire, the sun, etc all as a reference to God.

Footnote 28, p93 is interesting…its quite long, talking about the 'heavenly wanderings of the soul'. I take just a brief extract from it here:
28”… The heavenly journey is a special instance of the journeys of the hero, a motif that was continued as the peregrinatio in alchemy.

§145 ”…but constellations, as we know, are mainly theriomorphic or anthropomorphic.”

Just as an aside, in the discussion here amidst the ceremonies mentioned there is a lot of mention of the count of five. This seems curious to me…from Alchemy we have the seven planets, or the five planets plus the sun and moon.
§145 ”…'five-fingered stars,' similar to the 'rosy-fingered Dawn'), which is a pure anthropomorphic image .“ (Italics mine) Cf. footnote 38, p98
§135 ”…from the disc of the sun - “five-pointed, …”“

§146 Talking here about Nietzsche's poem 'The Beacon' and discussing the snake symbol, “The Egyptian symbol of the “living sun-disc” - a disc with the two intertwined Uraeus serpents (pl. VII) - …“
Jung goes on to identify the way in which we make comparisons with what we see:
“We have, therefore, three ways of symbolising the libido :
1. Comparison by analogy : as sun and fire (fig. 4)
2. Causative Comparisons : (a) with objects. The libido is charactersed by its object, e.g., the health-giving sun. (b) with the subject. The libido is characterised by its instrument or by something analogous to it, e.g., the phallus or its analogue, the snake.”
§146 “The phallus is the source of life and libido, the creator and worker of miracles, and as such it was worshipped everywhere.”
§147 “To these three fundamental forms of comparison there must be added a fourth: the functional comparison, where the ”tertium comparationis” is activity. For instance, the libido is fertile like the bull, dangerous like the lion or boar (because of the fury of its passion), and lustful like the ever-rutting ass, and so on. …“
“These comparisons represent so many possible ways of symbolisation, and for this reason all the infinitely varied symbols, so far as they are libido-images, can be reduced to a common denominator - the libido and its properties.”

p97 Footnote 35 is noteworthy I reckon simply for its reference to the crocodile…
35Even the water-god Sobk (or Sobek), who appeared as a crocodile, was identified with Ra.

Jung talks here of civilisations attempts at the simplification of polytheism to a single deity or god. This seemed to bring together many of the gods to the sun god.
§148 “Amenophis IV achieved, by his reforms, a psychologically valuable work of interpretation. he united the bull,39 ram,40 crocodile,41 and pile-dwelling42 gods into the sun-disc, and make it clear that their various attributes were compatible with those of the sun.43

Σ §149 “Buy the striving for unity is opposed by a possibly even stronger tendency to create multiplicity, so that even in strictly monotheistic religions like Christianity the polytheistic tendency cannot be suppressed. The deity is divided into three parts, and on top of that come all the heavenly hierarchies.”

Just as a note: the phallus associated with the sun disk associate with the wind, §149-§154. Cf. para 486, footnote 19.
§150 “The phallic significance of this attribute is not apparent at first sight, but we must remember that the wind, just as much as the sun, is a fructifier and creator.47

§154 “These and other experiences like them were sufficient to give me a clue: it is not a question of a specifically racial heredity, but of a universally human characteristic. Nor is it a question of inherited ideas, but of a functional disposition to produce the same, or very similar, ideas. This disposition I later called the archetype.53
53Further material in my ” Psychology of the Child Archetype” and my ” On the Nature of the Psyche” (1954/55 edn., pp. 401ff.)

Just an interesting note: §155 “The bull is a notorious fertility-symbol.”

There's an interesting quote from Johannine Apocalypse' vision where he talks of seeing the Son of man, §156 “And he had in his right hand seven stars:57 and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword58
57 The Great Bear (Constellation) consists of seven stars.
58Mithras is fequently represented with a short sword in one hand and a torch in the other (fig. 9). The sword as sacrificial instrument plays a considerable role in the Mithraic myth and also in Christian symbolism. See my ” Transformation Symbolism in the Mass,” par. 324 (1955/56 edn., p.284).
Cf. this with the depictions of Mithras mentioned in the previous paragraphs, plates XXIVa & XL, §155 ”…in his right hand he holds “the constellation of the Bear, which moves and turns the heavens round.”
Earlier in §155; “In the Mithraic liturgy, the bull-gods are called κνωδακοΦύλακες, 'guardians of the world's axis,' who turn the “axle of the wheel of heaven.”
I mention this as the symbolism unites Mithras, Helios (the sun) and the Son of man. There's more here to read…see the footnotes.

§163 Goes into more detail about sun worship and Christianity. The twelve apostles for e.g. being likened to the twelve signs of the zodiac and the suns course through the zodiac (cf. footnote72, p107). There is also a nice point (and Fig.10 on p108) about the serpent/snake depicting the course of the moon and/or sun across the sky carrying 'the signs of the zodiac on its back'.
Here too, Christ is likened with the serpent (in paradise). Interesting footnote 75, p108,
”“To the great God Zeus Helios, King Jesus” (p. 166, §22).“ taken from a manuscript “Report on the Happenings in Persia,” from 11th century. See footnote for reference.

We now rejoin Miss Miller…briefly before going in to detail about passion…

§165 “The forces of nature are always two-faced …” (Beneficent and destroying)

Λ The moth and the sun is what Jung was discussing previously from the title of Miss Miller' poem, and now he brings in the with the moth and the flame. The latter part of this paragraph has some interesting points related to the two sides of nature and the two sides of fate;
§165 ”“The Moth and the Flame” could easily have the hackneyed meaning of lying round the flame of passion until one's wings are burned. This passionate longing has two sides: it is the power which beautifies everything, but, in a different set of circumstances, is quite as likely to destroy everything. … All passion is a challenge to fate … Fear of fate is a very understandable phenomenon, for it (fate) is incalculable, immeasurable, full of unknown dangers. The perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to launch out into life is readily explained by his desire to stand aside so as not to get involved in the dangerous struggle for existence. But anyone who refuses to experience life must stifle his desire to live - in other words, he must commit partial suicide. This explains the death-fantasies that usually accompany the renunciation of desire.“

This makes me think of Faust, when he meets Want, Blame, Need & Care…

§169-170 Jung talks of passion and the overwhelming force of libido, particularly - it seems to me - passion in instinct. He relates it to nature, to the flood. He talks here of the Angels desire for the daughters of Cain. ”…rational Power which rules the world with wise laws is threatened by the chaotic, primitive force of passion. … As a power which transcends consciousness the libido is by nature daemonic: it is both God and devil.“

§171 “Passion raises a man not only above himself, but also above the bounds of his mortality and earthliness, and by the very act of raising him, it destroys him. This “rising above himself” expressed mythologically in the building of the heaven-high tower of Babel that brought confusion to mankind,85 and in the revolt of Lucifer.”
This makes me think of inflation.

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I Introduction 176 - 189

§176 “The sun, as Renan has observed, is the only truly “rational” image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science. In either case the sun is the father-god from whom all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and creator, the source of energy four our world. … The sun is not only beneficial, but also destructive; … It shines equally on the just and the unjust, and allows useful creatures to flourish as well as the harmful. Therefore the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad.”

See footnote 1 in 176 for a brief reference to Samson and the slaying of the lion. Also, an interesting comment about the sun being our source of power, 'Our physiological life, regarded as an energy process, is entirely solar.' (emphasis mine) This has been intuited by the mystics says Jung as they 'descend into the depths of their own being they find “in their heart” the image of the sun, …'

§177 Jung continues into Indian mythology now, taking examples of god's related to the sun, and being in man from, but not limited to the Shvetashvatara Upanishad for e.g. An interesting comment from the Upanishad quoted in

§178 ”…
That person, no bigger than a thumb, the inner Self, seated forever in the heart of man, is revealed by the hear, the thought, the mind. They who know That, become immortal.
Thousand-headed, thousand-eyed, thousand-footed is Purusha. He encompasses the earth on every side and rules over the ten-finger space. … “ Cf. this with the atman of Hinduism or Buddhism referenced in CW9i:

§179 “We know that Tom Thumbs, dactyls, and Cabiri have a phallic aspect, and this is understandable enough, because they are personifications of creative forces, of which the phallus, too, is a symbol. It represents the libido, or psychic energy in its creative aspect.”

In talking of the Tom Thumb images, he says they are symbols, not signs:
§180 “A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meaning, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known. …The symbol therefore has a large number of analogous variants, and the more of these variants it has at its disposal, the more complete and clear-cut will be the image it projects of its object.”
“Thus the creative dwarfs toil away in secret; the phallus, also working in darkness, begets a living being; and the key unlocks the mysterious forbidden door behind which some wonderful thing awaits discovery.” Interesting segue to the 'key'…? Ahhh - ok, so in this context the key that Mephistopheles 'gives' to Faust is the Phallus that 'increases in my hand', Cf footnote 7, p125
7The light symbolism in the etymology of Φαλλός (phallus) is discussed in pars. 321f., below.

I like this quote from Faust, that Jung relates to the libido:

Part of that power which would
Ever work evil, but engenders good.9

§182 “What he is describing here is the libido, which is not only creative and procreative, (the phallus) but possesses an intuitive faculty, a strange power to “smell the right place,” almost as if it were a live creature with an independent life of its own (which is why it is so easily personified). It is purposive, like sexuality itself, …” Important here that when I relate this creative aspect of the libido to the phallus I'm not restricting it there, I'm coupling these ideas with the discussion above.
“This Libido is a force of nature, good and bad at once, or morally neutral.”

Footnote 11, Chrysopoeia or Chrysopoea
Also, Cf. para.'s 182 & 183 for “the realm of the mothers” from the quote by Faust in para 180

§183 “The phallus often stands for the creative divinity, Hermes being an excellent example. It is sometimes thought of as an independent being, an idea that is found not only in antiquity but in the drawings of children and artists of our own day. …
Hephaestus, Wieland the Smith, and Mani (the founder of Manichaeism, (a Gnostic religion) famous also for his artistic gifts), had crippled feet. The foot, as I shall explain in due course, is supposed to possess a magical generative power. ”

Paragraph 183 talks about the Dactyl's quite a lot. Also, the Pileus is mentioned here. Speaking of the 'Tom Thumbs', Jung says: “They were the first Wise Men, the teachers of Orpheus, and it was they who invented the Ephesian magic formulae and the musical rhythms.”

§184 “The dwarf motif brings us to the figure of the divine boy, the puer aeternus, παῖς, the young Dionysus, Jupiter Anxurus, Tages, etc. …”

An interesting comment that in a way relates thread to sperm : “Μίτος really means 'thread,' but in Orphic speech it stands for semen.” Cf. mitozo and the context with mitosis (cell division).
Orphism = …(quoted from wikipedia)

(more rarely Orphicism) (Ancient Greek: Ὀρφικά) is the name given to a set of religious beliefs and practices originating in the ancient Greek and the Hellenistic world, as well as by the Thracians, associated with literature ascribed to the mythical poet Orpheus, who descended into Hades and returned. Orphics also revered Persephone (who annually descended into Hades for a season and then returned) and Dionysus or Bacchus (who also descended into Hades and returned). Orpheus was said to have invented the Mysteries of Dionysus. Poetry containing distinctly Orphic beliefs has been traced back to the 6th century BC[8] or at least 5th century BC, and graffiti of the 5th century BC apparently refers to “Orphics”.

§184 “Moreover the phallic herm of the god (Dionysus) gave rise to a personification of the phallus of Dionysus in the form of the god Phales, who was nothing but a PriapusCheck on the image of Priapus on the Wikipedia page where he is depicted with attributes of Mercury.

§185 “All this goes to show that though the Freudian term “libido” is not without a sexual connotation,23 an exclusively sexual definition of this concept is one-sided and must therefore be rejected. Appetite and compulsion are the specific features of all impulses and automatisms. … The very fact that it is impossible to derive the whole mass of psychic phenomena from a single instinct forbids a one-sided definition of “libido.””
Cf. here §181 above and the quote from Faust.

§186 Jung discusses here the words 'want' or 'wish' and 'desire' in the context of a quote from Cicero. I like the etymology of the word desire - which has nothing to do with the discussion, but thought I'd put it down anyway :)
desire (v.) : early 13c., from O.Fr. desirrer (12c.) “wish, desire, long for,” from L. desiderare “long for, wish for; demand, expect,” original sense perhaps “await what the stars will bring,” from the phrase de sidere “from the stars,” from sidus (gen. sideris) “heavenly body, star, constellation” (but see consider). Related: Desired; desiring. The noun is attested from c.1300, from O.Fr. desir, from desirer; sense of “lust” is first recorded mid-14c.
In particular, I like the bit about “from the stars” …to seek in the stars but not to find I heard once. I like that.
There is a nice quote from St. Augustine too.

§189 “We can say, then, that the concept of libido in psychology has functionally the same significance as the concept of energy in physics since the time of Robert Mayer.32
32See my ” On Psychic Energy(in CW8) (Swiss edn., pp. 36ff.).

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II The Concept of Libido 190 - 203

§190 - 194 Jung spends time here going through Freud's ideas on Libido and sexuality, or rather, that the libidinal cathexis is entirely sexual. He also talks about 'conceptual inflation' when it comes to the terminology around sex and libido, highlighting - quite rightly - that 'sexuality' loses meaning with so much instinctual energy assigned to it as the sole cause for Neurosis. The quote from Freud in footnote 5, p132 is instructive regarding Freud's opinion on the role of the patients sexual life as the 'key' if you like to all the energy or 'libidinal affluxes' that produce a neurosis. Jung goes on to discuss 'libido' in terms of energy and how he worked from this angle: “An interpretation in terms of energy seemed to me better suited to the facts than the doctrine set forth in Freud's Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It allowed me to identify “psychic energy” with “libido.” … Libido (and here he seems to resonate closely with Freud's view of Libido in the Id I think) is appetite in its natural state. From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex, and emotional states or affects, which constitute the essence of libido.”

§194 Jung gets a little liberal and cursory here I reckon with his justification as he touches on evolution and how instincts derived from a common denominator, for e.g. in the evolutionary chain the first instinct was no doubt to pro-create, hence, the reproductive instinct : “Thus, many complex functions, which today must be denied all trace of sexuality, were originally derived from the reproductive instinct.” …and then again, a bold comment I think “Although there can be no doubt that music originally belonged to the reproductive sphere, it would be an unjustified and fantastic generalisation to put music in the same category as sex.” This is very bold I think - does this mean, that somewhere in the evolutionary path a process of ”??' occurred to take something of an instinctual nature to something of an artistic nature?…what could that be? Perhaps he explains further on.

There's an interesting quote from Freud that I think worth mentioning that reminds me of On the Nature of Psyche in CW8 - instinct and soma :
“We regard instinct as being a term situated on the frontier-line between the somatic and the mental, and consider it as denoting the mental representative of organic forces. …. 6
6“Notes on a Case of Paranoia,” pp.460ff.
Sounds a lot like Jung here I think.

§195 “Thus far our conception of libido coincides with Schopenhauer's Will, inasmuch as a movement perceived from outside can only be grasped as the manifestation of an inner will or desire.” Getting philosophical now…philosophically speaking this is “introjection”. ”… Similarly, the concept of libido as desire or appetite is an interpretation of the process of psychic energy, which we experience precisely in the form of an appetite. We know as little about what underlies it as we know about what the psyche is per se.” Things get a little hairy here as Jung points out we have no idea about psychic energy or libido, we only know how we experience, and thus, interpret it.

§197 “This view leads to a conception of libido which expands into a conception of intentionality in general. … We would be better advised, therefore, when speaking of libido, to understand it as an energy-value which is able to communicate itself to any field of activity whatsoever, be it power, hunger, hatred, sexuality, or religion, without ever being itself a specific instinct.”

§198 Jung opens with : “Numerous mythological and philosophical attempts have been made to formulate and visualise the creative force which man knows only by subjective experience.” He then goes on to give numerous examples in the paragraph. I find this interesting as here is where many people would be lost I think in that Jung suddenly goes all encyclopedic and mythological about how people have tried to depict this 'energy' within us…its a tricky segue I reckon. It also brings to my mind the question I ask above as to when this energy in evolution shifted from 'reproductive and survival' (individual and species, I'm thinking here ontogenetic and phylogenetic) to something related to art. When did energy hit the 'art' button so to speak?…perhaps it was there all along and we developed consciousness to realise the energy otherwise.

A long quote but worth it I think…
§199 “The energic standpoint has the effect of freeing psychic energy from the bonds of a too narrow definition. … Instinct … It is one of the most conservative functions in the psyche and is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to change. Pathological maladjustments, such as the neuroses, are therefore more easily explained by the patient's attitude to instinct than by a sudden change in the latter. But the patient's attitude is a complicated psychological problem, which it would certainly not be if his attitude depended on instinct. The motive forces at the back of neurosis come from all sorts of congenital characteristics and environmental influences, which together build up an attitude that makes it impossible for him to lead a life in which the instincts are satisfied. Thus the neurotic perversion of instinct in a young person is intimately bound up with a similar disposition in the parents, and the disturbance in the sexual sphere is a secondary and not a primary phenomenon. Hence there can be no sexual theory of neurosis, though there may very well be a psychological one.” Cf. §263 below.

Ν §200 “This brings us back to our hypothesis that it is not the sexual instinct, but a kind of neutral energy, …”
This is interesting…
“The fact that an archaic world of fantasy takes the place of reality in schizophrenia proves nothing about the nature of the reality function as such; it only demonstrates the well-known biological fact that whenever a more recent system suffers deterioration it is likely to be replace by a more primitive and therefore obsolete one.” … “We find this principle in the theory of neurosis which holds that any failure of adaptation is compensated by an older one, that is, by a regressive reactivation of the parental imagos. In neurosis the substitute product is a fantasy of individual origin and scope with hardly a trace of those archaic features which are characteristic of the fantasies of schizophrenia. Again, in neurosis there is never an actual loss of reality, only a falsification of it. In schizophrenia, on the other hand, reality has all but disappeared.”

An interesting comment here linking to the idea of having power by knowing somethings name. Cf. §274.
Its mentioned here in the context of the reality function being replaced by archaic ideas which may well have been reality at some point but, as Jung points out, the ideas were symbols that sought to give expression…so appropriate for their time, not being - what I think can only be said to be - misused, so to speak, by replacing an existing reality. This raises the question as to whether we can 'go back' and also relates to Myth…can we really appreciate or live Myth once again? This paragraph 201 would suggest not I think. Cf this too with the prologue written by Kerényi in Essays on a science of mythology.

§201 “Functionally, the concept corresponds to the magically powerful name which gets a grip on the object. This not only renders the object harmless, but incorporates it into the psychic system, thus increasing the meaning and power of the human mind.”

I really like this quote Jung takes from Spielrein that requires a little thought but is very worthwhile pondering :

Thus a symbol seems to me to owe its origin to the striving of a complex for dissolution in the common totality of thought…
The complex is thus robbed of its personal quality… This tendency towards dissolution or transformation of every individual complex is the mainspring of poetry, painting, and every form of art.30

This essentially comes down to symbol formation being in the service to bring society on to the same page. It loses its 'personal quality' and we all aim to have a common understanding. Although, there are things that can never be complete in their understanding, the symbol is only ever an approximation towards the idea…as Jung mentions above in para 180.

§203 “Specially colourful or intense contents (the “feeling-toned” complexes) were reflected in countless analogies, and gave rise to synonyms whose objects were thus drawn into the magic circle of the psyche. (wtf is the 'magic circle') In this way there came into being those intimate relationships by analogy which Lévy-Bruhl fittingly describes as “participation mystique.”” Then building on para 201 above, Jung clarifies these ideas a bit more by saying “It is evident that this tendency to invent analogies deriving from feeling-toned contents has been of enormous significance for the development of the human mind. … One can easily imagine that the canalisation of libido into analogy-making was responsible for some of the most important discoveries ever made by primitive man.” Emphasis mine - see start of next section.

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III The Transformation of Libido 203 - 250

§204 “In what follows I should like to give some concrete examples of this canalisation of libido.”

§205 “…schizophrenia. The peculiarity of this disease lies in the startling emergence of an archaic psychology.” Cf. this with §200 above. “…and what we take to be original and individual creations are mostly products which can only be compared with those of antiquity. We have to apply this criterion to probably all the products of this remarkable illness…”

§206 “We know that in infants the libido first manifests itself exclusively in the nutritional zone … With the growth of the individual and development of his organs the libido creates for itself new avenues of activity. The primary model of rhythmic movement, producing pleasure and satisfaction, is transferred to the zone of other functions, with sexuality as its ultimate goal.” Although I can see the credibility in these ideas I feel a bit like Jung was noting down a satisfactory path of explanation as he heads towards his point and that this feels a bit like conjecture.
Cf this with Von Franz The Feminine in Fairytales where she talks of repetitive 'nodding' or metronomic movement. I don't think this is what Jung is talking about at all…but worth the Cf.
Jung continues in this paragraph to overview the unfolding of rhythmic movement as we develop as one of two distinct phases, the other being sucking, that too moves from being nutritional to a rhythmic event towards sexuality. There seems to be a natural flow of libido from the nutritional to the sexual, and perhaps even a carry over from the former to the latter.

“I therefore propose to call the period from birth up to the time of the first clear manifestations of sexuality the “pre-sexual stage.” As a rule it falls between the first and the fourth year, … Certain regressions go right back to the pre-sexual stage …” (i.e. regression to nutritional motif's)

§207 “If this assumption is correct, it is very likely that in earlier stages of human development this way of transformation was not just a pathological symptom, but a frequent and normal occurrence. It would therefore be interesting to see whether it has left any historical traces.” …and so it begins…

§208 - 212 … A discussion on fire making…I can see why some people may think Jung is full of mythological bollocks!

Footnote 7 is interesting…
7[“The one who thinks ahead” is the meaning of Prometheus now accepted as philologically correct. - EDITORS.]

Footnote 10, interesting comment on 'mint' …yes, mint, as in fresh breath!
10In antiquity mint was called “Aphrodite's crown” (Dioscorides, II, 154). Apuleius calls it “mentha venerea,” because it was held to be an aphrodisiac. Hippocrates (“On Diet,” II, 54) gives it the opposite meaning: …some latin text (If one eats of it often, the genital seed becomes so liquid that it flows out; it prevents erection and renders the body week), and according to Dioscorides (III, 34) mint is a contraceptive …
Some stuff here about the 'chin' having a priapic characteristic.

autochthonous = adjective; (of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.

Agni = (Sanskrit: अग्नि) is a Hindu deity, one of the most important of the Vedic gods. He is the god of fire and the acceptor of sacrifices. The sacrifices made to Agni go to the deities because Agni is a messenger from and to the other gods. He is ever-young, because the fire is re-lit every day, and also immortal.

§210 There is an indian ceremony involving two pieces of wood; the fire stick = phallus and the wood that is bored ( = the female vulva) to result in fire as a new child (Agni).

Interesting Footnote 15, p148…
15…For wood as a mother symbol, see Freud, The interpretation of Dreams, p.355. …

§212 Sexual symbolism in ceremonial fire-making.

§213 An intermittent conclusion… “These examples, coming from different periods of history and from different peoples, prove the existence of a widespread tendency to equate fire-making with sexuality.”

§214 - 215 Sexuality and ploughing the earth - the phallic plough

§216 - 218 “Of all the components of the psyche, sex is undoubtedly the one with the strongest affective tone.
A brief mention here of Freud's hypothesis about sex and the incest taboo. There is also a mention of the endogamic concern and the need to keep that in check. Continues with a discussion on the flow of libido - what happens when it regresses to 'earlier modes of application'.

§219 “Since the rhythmic activity can no longer find an outlet in the act of feeding after the nutritional phase of development is over, it transfers itself not only to the sphere of sexuality in the strict sense, but also to the “decoy mechanisms,” such as music and dancing, and finally to the sphere of work.” Jung goes on…big disagreement with Freud here :)
Jung continues talking of rhythm and sexuality…
”…I assumed that the various forms of attraction and protection of the young came from the splitting and differentiation of an originally sexual libido, … Only later did I realise that the rhythmic tendency does not come from the nutritional phase at all, as if it had migrated from there to the sexual, but that it is a peculiarity of emotional processes in general. … Rhythmic patterns therefore offer no ground for assuming that the function they affect originated in sexuality.“

Worth a quick recap here:
Jung starts off discussing Libido as energy, raw energy with no particular bias towards a particular instinct.
He then talks about the canalisation of the libido energy around certain feeling toned elements.
He uses this to break in to the discussion of fire making and sexuality.
This offers a nice segue into sexual libido and where that might come from. The hypothesis being that it may stem naturally from nutrition - the first focus of our libido, towards other activity, and 'ultimately' towards sexuality.
Using this, he moves on to discuss the rhythm involved in carnal activity, as well as the endogamic and exogamy aspects of survival, linking this to the incest taboo.
We then hit this next section where he now brings back the survival aspect, but instead of the external factors, focuses now on internal, i.e. Psychic reality. §321ff

§222 ”…psychic reality is and remains a genuine source of anxiety whose danger increases the more it is denied. … The same psychic system which, on one side, is based on the concupiscence of the instincts, rests on the other side on an opposing will which is at least as strong as the biological urge.“
§223 “Except when motivated by external necessity, the will to suppress or repress the natural instincts, or rather to overcome their predominance (superbia) and lack of co-ordination (concupiscentia), derives from a spiritual source; in other words, the determining factor is the numinous primordial images.”

Σ Very interesting comment on archetypes and religion…something for the history of religion.
§225 “The archetype, as a glance at the history of religious phenomena will show, has a characteristically numinous effect, so that the subject is gripped by it as though by an instinct. What is more, instinct itself can be restrained and even overcome by this power, …”

§225 “Whenever an instinct is checked or inhibited, it gets blocked and regresses. Or, to be more precise: if there is an inhibition of sexuality, a regression will eventually occur in which the sexual energy flowing back from this sphere activates a function in some other sphere. In this way the energy changes its form.”
An interesting comment in the context of explanation, worth noting down I think… ”…for when a man is forbidden to look at a woman, his Eros reverts to the mother.“ Carrying on in the same paragraph, in the context of sexual energy ”…for the primary instinct is composed of an endogamous (“incestuous”) tendency and an exogamous one, and must therefore be split into two. This splitting is connected with the consciousness and the process of becoming conscious. The regression is always attended by certain difficulties because the energy clings with specific force to its object, and on being changed from on form carries something of it previous character in the next form.32
32Known as the “factor of extensity” in the older physics. Vf. von Harmann, Die Weltanschauung der modernen Physik, p.5.

fc green>An interesting comment about the hieros gamos, and what I think is a hint towards why it plays such a big role, not least of all in the representation of the earth-mother…this must be read in context.</fc>
“The psychology of the presexual stage accounts for her (The earth-mother) nourishing character, and sexuality for her most typical form of worship, the hieros gamos.”

The whole experience of reading Jung can be summed up in the affect one experiences in reading the following statement made by Jung… :)
§227 “Consequently the production of fire may have originally occurred as the objective expression of a quasi-masturbatory activity analogous to the aforementioned case of masturbatory boring.”
…and he wonders why not everyone accepts his work.

§229 Interesting comment - continuation - of the theme about fire being associated with coming from the mouth. …and all the way to §233.
§230 '…speech becomes fire…' When I read this I think of the power of words to create. Very interesting quote from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, paraphrasing: sun → moon → fire → speech → self …in that order, in answer to 'what is the light of man'.
§232 Also, like our mouths, fire too 'devours' and 'consumes'.

Phoebus : Literally, “the radiant one”. In Greek mythology, an epithet of Apollo because of his connection with the sun or as descendant of the Titaness Phoebe (his grandmother). The Romans venerated him as Phoebus Apollo.

Interesting footnote on page 164 ;
40The word swan might also be mentioned here, because the swan sings when about to die. The swan, eagle, and phoenix occur in alchemy as related symbols. The signify the sun and thus the philosophical gold. …

§237 Interesting comment about sound and colour, or 'colours and the chromatic quality of musical tones'. Basically, a common something (preconscious as Jung puts it) in us between speech (noise, sound) and colour, i.e light, fire. “Both are products of psychic energy, of libido or mana.”
See here, and §238 the word Tejas from Sanskrit. An interesting word psychologically related to the concept of libido.

§239 - 246 Agni, the god of fire …

§242 Diotima and her description of Eros.

Δ §245 “The fiery furnace, like the fiery tripod in Faust, is a mother-symbol. … The alchemical athanor, or melting-pot, signifies the body, while the alembic or cucurbita, the Hermetic vessel, represents the uterus.”

§246 “Soma and fire are identical in Vedic literature. The ancient Hindus saw fire both as a symbol of Agni and as an emanation of the inner libido-fire, …“
Cf. end of §315.

§248 “Legend always conceives the discovery of fire as a robbery, and to that extent it is akin to the widespread motif of the “treasure hard to attain.””

§249 “The blocking of libido leads to an accumulation of instinctuality and, in consequence, to excesses and aberrations of all kinds. Among them, sexual disturbances are fairly frequent, as we might expect. A particularly instructive example is the psychology of incendiarism: incendiarism is really a regressive act of fire-making, and in certain cases it is combined with masturbation. …”

Fire making rituals are important I think…there is still magic in starting a fire. I really like this…
§250 “From the psychological point of view the ceremony has the significance of a meaningful institution, inasmuch as it represents a clearly defined procedure for canalising the libido. It has, in fact, the functional value of a paradigm, and its purpose is to show us how we should act when the libido gets blocked.”

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IV The Origin of the Hero 251 - 299

This next chapter seems to kick off from the theme mentioned in paragraph 248 - the hero's journey, the quest to attain fire, the 'treasure hard to attain'.

§251 “The finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure, conceived as a demon or hero.” Jung in this para goes on to allegorically liken the hero's journey to that of the sun. He starts with an interesting point about the human element, no longer an objective symbolism, but that we humans embody this journey. There is an interesting point about our journey rising again in our children when we have come to the end of our course.

§253 “The world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful.”
I find this interesting. Also, a little bit of a stretch, but Cf. §101 about love. I think the hard thing about love is very often, not finding something to love, but finding someone to accept your love, to receive it, to accept your gift. There is nothing quite like unrequited love…it is, I think, not so much that they don't love you back, but that in that, the unspoken element is that they don't accept your love. See the earlier discussion on Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.
This is not exactly the same as what Jung is talking about here though…he goes on:

“What compels us to create a substitute from within ourselves is not an external lack, but our own inability to include anything outside ourselves in our love.”
I really like this 'our love' and including some body else, or something else in it.
Reading on …

“Real difficulties alone will never drive the libido back to the point where a neurosis arises, because the conflict which is the precondition for every neurosis is lacking. … Just as the libido may be compared to a steady stream pouring its waters into the world of reality, so a resistance, dynamically considered, resembles, … a flowing back towards the source. Part of the psyche really wants the external object, but another part of it strives back to the subjective world, … Bleuler has coined the term “ambitendency,”3
Jung goes on to say here that this setup in itself is not pathological - the presence of opposites is natural. It is an unbalanced 'plus' or 'minus' to one or the other opposite that splits them, and thus creates the tension between the otherwise balanced opposites. It is this 'third' that is the antecedent of a potential pathogenic response.

Of all the Passions we are exposed to, none is more concealed from our Knowledge than Idleness. … 5

5La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims, No. DLX, p.139

§254 is instructive in understanding the approach Jung is taking to the 'hypnogogic' poem by Miss Millerl. He considers whether or not the libido 'resistance' was an external obstacle or something internal. Interestingly though, there is a comment about what happens when an external obstacle is the cause of resistance, then ”…the libido would be violently dammed back, and would produce a flood of fantasies which could best be described as plans to overcome the obstacle: ideas that toy with solutions, …“
I like this, and find it interesting - this informs to our dreams too, when we have a dream, it may be telling us how to fix some resistance.
He makes a comment about an
”… external object that 'cannot be loved,…' because an overwhelming proportion of the libido prefers an internal object …“
This make me think of times in my own life where I couldn't feel anything, and I can only imagine now that I must have had an internal resistance, something that needed to be discovered internally. So by my reckoning, this deep introversion, flowing back of libido, can perhaps, be healthy too at times - provided one can identify the internal factors of resistance to once again start living in the real world.

Σ §257 Some thoughts about this para - Imagine the libido being directed internally, intensely introverted if you will, expecting to hear something. Jung mentions 'prayer' here. It makes me wonder, when thinking of the divine love, and the god image discussed earlier, how power that 'prayer' might be when directed internally, to the imago dei in us, seeking an answer. Then, importantly, to listen to the answer and bring it back to reality. Synthesize it, integration of the unconscious (God in us) response. Cf. §95 where Jung talks of Prayer.

§258 The unconscious unites us all as human beings : “We know that however much individuals differ from one another in the content of their conscious minds, they become all the more alike when regarded from the standpoint of the unconscious. …
The unconscious consists, among other things, of remnants of the undifferentiated archaic psyche, including its animal stages.”

§258 - Jung doesn't care for the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Carus, and von Hartmann much its seems. Equating them with the interpretation of the undifferentiated unconscious content. A more differentiated, different view only arises, he says, through individuation. So these guys were basically stuck.

§258 “The unconscious consists, among other things, of remnants of the undifferentiated archaic psyche, including its animal stages.” Cf. CW8 - Nature of the Psyche

I get the feeling that this next comment underpins much if not all of Jung's view on Psychology - one of the key reasons for studying the unconscious as opposed to the individual cases of consciousness, and the conscious individual. But rather, to view consciousness as the adaptation of the unconscious content, and most of all, to understand the unconscious.
§258 “The individual content of consciousness is therefore the most unfavourable object imaginable for psychology, precisely because it has differentiated the universal to the point of unrecognisability. The essence of conscious processes is adaptation, which takes place in a series of particulars. The unconscious, on the other hand, is universal: it not only binds individuals together into a nation or race, but unites them with the men of the past and with their psychology. Thus, by reason of its supra-individual universality,8 the unconscious is the prime object of any real psychology that claims to be more than psychophysics.”
8In my later works, I therefore speak of the “collective” unconscious.
Emphasis mine. Cf §'s 2-3 too.

Where did the hero come from??
Σ §259 “The cultural point of view gives man a meaning apart from the mass, (mass of particles) and this, in the course of centuries, led to the development of personality and the cult of the hero.”
So I'm thinking that the hero developed out of cultural development, of the personality, the individual elevating themselves as a personality above the culture??…don't know.
Jung carries on here discussing how 'rationalistic' theology are inline with this tendency. So Christ and religion are closely related to the hero myth.
… “The concrete reality of religious figures assists the canalisation of libido into the equivalent symbols, provided that the worship of them does not get stuck at the outward object.” Emphasis mine. This last bit is very interesting, and very important I think as the canalisation must return, or recognise what is being constellated - canalised - internally. It will never attain its symbolic form but rather, will be stuck on the objective manifestation…which can only take you so far. Further interesting reading here on the religious element. …“These, so far as psychological experience is concerned, are the archetypal contents of the (collective) unconscious, the archaic heritage of humanity, the legacy left behind by all differentiation and development and bestowed upon all men like sunlight and air.” This comment is very important I think. In some ways it says the unconscious archetype is archaic heritage as a result of the differentiation and development of man breaking away from the cultural development as stated earlier. So man's quest or journey(s) towards individuality over the centuries has resulted in this archaic content resulting in the archetype…is that how this should be read?

Antaeus “He would challenge all passers-by to wrestling matches, kill them, and collect their skulls, so that he might one day build out of them a temple to his father Poseidon. He was indefatigably strong as long as he remained in contact with the ground (his mother earth), but once lifted into the air he became as weak as other men.”

Σ §260 “It is a fact of experience that all archetypal contents have a certain autonomy, since they appear spontaneously and can often exercise an overwhelming compulsion. There is, therefore, nothing intrinsically absurd about the expectation that “God” will take over the activity and spontaneity of the conscious mind, for the primordial images are quite capable of doing precisely this.”

§261 “The Sphinx is a semi-theriomorphic representation of the mother-imago, or rather of the Terrible Mother, who has left numerous traces in mythology.”

§261 An indication here of Jung's methodology on understanding things : “Therefore, in order to understand the vision at all, we have to turn boldly to the ethnological material, on the assumption that the unconscious coins its symbols today in much the same way as it did in the remote past.”

§261 Of theriomorphic libido representation, Jung says : “The libido so represented is the “animal” instinct10 that has got repressed.” And at the end of the paragraph… “Thus the theriomorphic symbols always refer to unconscious manifestations of libido.”

In and amidst a case discussion here Jung mentions something interesting about dream contents, “The pointed instrument generally means the needle of the intellect, with which insects are pinned down and classified.” Something to keep in mind…

§262 “There are two main reasons why these instinctual impulses are unconscious: (1) the first is the general unconsciousness which we all share to a greater or less degree; (2) the other is a secondary unconsciousness due to the repression of incompatible contents. …“
§263 “Repression, as we have seen, is not directed solely against sexuality, but against the instincts in general, which are the vital foundations, the laws governing all life.” Cf. CW8 - Nature of the Psyche “The regression caused by repressing the instincts always leads back to the psychic past, and consequently to the phase of childhood where the decisive factors appear to be, and sometimes actually are, the parents.” Cf. §199, §92 & §134

§264 “If the regression goes still further back, beyond the phase of childhood to the preconscious, prenatal phase, then archetypal images appear, no longer connected with the individual's memories, but belonging to the stock of inherited possibilities of representation that are born anew in every individual.” We are all born with the same - 'born anew' - blueprint of archetypal content. However, has this content evolved, developed, been contributed to…it isn't clear here. Although in the previous paragraphs, Cf. §259, it would seem it has developed over time, from the first human. So then, the collective unconscious must be something that we all contribute to over time in some way if we can venture there and in some way dialogue with it. Most people do not though.
This is just interesting and noteworthy:
“It frequently happens that if the attitude towards the parents is too affectionate and too dependent, it is compensated in dreams by frightening animals, who represent the parents just as much as the helpful animals did.”
Jung makes some very interesting comments here about Oedipus and his impression / confrontation with the devouring mother in the form of the Sphinx - if we recall that the person who could confront and solve the riddle of the Sphinx won for them the hand of the Queen, Jocasta, his mother. “This had all those tragic consequences which could easily have been avoided if only Oedipus had been sufficiently intimidated by the frightening appearance of the “terrible” or “devouring” Mother whom the Sphinx personified.” I find this very interesting, especially Jung's view and focus - in this paragraph at least - on the Sphinx and the riddle as the antecedent to all these troubles. Well, not exactly, but certainly as a key in Oedipus' journey. “Little did he (Oedipus) know that the riddle of the Sphinx can never be solved merely by the wit of man.”

Echidna : In Greek mythology, Echidna (Greek: Ἔχιδνα, ekhis, ἔχις, meaning “she viper”) was half woman half snake, known as the “Mother of All Monsters” because most of the monsters in Greek myth were mothered by her.

§265 “One of her sons was Orthrus, the dog of the monster Geryon, … With this dog, her own son, Echidna incestuously begat the Sphinx. This should be sufficient to characterise the complex whose symbol is the Sphinx. It is evident that a factor of such magnitude cannot be disposed of by solving a childish riddle. The riddle was, in fact, the trap which the Sphinx laid for the unwary wanderer. Overestimating his intellect in a typically masculine way, Oedipus walked right into it, and all unknowingly committed the crime of incest. The riddle of the Sphinx was herself - the terrible mother-imago, which Oedipus would not take as a warning.” Cf. §315 for further mention of Echidna.

I've taken this a little out of context here but worth noting…
§266 ”…because the danger for a woman comes not from the mother, but from the father.”

Another interesting snippet - if not a little out of context…
§267 “I have frequently observed in the analysis of Americans that the inferior side of the personality, the “shadow,”14 is represented by a Negro or an Indian, whereas in the dream of a European it would be represented by a somewhat shady individual of his own kind.”

§268 Jung discusses her briefly the crown, Cf. p88, footnote. A noteworthy footnote 18…
16… The crown also plays a role in alchemy, perhaps as a result of cabalistic influence. … The hermaphrodite is generally represented as crowned (pl. XVIII). I have put together the alchemical material on the crown in my Mysterium Coniunctionis.

§272 “The mother's influence is mainly on the Eros of her son, therefore it was only logical that Oedipus should end up by marrying his mother. But the father exerts his influence on the mind or spirit of his daughter - on her “Logos.””

§274 “To know the secret name of a person is to have power over him. A well-known example of this is the tale of Rumpelstiltskin.” Cf. §201.

Moving now on to the anal theme brought about by the association of Miss Miller's name Chiwantopel to the onomatopoeic sounding name of the volcano Popcatepetl.
§276 “In order to understand this, we have to realise that when something is produced from the unconscious, the first thing to come up is the infantile material that has long been lost to memory. …
Before we attempt to answer this question, it must be said at once that the anal region is very closely connected with veneration. … We might also mention the intimate connection between excrement and gold;23 the lowest value allies itself to the highest. … “
23 …Grimm reports the following magical practice: “If you want money in the house all the year round, you must eat lentils on New Year's Day.” This singular association is very simply explained by the indigestibility of lentils, which reappear in the form of coins. In this manner one defecates money. Ha ha!
Interesting comment here on children's playful association with defecating: “We can only begin to understand this interest when we realise that the young child connects defecation with a theory of propagation. …The child thinks: that is how things are produced, how they “come out.”“
Basically, pooping as creating! :)

Ahasuerus - the Wandering Jew

§282 An interesting point here in footnote 28 about the 'wandering sun-heroes'….as in the wandering Jew, or Comte de Saint-Germain. Jung relates this idea - or motif rather - with 'the dynamics of the unconscious creation of personality'. Cf. §281

p194
32 Dhulqarnein = The “two-horned.” According to the commentators this refers to Alexander the Great, …. There can be no doubt that mankind felt a great need to eliminate everything personal and human from its heroes so as to make them equal to the sun, i.e., absolute libido-symbols, through a kind of metastasis. If we think like Schopenhauer, we shall say “libido-symbol”; but if we think like Goethe, we say “sun.” We exist because the sun sees us.

§282 … Jung talks of Khidr, the 'tireless wanderer' and his meeting with Moses.

§290 “The fish in dreams occasionally signifies the unborn child,47 because the child before its birth lives in the water like a fish; similarly, when the sun sinks into the sea, it becomes child and fish at once. The fish is therefore a symbol of renewal and rebirth.”
47This interpretation is still a bit mythological; to be more accurate, the fish signifies an autonomous content of the unconscious. …

p199
49… The rapid growth of the hero, a recurrent motif, seems to indicate that the birth and apparent childhood of the hero are extraordinary because his birth is really a rebirth, for which reason he is able to adapt so quickly to his heroic role. For a more detailed interpretation of the Khidr legend, see my paper Concerning Rebirth CW 9i, (Swiss edn., pp. 73ff.).

Dioscuri (from wikipedia): In Greek and Roman mythology, Castor ( /ˈkæstər/; Latin: Castōr; Greek: Κάστωρ, Kastōr, “beaver”) and Pollux ( /ˈpɒləks/; Latin: Pollūx) or Polydeuces ( /ˌpɒlɨˈdjuːsiːz/; Greek: Πολυδεύκης, Poludeukēs, “much sweet wine”[1]) were twin brothers, together known as the Dioscuri ( /daɪˈɒskjəraɪ/; Latin: Dioscūrī; Greek: Διόσκουροι, Dioskouroi, “sons of Zeus”). Their mother was Leda, but Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and Pollux the divine son of Zeus, who visited Leda in the guise of a swan. Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are sometimes said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.

Dadophors : Dadophores are always dressed as Persian god Mithra, but in oposition to Mithra which represents movement Dadophores always represent stillnes. They are also not blodthirsdy (require no sackrifices). There are 2 kinds of Dadophors, with raised torch (Cautes) and with lowered torch (Cautopates). Together with Mithra they represent 3 sides of one person. Cf. footnote 53 on page 201

Σ §294 There is a very interesting comment here about the sacrifice of Christ, i.e., on the cross flanked by two thieves (one good/repentant going to heaven, the other bad/non-repentant and going to hell), and the Mithraic sacrifice flanked by dadophors, one with a raised torch, the other with a lowered torch.
52The difference between this and the Mithraic sacrifice is significant. The dadophors are harmless gods of light who take no part in the sacrifice. The Christian scene is much more dramatic. The inner relation of the dadophors to Mithras, of which I will speak later, suggests that there was a similar relation between Christ and the two thieves.

§296 “As the whole solar mythology is psychology projected into the heavens, the underlying idea could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal, the other immortal. Man is mortal, yet there are exceptions who are immortal (Christ for e.g.), or there is something immortal in us. Thus the gods, or figures like Khidr and the Comte de Saint Germain, are our immortal part which continues intangibly to exist.” Cf. back here to §281 & §282 where Jung starts this discussion on the 'wanderer'. “The sun comparison tells us over and over again that the dynamic of the gods is psychic energy. This is our immortality, the link through which man feels inextinguishably one with the continuity of all life.”

§297 “The psychic life-force, the libido, symbolises itself in the sun59 or personifies itself in figures of heroes with solar attributes. At the same time it expresses itself through phallic symbols.”

Needs to be read in context, but worth writing some of it down here…
§298 “The symbolism is plain: sun = phallus, moon = vessel (uterus). …
From this it is clear that sexuality as well as the sun can be used to symbolise the libido.”

§299 “One further point deserves mention here. The dadophor Cautopates (lowered torch) is often represented with a cock64 and pine-cones.”
64A well known sun-animal.

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V Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth 300 - 418

§300 Interesting comment… ”…a “swarm of people.” We know that this image symbolises a secret,1 or rather, the unconscious.
1Freud, The interpretation of Dreams, pp. 245-46, 288.
Read on for comments about 'secrets' and the impact on an individual. Basically… ”…it is of the utmost importance for the economy of the libido that his rapport with the environment should be as complete and as unimpeded as possible, the possession of subjectively important secrets usually has a very disturbing effect.”
“I have often noticed that the symbol of the crowd, and particularly of a streaming mass of people in motion, expresses violent motions of the unconscious. Such symbols always indicate an activation of the unconscious and an incipient dissociation between it and the ego.”

§303 Another interesting comment…needs to be read in context, but worth extracting out here. “The city is a maternal symbol, a woman who harbours the inhabitants in herself like children.”

Ogyges and Thebes. The name of Ogyges wife was apparently also Thebes.

Lingam : a symbol of divine generative energy, especially a phallus or phallic object as a symbol of Shiva. Compare with yoni.

§306 “The chest or casket is a female symbol (cf. fig. 21. and pl. LIII), i.e., the womb, a common enough conception in the older mythologies.4 The chest, barrel, or basket with its precious contents was often thought of as floating on the water, thus forming an analogy to the course of the sun.” Cf. §311.

§307 Interesting quote from Frobenius…if, in ancient times the sun set in to the sea, and then in the morning gave birth to the sun at sun rise, we could say; the sea devours or consumes the sun and then gives birth to it in the morning again, or spews it back up. Or, the sun impregnates the sea (as a great mother) only for her to give birth to the sun in the morning. So we have the incest element again, the fun both impregnating and being born to the mother sea - the night sea journey. :) Cf. §309 & §310.
These stories about the night see journey (the sun(-god) travelling in the mother's (the sea) womb) are very reminiscent of Joshua and the whale for e.g.
Frobenius' explanation of this theme (see the diagram on p210) is instructive of the hero's journey (in brief - my interpretation.):
- Devouring, or rather, being devoured
- sea journey - in the belly of the whale
- fire-lighting - discovers/uses the fire
- cutting of the heart - a challenge to find the energy source, the 'heart of the matter'
- landing - the return to land, starting again, somewhere new
- opening - escaping, finding the way out
- slipping out - birth
- heat and hair - you are not left without a mark from the journey.

Hanuman and his sea journey.

Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, p. 421:
 The night sea journey

Σ §312 “The meaning of this cycle of myths is clear enough; it is the longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, and to become immortal like the sun. This longing for the mother is amply expressed in the literature of the Bible.”

Σ §313 “The Christians are children of the Higher City (Cf. §312 quote from Galations 4:36ff), not sons of the earthly city-mother, who is to be cast out; for those born after the flesh are opposed to those born after the spirit, who are not born from the fleshly mother but from a symbol of the mother.” I find this very interesting. The idea aligns with the Gnostic and alchemy themes of nature in that the Christians shunned nature and 'being (re)born of nature' in a sense. Salvation had to come from the spiritual domain and thus the flesh - nature - was shunned. So a mother symbol, a spiritual symbol, not of the fleshy mother, is where the Christian birth arises. The Gnostics however, along with the Alchemists sought rebirth in the material as well as spiritual, there was a more balanced relationship.
As an aside, comparing the stories of moses in the basket, Joshua in the whale…the Christian narrative used symbols, whereas the Greek myths would just have the god or goddess born out of the thigh of another god for e.g., Zeus giving birth to Dionysus.
Jung goes on…

“This substitution is due to the fact that the regression of libido reactivates the ways and habits of childhood, and above all the relation to the mother;10 but what was natural and useful to the child is a psychic danger for the adult, and this is expressed by the symbol of incest. Because the incest taboo opposes the libido and blocks the path to regression, it is possible for the libido to be canalised into the mother analogies thrown up by the unconscious.”
10And, of course, to the father, though the relation to the mother naturally takes first place, being on a deeper level.
Very interesting….this whole paragraph is very good. Worth reading again. The discussion around how the libido canalises around the mother analogies presented by the unconscious; as libido regresses towards infantile associations with the mother the incest taboo halts the deeper regression to a purely infantile stage (for the adult, 'rejoining' = incest the mother is not healthy, although for a child it is natural) and presents the mother analogies upon which the libido can now work and canalise. This is an opportunity for growth and consciousness to develop - unless one get hung up on the parents. This is where the symbol can help, and progress consciousness as for e.g. the symbol of the city. If this is where the adult can now focus efforts, it is a new mother.

Johannine Apocalypse

End of §313 and then §314 there is mention of the whore of Babylon, the sacred whore (the mother).

§315 “Here the intoxicating drink is closely associated with fornication, for it too is a libido symbol, as we have already seen in the soma-fire-sun parallel.”
I wrote this down as a reference to §246 where the soma - fire parallel is drawn.

§315 - §318ff there is some good discussion about the book of Revelations, the city of Babylon (the great mother), and the marriage of the Lamb (= Christ) of God; the new Jerusalem.

§318 “After all that has gone before, it is evident from this passage that the City, the heavenly bride who is here promised to the Son, is the mother or mother-imago.15
15 … The connection of the Church with the mother is beyond all doubt (cf. pl. xxxa), also the interpretation of the mother as the spouse.

Christ and Mithras are of 'most interest' here as per para 319. I mention this only as a reminder of the context in which much of this encyclopedic discussion is going on.

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The motif of water as a mother symbol

§319 Much mention here about water as the giver of life and then he touches on death and life briefly. “The maternal significance of water (pl. XXVI) is one of the clearest interpretations of symbols in the whole field of mythology.17 … Those black waters of death (The Styx) are the water of life, for death … is the maternal womb, just as the sea devours the sun but brings it forth again.”

§320 “The projection of the mother-imago upon water endows the latter with a number of numinous or magical qualities peculiar to the mother. … In dreams and fantasies the sea or a large expanse of water signifies the unconscious. The maternal aspect of water coincides with the nature of the unconscious, because the latter (particularly in men) can be regarded as the mother or matrix of consciousness. Hence the unconscious, when interpreted on the subjective level,.22 has the same maternal significance as water.”
Emphasis mine
.22See my Psychological Types Def. 52.

The 'tree of life' as a mother symbol
Cf with CW13 Alchemical Studies - the Philosophical Tree

§321 “Another equally common mother-symbol is the wood of life ( ξύλον ζωής), or tree of life.”

An interesting side note here that I like to capture when Jung mentions different tree types. Here he mentions, 'Adonis in the myrtle, Osiris in the cedar-tree' CF. para. 353. And also “Hence when Attis castrates himself under a pine-tree, he did so because the tree has a maternal significance. … 23
15Cones were sometimes used instead of columns, as in the cults of Aphrodite, Astarte, etc.
There's more here about 'blocks of wood', 'posts', 'columns', 'cross post'…etc. “The φαλλός is a pole, a ceremonial lingam carved out of figwood, as are all the Roman statues of Priapus.” Cf. footnote 30 on p221.

An interesting footnote on page 220:
24For the symbolism of the finger-joint, see my remarks on the dactyls, pars. 180-84. Here I would like to add the following from a Bakairi myth: ” From these finger-bones, and not from Oka, the woman became pregnant.” (Frobenius, p. 236.)

§324 “Not only the gods, but the goddesses, too, are libido-symbols, when regarded from the point of view of their dynamism. The libido expresses itself in images of sun, light, fire, sex, fertility, and growth. In this way the goddesses, as we have seen, come to possess phallic symbols, even though the latter are essentially masculine. …so the male lies hidden in the female.28 … Thus the tree has a bisexual character, … 30
28 Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 131, p.245.
30The fig-tree is phallic. It is worth noting that Dionysus planted a fig-tree at the entrance to Hades, in the same way that phalloi were placed on graves. The cypress, sacred to Aphrodite, the Cyprian, became an emblem of death, …

What is a symbol

§329 “The various meanings of the tree - sun, tree of Paradise, mother, phallus - are explained by the fat that it is a libido symbol and not an allegory of this or that concrete object. Thus a phallic symbol does not denote the sexual organ, but the libido, and however clearly it appears as such, it does not mean itself but is always a symbol of the libido.” There continues here now a good few sentences on Jung's view of a symbol, and the tertium comparationis symbols attempt to explain.

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Incest

Σ §330 32The relationship of the son to the mother was the psychological basis of numerous cults. Robertson ( Christianity and Mythology, p. 322) was struck by Christ's relationship to the two Marys, and he …
There is more here about the eschatological experience involving the mother (for this case material)…and this being akin to the Christian theme of the Lamb united with the mother-bride (his Church) - the nuptiae chymicae, the coniunctio. This makes me think of a return to participation mystique, a return to mother earth. Cf. this with an interesting comment on infantilism in para. 345. Not exactly the same thing, but worth referencing.
§332 Jung starts out here questioning Freud's causal theory of symbol-formation from the incest taboo, or “incest prohibition”…he then goes on to discuss the idea of incest a little further and says: “Moreover it must be pointed out that the basis of the “incestuous” desire is no cohabitation, but, as every sun (Sun = libido) myth shows, the strange idea of becoming a child again, of returning to the parental shelter, and of entering into the mother in order to be reborn though her. But the way to this goal lies through incest …”
Worth reading on further here on the whole incest thing …
“It is not incestuous cohabitation that is desired, but rebirth.” There is a very interesting footnote on p224, footnote 36, about sex and sexuality. Of sexuality - ” … the libido becomes imperceptibly spiritualised. The power which “always desires evil” thus creates spiritual life. That is why the religions exalt this procedure into a system. …“
John 3:4ff
§335 “The reason why Jesus' words have such great suggestive power is that they express the symbolical truths which are rooted in the very structure of the human psyche.” Cf. para. 339 below.

This next comment in the context of this paragraph obviously is very interesting and I think requires some pondering.
“The empirical truth never frees a man from his bondage to the senses; it only shows him that he was always so and cannot be otherwise. … “
This is said in the context of the concretisation of rebirth and the restraints of reality to grasp this fact as something that can actually happen as opposed to spiritual rebirth. However, I'm thinking in the context of everyday life too - what is this 'bondage to the senses'? Reality? Empirical truth and our sense go hand in hand very often although what I'm saying is that they perhaps don't. Can our senses seek rebirth that the empirical facts are not able to explain? For this we need the symbolic truth (as Jung goes on to discuss). However, what are the senses Jung is talking about here?…it isn't quite clear to me. Cf. the end of the next paragraph.

Σ §336 “It is as necessary today as it ever was to lead the libido away from the cult of rationalism and realism - not, indeed, because these things have gained the upper hand (quite the contrary), but because the guardians and custodians of symbolical truth, namely the religions, have been robbed of their efficacy by science. …
But that means placing symbolical truth on a new foundation - a foundation which appeals not only to sentiment, but to reason. And this can only be achieved by reflecting how it came about in the first place that humanity needed the improbability of religious statements, and what it signifies when a totally different spiritual reality is superimposed on the sensuous and tangible actuality of this world.”
This is fantastic. Cf. para.'s 2 & 3, and 34ff. It is important to look back. Also, I think of alchemy and, for example, the figure of Mercurius that is so hard to pin down both academically and spiritually and the important thing in many ways is not to understand the Mercurial figure in his myriad of complexities (although sure, it is important), but more importantly is to understand why the figure of Mercurius was/is so important. Why does the psyche find need to have such a figure - symbol. That is almost as if not more important to understand.

Regarding instincts and emancipating the libido from pure instinctuality as consciousness develops… §337 “These systems have to be constituted in such a way that they offer the libido a kind of natural gradient. For the libido does not incline to anything, otherwise it would be possible to turn it in any direction one chose.”
This is important in consideration of the instincts and how we perceive them. Cf. [aker:collected_works:cw8|Nature of the Psyche]], CW8. The structures that we must understand and make available to the instinctual forces - libido - that we might allow it to canalise in a healthy manner are guided by the archetypes. The archetypes are intimately related to the instincts. ”…for the archetypes are the forms or river-beds along which the current of psychic life has always flowed.”
§338 “It is not possible to discuss the problem of symbol-formation without reference to the instinctual processes, because it is from them that the symbol derives its motive power.” This next bit is really interesting and speaks to the conflict of just letting instinctual forces run wild (emphasis mine) : “It (The symbol that is) has no meaning whatever unless it strives against the resistance of instinct, just as undisciplined instincts would bring nothing but ruin to man if the symbol did not give them form.”
Jung goes on here to explain his - scientific - approach to symbol formation: “To interpret symbol-formation in terms of instinctual processes is a legitimate scientific attitude, … In accordance with my empirical attitude I nevertheless prefer to describe and explain symbol-formation as a natural process, (i.e. instincts) …”

Σ §339 - 340 Cf. para. 332. & 337 Christianity's 'archetypal analogies' for the most part were in tune with instinctual forces it wanted to transform and the motive forces it was dealing with. There's argument here for why Jung thought religion and having a religious attitude was and is so important to having a legitimate experience of one's Self, and understanding ourselves, to think symbolically. There is an interesting comment in para. 341 about brutality - anyone who lays aside Christianity (religion) on rational judgement will be confronted with the brutality that is in us, that was channeled by Christianity. Jung points to contemporary historical events (WWII) as implications to illustrate this point.

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Faith Cf. para 345.
§342 “When I remarked earlier (par. 106) that an unconscious transformation of libido was ethically worthless, and contrasted it with the Christianity of the early Roman period … I ought to have added that mere faith cannot be counted as an ethical ideal either, because it too is an unconscious transformation of libido.” There is argument for 'faith' here, but Jung rebuts that as a unique charisma to certain people. For the others, there should be understanding.

The ol' Archimedean point chestnut… 'since all knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic'!
§344 “Though we do not possess a physics of the soul, and are not even able to observe it and judge it from some Archimedean point “outside” ourselves, and can therefore know nothing objective about it since all knowledge of the psyche is itself psychic, in spite of all this the soul is the only experience of life and existence. It is, in fact, the only immediate experience we can have and the sine qua non of the subjective reality of the world. The symbols it (Psyche) creates are always grounded in the unconscious archetype, but their manifest forms are moulded by the ideas acquired by the conscious mind. The archetypes are the numinous, structural elements of the psyche and possess a certain autonomy and specific energy which enables them to attract, out of the conscious mind, those contents which are best suited to themselves. The symbols act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a “lower” into a “higher” form . …” (Emphasis mine)

§345 More discussion on faith. An interesting comment on blind faith, and the return to 'infantilism'. However, “The much-vaunted “child-likeness” of faith only makes sense when the feeling behind the experience is still alive. If it gets lost, faith is only another word for habitual, infantile dependence, which takes the place of, and actually prevents, the struggle for deeper understanding. This seems to be the position we have reached today.” (Emphasis mine).

§346 “Since faith revolves round those central and perennially important “dominant ideas” which alone give life meaning, the prime task of the psychotherapist must be to understand the symbols anew, and thus to understand the unconscious, compensatory striving of his patient for an attitude that reflects the totality of the psyche.”

Tree Symbolism

Cf. para's 321ff. As in these referenced paragraphs its worth just noting here the types of trees Jung mentions; the pine-tree of Attis (p423, Fig. 42 - 'The sacred tree of Attis'), the world-ash Yggdrasill of Nordic mythology.

Σ §349 “The hanging of Attis, in effigy, on a pine-tree …the hanging of Marsyas, … the hanging of Odin, … - all teach us that the hanging of Christ on the Cross is nothing unique in religious mythology, …
In this world of images the Cross is the Tree of Life and at the same time a Tree of Death - a coffin (cf. pl. XXXVI).”

§350 Just some Greek mythology worth noting as a reminder… “Osiris was killed in a crafty manner by the god of the underworld, Set (Typhon in Greek), who locked him in a chest. He was thrown into the Nile and carried out to sea. …” (I mention this also for the reference to Set / Typhon which is notable for further reference.) Its also noteworthy in the story of Osiris the incest with his twin sister Isis in utero, and then his sister Nephthys. With Set and Osiris, I think too of Cain and Abel (Cain killed Abel).
§351 “The wicked Set lured Osiris in the the chest by a ruse, in other words the original evil in man wants to get back into the mother again, and the illicit, incestuous longing for the mother is the ruse supposedly invented by Set. It is significant that it is “evil” which lures Osiris into the chest; for, (and I find this very interesting, Cf. para 182) in the light of teleology, the motif of the containment signifies the latent state that precedes regeneration. Thus evil, as though cognisant of its imperfection, strives to be made perfect through rebirth - “Part of the power which would / Ever work evil, but engenders good!”40
40 Faust, Part I, trans. by Wayne, p. 75, modified.
An interesting footnote on page 235 about the way Jung is using the word incest in this context:
“But the real cause of the wound is the incest-taboo,42 which cuts a man off from the security of childhood and early youth, from all those unconscious, instinctive happenings that allow the child to live without responsibility as an appendage of his parents.”
42 Here I must again remind the reader that I give the word “incest” a different meaning from that which properly belongs to it. Incest is the urge to get back to childhood. For the child, of course, this cannot be called incest; it is only for an adult with a fully developed sexuality that this backward striving becomes incest, because he is no longer a child but possesses a sexuality which cannot be allowed a regressive outlet.
“So long as the child is in that state of unconscious identity with the mother, he is still one with the animal psyche and is just as unconscious as it. The development of consciousness inevitably leads not only to separation from the mother, but to separation from the parents and the whole family circle and thus to a relative degree of detachment from the unconscious and the world of instinct. Yet the longing for the lost world continues and, when difficult adaptation are demanded, is forever tempting one to make evasions and retreats, to regress to the infantile past, which then starts throwing up the incestuous symbolism.” (Emphasis mine) It seems like I'm copying out the whole paragraph but I think this next part is important too…

“But it is far from clear, because a new adaptation or orientation of vital importance can only be achieved in accordance with the instincts. Lacking this, nothing durable results, only a convulsively willed, artificial product which proves in the long run to be incapable of life.” Like doing a job you son't like - this next bit is important too. Emphasis mine.
No man can change himself into anything from sheer reason; he can only change into what he potentially is .”
This next sentence makes me think of fairytales and the need for a new adaptation, a new kingdom…
“When such a change becomes necessary, the previous mode of adaptation, already in a state of decay, is unconsciously compensated by the archetype of another mode.” (Emphasis mine) What isn't clear here though is what this other mode is…is it the same archetype, but a different mode thereof, as would seem to be the case by his next example (read further in this paragraph). So the archetype remains, but the mode of the archetype changes. In his example, the mother relationship replaced by the 'Mother Church' relationship. Or, does each 'mode' have an archetype? So there must be many archetypes.

The Terrible Mother
§352 ”… This longing can easily turn into a consuming passion which threatens all that has been won. The mother then appears on the one hand as the supreme goal, and on the other as the most fightful danger - the “Terrible Mother.”43
43 Frobenius, Zeitalter.

Necrophagous & dogs
§354ff This paragraph is interesting for the topic being discussed is a about the dismembered body of Osiris (and Dionysus as well is mentioned) and how his parts were gathered up with the help of the jackal headed god Anubis. Here the association is made to dogs, and their role in death rituals - some cultures leaving the bodies of their dead out to be eaten by dogs or vultures. The symbolism then of these animals related to death, and then rebirth is significant. The dog is also regular companion of Aesculapius (mentioned in para. 355), the god of healing.

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§356 The reconstruction of Osiris' body by Isis was only partial, the phallus had been eaten by the fishes, ”…and the reconstituted body lacked vital force.50(The phallus as a symbol of vital force. The footnote is interesting too then in relation to fire making…)
50 …The main elements here are firstly a mutilation, and secondly a twisting movement, which Frobenius rightly connect with fire-boring. The mutilation is a castration in the case of Attis, and something similar in the case of Osiris.
“The foot, as the organ nearest the earth, represents in dreams the relation to earthly reality and often has a generative or phallic significance. The name Oedipus, 'Swell-foot,' is suspicious in this respect.”

Just thought I would note these references to the gods…always interesting to have about…
§357 “Khnum-Ra, the sun-god of Lower Egypt, is a ram, and his consort, the female divinity of the nome, is Hatmehit, who wears the fish on her head.”

§359 Naunet (from wikipedia) Nu (/nuː/; “watery one”; “watery one”) or Nun (/nʌn/ or /nuːn/; “inert one”) is the deification of the primordial watery abyss in Egyptian mythology. In the Ogdoad cosmogony, the word nu means “abyss”. Nu was shown usually as male but also had aspects that could be represented as female or male. Nunet (/ˈnuːˌnɛt/; also spelt Naunet) is the female aspect, which is the name Nu with a female gender ending.

§361 “Thus the fate of Osiris is explained; he enters into the mother's womb, into the coffer, the sea, the tree, the Astarte column; is dismembered, put together again, and reappears in his son Horpi-chrud.” (Horpi-chrud = Horus, Cf. para. 357)

§362 ” …say a few words more about the symbol of the tree. … The motif of embracing and entwining is often found in the sun myths and rebirth myths, …” (Emphasis mine)

Mentioned here, the lygos-tree (the “chaste-tree”). Cf. with Heraion of Samos - a large sanctuary to the goddess Hera.

”…train of thought connected with the hieros gamos, namely, rejuvenation magic. The disappearance and hiding of the image in the wood, in the cave, on the seashore, its twining-about by the lygos-tree,63 all this points to death and rebirth.”
63Λύγος means 'willow,' or indeed any pliant twig or rod. λυγόω means 'to twist, plait, weave.'

Argive Hera, Cf. Heraion of Argos
Gargarus, Cf. Mount Ida

§364 66 …there is a description of Sleep sitting high up in a fir-tree; “There he perched, hidden by the branches with their sharp needles, in the form of a songbird of the mountains” … It looks as if this motif belonged to the hieros gamos. Cf. also the magic net with which Hephaestus caught Ares and Aphrodite in flagrante and kept them there for the entertainment of the gods.

The motif of devouring (and entwining, enveloping)

§365 “The motif of “devouring” (pls. XXXIIb, XXXIV), which Frobinius has shown to be one of the commonest components of the sun myth, is closely connected with the embracing and entwining. The “whale-dragon” always “devours” the hero, but the devouring can also be partial. …“
At the end of this paragraph Jung references a dream about a woman's foot that is seized by a crab. This is cross-referenced to his explanation in CW7 "On the Psychology of the Unconscious", para. 123ff.

§367 “The motif of entwining is a mother-symbol.72 The entwining trees are at the same time birth-giving mothers (cf. pl. XXXXIX), as in the Greek myth where the μελίαι νύμΦαι are ash-trees, the mothers of the men of the Bronze Age.” … “According to a Nordic myth, God created man by breathing life into a substance called tre 73 (tree, wood).74 …” There is more mention here of the 'world-ash tree', the 'tree pregnant with death and life', and the 'regenerative function of the world-ash. From an egyptian book there is a reference to 'the tree of emerald green'… I wonder what that is, if it is a specific tree, or just reference to the tree of life.
72This motif also include that of the “clashing rocks” (Frobenius, p. 405). The hero often has to steer his ship between two rocks that clash together. (A similar idea is that of the biting door or the snapping tree-trunk.) …. This formulation implies that opening the rock is an undertaking that can never be accomplished in reality, it can only be wished. … The bird is a symbol of “wishful thinking.” (I think of the bird, flight, and mans wish to fly…there has always been an eternal gaze of man towards the skies, towards birds that can soar.)

When thinking of entwining there are some interesting images of Odin and the Yggdrasil tree of Norse Mythology on the wikipedia page…particularly of Odin sacrificing himself in the Ash Yggdrasil tree, Cf. end of para 373 - 'And Odin hung upon the maternal world-ash, upon his “terrible horse” ( Schreckross ← mentioned middle of para. 370). Especially this one by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine …copied/linked here from wikipedia (see the Uroboros) :

the_ash_yggdrasil_by_friedrich_wilhelm_heine.jpg

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§368 “Ship and tree (i.e., the ship of death and tree of death) are closely related here.”
There is an interesting comment here from a historical point of view where he talks of a change during the middle ages, a time in European history between 5th and 15th centuries. In consideration of the tree as a symbol of birth: …“So it is only logical that in the Middle Ages the tree was poetically addressed with the honorific title of “Lady.” Nor is it surprising that Christian legend transformed the tree of death, the Cross, into the Tree of Life…” So there is a shift here in how the tree was viewed it would seem - it has always has a symbol of life associated with it but it seems Jung is highlighting the fact that it was associated with death too…and that perhaps this part was overshadowed with the tree of life symbolism during the Middle-Ages, particularly with the rise of Christianity. The Christian cross as a symbol most likely evolving from the Tree of Life symbol…that has been around for ages. Jung goes on here to discuss the Christian Cross symbol and that historical (pre-Christian) use of the Cross as a symbol does not contradict this view - that the Christian Cross came from the Tree of Life, and not perhaps from another use of the Cross as a symbol. Indeed, Jung points out that : ”…for its (the cross) meaning is life.”
“Christian legend has made abundant use of this symbolism. The student of medieval art with be familiar with the representation of the Cross growing from Adam's grave (pl. XXXVII). The legend says that Adam was buried on Golgotha, and that Seth planted on his grave a twig from the tree of Paradise, which grew into Christ's Cross, the Tree of Death.82
This makes me think of the many pictures I saw in Brugge with a skull at the foot of Christ, or a skull at the foot of the Cross of Christ. See images below.

A triptych from a medieval church in Brugge

The painting Triomferende Christus by Marcus Gheeraerts de oude, c1550
The feet of Christ amplified from the painting, at the feet of christ; the world, Adam's skull, the snake of the devil.

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See footnote 84, page 248, “a lime tree that will be planted and throw out two boughs” … a lime tree will bring forth the salvation of the world.

§369 ”…Jewish tradition that Adam, before he knew Eve, had a demon-wife called Lilith, with whom he strove for supremacy. But Lilith rose up into the air through the magic of God's name … Adam forced her to come back with the help of three angels,85 whereupon Lilith changed into a nightmare or lamia (pl. XXXVIIIa) who haunted pregnant women and kidnapped new-born infants. … This motif is a recurrent one in fairytales, where the mother often appears as a murderess86 or eater of human flesh (pl. XXXVIIIb); a well-known German paradigm is the story of Hansel and Gretel. … Lamia is also the name of a large, voracious fish,87 … Once again we meet the idea of the terrible Mother in the form of a voracious fish, a personification of death.88
85Here we may discern, perhaps, the motif of the “helpful bird” - angels are really birds. … The symbolism of the three angels is important because it signifies the upper, aerial, spiritual triad in conflict with the one lower, feminine power. Cf. my ”Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales” (1954/55 edn., pp. 25ff.). ( CW 9i)

§370 “The lamias are typical nightmares whose feminine nature is abundantly documented.89 Their universal peculiarity is that they ride their victims. Their counterparts are the spectral horses who carry their riders away at a mad gallop. …” (Emphasis mine) Read more here about some comments on child psychology. Notably the sexual meaning of riding fantasies. There's lots more in the next couple of paragraphs about the etymology of the word ' mare '. Its worth noting footnote 94 on p.250; a note from the Editor, 'Not all etymological conjectures in this passage are now considered warranted.”
“At first sight, there seems to be an etymological connection between nightmare and mare (female horse) … The supposed source of nightmare is Old English and Old Norse mara, 'ogress, incubus, demon,' and, by extension, 'nightmare.' …
which shows that a secondary sexual meaning attaches to stamping or kicking, though the rhythm is obviously primary.”

§374 ”….it is evident that Horus' fight is the typical fight of the sun-hero with the “whale dragon” who, as we know, is a symbol of the Terrible Mother, of the voracious maw, the jaws of death in which men are crunched and ground to pieces.100
Cf. para's 362 and 365, the 'sun myth'. Here Jung talks of the sun-hero fight, which is the same thing as the sun myth. The sun myth seems to be the hero's journey.
“Whoever conquers this monster wins to eternal youth. But to this end, defying all danger, he must descend into the belly of the monster101 (“journey to hell”) and sojourn there for some time (“night sea imprisonment”: Frobenius). (Cf. diagram, p. 210; pl. XXIIb.)“
101 …[As Mephistopheles says (Wayne trans., p. 77): “All friends and phantoms must obey a law/ To use the way they entered in before.” ] This motif evidently belongs to the rebirth myth.
Cf. para 309 and the image from Frobenius of the night sea journey.

§379 Wind fertilisation….in this creation myth example: “The world is created from the mother, i.e., with the libido that is withdrawn from her through the sacrifice, and through prevention of the regression that threatened to overcome the hero.”
I'm drawn to this motif of regression to the mother. Should Marduk have got stuck in Tiamat when she tried to devour him, he would have essentially returned to the mother, to the womb and thus become as a child (unborn) again, in the safety of the mother - but not growing up or coming to consciousness.

§388 …“It is not man as such who has to be regenerated or born again as a renewed whole, but, according to the statements of mythology, (Italics mine - an interesting note on the mythological antecedent for Jung's ideas and steering his hypothesis. This is important as it helps in reading his writing, and appreciating that when he's talking of myth as fact - very often - it is rather that he is drawing on the psychological reality, precedent if you will, in the fortified myths and beliefs - that must have come from the unconscious.) it is the hero or god who rejuvenates himself. These figures are generally expressed or characterised by libido-symbols (light, fire, sun, etc.), so that it looks as if they represented psychic energy. They are, in fact, personifications of the libido. …” Definitely worth reading on, there is discussion on the autonomous aspects of the psyche - the archetypes.
“Consequently, man derives his human personality only secondarily from what the myths call his descent from the gods and heroes; or, to put it in psychological terms, his consciousness of himself as a personality derives primarily from the influence of quasi-personal archetypes.107
107Represented in the human sphere by the quaternity composed of father, mother, godfather, godmother, the latter two corresponding to the divine pair.
So basically, our personality is only 'quasi-' up to who we think we are.

§389 “It is, then, in the first place the god who transforms himself, and only through him does man take part in the transformation.” Very interesting Cf. para 394 below.

This next statement is very interesting when considering what must be going on psychologically for people. I'm not clear though from what he says if its 'normal' or what happens when libido regresses…so what if libido doesn't regress…will the 'gods' not appear then? I think the important thing here is the 'naturalness' of libido canalising into the gods in their various forms….its normal. Also, it is the gods, libido, not my ego consciousness that is seeking incest for e.g. Now we must understand the incest that is being sought. As Jung goes on to point out, it isn't a problem really for the primitive when this happens - its only when we consciously try make sense of it and reject the incest due to modern morality, the incest taboo - that the libido is then blocked and other avenues will arise as the energy can't stagnate.
§390 “The canalisation of regressive libido into the god justifies the mythological statement that it is the god or the hero who commits incest.”

§392 “It is clear that the votaries fight and even kill each other for their share in the mystery of divine incest.114A good description of the puer aeternus : ”…a puer aeternus. The graceful Baldur is such a figure. This type is granted only a fleeting existence, because he is never anything but an anticipation of something desired and hoped for.”
114 … The theft of the veil in the myth of the swan-maiden means the same thing. …
115The above mentioned myth of Halirrhothios (para. 372), who killed himself in the attempt to cut down the sacred tree of Athens, the moria, (an olive tree) expresses the same psychology, as also does the castration of the priests who serve the Great Mother. The ascetic tendency in Christianity (e.g. Origen's self-castration) is a similar phenomenon.
I find this last footnote interesting - the different themes/phenomena of attempting to participate in the incest ritual. Notably castration, which is as we've seen, similar to cutting down the tree…as in the myth of Attis.

Mistletoe - “European mistletoe, Viscum album, figured prominently in Greek mythology, and is believed to be The Golden Bough of Aeneas, ancestor of the Romans.”
The legend of Baldur and how he was killed by a mistletoe branch (arrow).

At the end of para. 392, there is a mini conclusion and elucidation to castration and the cutting down of the tree in relation to the incest phenomena. Of the puer aeternus
”… only a dream of the mother, an ideal which she soon takes back into herself, as we can see from the Near Eastern “son-gods” like Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Christ. The mistletoe, like Baldur, represents the “child of the mother,” the longed-for, revivified life-force that flows from her. But, separated from its host, the mistletoe dies. Therefore, when the druid cuts it, he kills it and by this act symbolically repeats the fatal self-castration of Attis and the wounding of Adonis by the boar's tusk.”

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§393 “The lovely apparition of the puer aeternus is, alas, a form of illusion. In reality he is a parasite on the mother, a creature of her imagination, who only lives when rooted in the maternal body. In actual psychic experience the mother corresponds to the collective unconscious, and the son to consciousness, which fancies itself free but must ever again succumb to the power of sleep and deadening unconscious. ” (Emphasis mine) Does this mean the puer could continue to live if rooted in the mother - the unconscious? I guess so, but then they would never come to consciousness. see the comment at the end of this paragraph: ”…or too little consciousness in the hero for him to complete his heroic task.”

§394 It is the superhuman, or god imago of the hero that is able to accomplish the heroic task. Cf. 389 above.

§395 ”…the negative mother-imago …expresses resistance to incest, or the fear of it. Dragon and snake are symbolic representations of the fear of the consequences of breaking the taboo and regressing to incest.” Mentioned here too is an alternative motif of horses.

§396 “The tree entwined by the snake may therefore be taken as the symbol of the mother who is protected against incest by fear. … The rock with a snake coiled round it has a similar meaning, … This fact points to the father as being the cause of the fear, … The father represents the world of moral commandments and prohibitions, …” Interesting comments here about the practical phenomenological antecedents of this patriarchal theme, was it simply subjective tribal father dominance or actual a necessity for survival (the incest taboo). “The father is the representative of the spirit, whose function it is to oppose pure instinctuality. That is his archetypal role, … Accordingly, the monster to be overcome by the son frequently appears as a giant who guards the treasure. … He represents the father who - paradoxically - enforces the incest prohibition as a giant and dangerous animal. The paradox lies in the fact that, like the mother who gives life and then takes it away again as the “terrible” or “devouring” mother, the father apparently lives a life of unbridled instinct and yet is the living embodiment of the law that thwarts instinct. … the killing of the bull clearly denotes an overcoming of animal instinct, and at the same time a secret and furtive overcoming of the power of the law, and hence a criminal usurpation of justice.” This makes me think of Paul's letter to the Romans 4:13 “ For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his descendants, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. ” and Romans 3:28ff “ Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. ”
This next comment is very instructive shall we say, when looking at things and the overcoming of the collective view on things, the norm, or what is perceived as right (emphasis mine): “Since the better is always the enemy of the good, every drastic innovation is an infringement of what is traditionally right, …”

Footnote 125 on page 262 for an interesting mention of the evolution of God and Job.

Σ §398 “Animals represent instinct, and also the prohibition of instinct, so that man becomes human (Conscious) through conquering his animal instinctuality.”
Some very interesting comments now about the evolution of consciousness and symbols around the incest theme. It's long, but worth writing out:
“In the Mithraic sacrifice the conquest of instinctuality no longer takes the archaic form of overpowering the mother, but of renouncing one's own instinctive desires. The primitive idea of reproducing oneself by entering into the mother's body has become so remote that the hero, instead of committing incest, is now sufficiently far advanced in the domestic virtues to seek immortality through the sacrifice incest tendency. This significant change finds its true fulfillment only in the symbol of the crucified God. …Although the tree of life has a mother significance, it is no longer the mother, but a symbolical equivalent to which the hero offers up his life. …s symbol which expresses…the subjugation of instinct. … We can say that he unites himself with the mother in death and at the same time negates the act of union, paying for his guilt with deadly torment. This act of supreme courage and supreme renunciation is a crushing defeat for man's animal nature, and it is also an earnest of supreme salvation, because such a deed alone seems adequate to expiate Adam's sin of unbridled instinctuality. The sacrifice is the very reverse of regression - it is a successful canalisation of libido into the symbolic equivalent of the mother, and hence a spiritualisation of it.” (Emphasis mine)

§399 Mention of the theme of the spear and the sacrifice in the tree.

§400 Palenque Cross - from the Maya temple of the cross.

§401 The cross is not only the tree of life, but also a symbol of rain and fertility.

§402 The human figure with arms spread out is also in the shape of a cross. See footnote 142, p264 is interesting where Jung mentions the ritual of a priest wearing the skin of a woman just killed, with arms outstretched like a human cross. Cf. this with footnote 127 on page 263 where there is mention of putting animal skins in a tree and then attacking the skin with a spear.

§404 The cross as a symbol of 'union'.

§405 Diogenes of Sinope.

§406 “…the image of the “soul” somehow coincides with the mother-imago.142
142See Psychological Types, “Soul” and “soul image,” Defs. 48 and 49. The anima is the archetype of the feminine and play a very important role in a man's unconscious. See ” The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” Ch. II. I have discussed the world-soul of Plato's Timaeus in “ A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” pars. 186ff.

§408 Egyptian Tum of Atum. The Ankh or crux ansata (Latin meaning “cross with a handle”) was the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic character that read “life”.
An interesting snippet about the moon and the left/right eye. “…“the goddess Mehnit completes her work, so that the god Osiris may enter the left eye.”146
146The “left eye” is the moon. See below, para. 487: the moon as the gathering-place of souls (cf. fig. 31)

§411 “It is clear from all this that the cross is a many-faceted symbol, and its chief meaning is that of the “tree of life” and the “mother”. … The various forms of the crux ansata have the meaning of “life” and “fruitfulness,” and also of “union,” which can be interpreted as the hieros gamos of the god with his mother for the purpose of conquering death and renewing life.151There follows a very interesting quote from St. Augustine on the similarity of these themes with Christianity.

§412 An old English lament of the Virgin Mary - “Dispute between Mary and the Cross,” in Morris, Legends of the Holy Rood, pp. 134-35.

§415 Definitely worth a read of this whole paragraph where Jung sums up a bit on the incest taboo, and the emancipation from the mother .
“The separation of the son from the mother signifies man's leavetaking from the animal unconsciousness. It was only the power of the “incest prohibition”156 that created the self-conscious individual …”

§416 We return to Miss Miller's fantasy now. Jung discusses the etymology of the word bay.

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VI The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother 419 - 463

§420 “Sometimes the forbidden grove takes the place of the tabooed tree and is invested with all the attributes of the latter. “
“We have already seen that the libido directed towards the mother actually symbolises her as a horse.1 …” Important to remember here (and Jung goes on to mention this) that the horse is a symbol of the libido, and so the mother-imago may take on the symbol of a horse when the libido is so directed. We often just stop at horse = libido without further thought (or at least I do). As in the context of this example, the horse and rider may symbolise the man and the subordinate sphere of animal instinct libido. Jung sites a number of analogous representations (into the next paragraphs); Christ on the ass, Mithras on the bull, Agni on the ram, Wotan on Sleipnir (8 legged horse), Cf. para 423 etc.

The horse and ass

§421ff (Cf. para 427) Horses and Ass's, Horse and Rider, Wotan…. the horse as the animal component of man and numerous connections to the devil. The horse may also represent the sexual nature… Lightening too may be represented theriomorphically as a horse. Thunder and lightening. The horse and ass as priapic symbols, as well as the horse hoof, or horse shoe = symbols of fertility. Like the good luck - or apotropaic meaning - of a horse shoe.

§422 “On account of their speed, horses signify wind, and here again the tertium comparationis is the libido-symbol. German legend knows the wind as the wild huntsman in lustful pursuit of the maiden. …” Think also of the horse depicted as the energy of the waves in the sea, and Poseidon, known as the 'tamer of horses'.

§423 “Horses also signify fire and light, like the fiery horse of Helios. Hector's horses were called Xanthos (yellow, glaring), Podargos (swift-footed), Lampos (shining), and Aithon (burning).” I like these names :)

“There is no doubt that the quadriga is meant as an astronomical symbol of Time. We saw in Part I that the Stoic conception of fate is a fire-symbol, so it is a logical continuation of this idea when the closely related conception of time exhibits the same libido symbolism.” para's 424 & 425 are interesting too with reference to the horse as a time symbol.

See footnote 21, page 279 - some interesting points on symbols - particularly those of the zodiac (the god Aion - or Chronos, from Mithraic religion) - appearing on the animal hide/skin.
Quadriga - A quadriga (Latin quadri-, four, and iugum, yoke) is a car or chariot drawn by four horses abreast. Think Ben Hur.

22 … In mythology, too, the blossoming and withering of the tree of life denotes the turning point, the beginning of a new age.

§425 Carolingian Utrecht Psalter. A psalter is a volume containing the Book of Psalms.
Also, a lot here about time.
“Time is thus defined by the rising and setting sun, by the death and renewal of libido, …. So time, this empty and purely formal concept, is expressed in the mysteries through transformations of the creative force, libido, …”

§426 “In Firdausi, time is often the symbol of fate. … Just as Aion represents the libido in the “embrace” or state of death and rebirth, … the libido is in the “mother,” dying and rising again in the unconscious.” So there is the embrace mother, as symbols of death and rebirth.

§427 The horse related to death.

§428 ”…sometimes the devil rides on a three-legged horse. … “
30 … Cf. my remarks on the three-legged horse in ” The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales” (1954/55 edn., p. 28).

§429ff Jung discussing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in the context of Miss Miller's fantasy.
§431 “An individual is infantile because he has freed himself insufficiently, or not at all, from his childish environment and his adaptation to his parents, …”

Ω §432 “That the highest summit of life can be expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact, for any growing beyond oneself means death … Love and death have not a little to do with one another. ” (Emphasis mine) I like this, the summit here that Jung mentions is the death at the end of life - that he calls it a summit is interesting. However, the notion of death accompanying any 'going beyond' stage of life is crucial too.

§433 This comment is in the context of Miss Miller's fantasies, but worth noting from a general rule of thumb perspective when registering peoples reactions - I think Jung is correct when he says: “When a gesture turns out to be too theatrical it gives ground for the suspicion that it is not genuine, that somewhere a contrary will is at work which intends something quite different.”

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Death by an arrow

§436ff “It is a well-known fact that hysterics substitute a physical pain for a psychic pain which is not felt because repressed.” Jung continues to discuss how repression can lead to projection at times, but also, that the pain felt is often equated to an arrow piercing (the heart).
§438 “it is our own repressed desires that stick like arrows in our flesh.40Talking of the stigmata; “Stigmatisaton amounts to an incubation with the Saviour, a slight modification of the ancient conception of the unio mystica as cohabitation with the god.”

The motif of splitting Cf. footnote 47, p.288

§439 “A similar significance attaches to the lance: men are descended from the lance; the ash is the mother of lances; …”
Kaineus (Caeneus) who was first a woman Kainis. Poseidon turned Caenius into an invincible man, the quintessential hero. Caenius was originally like the Amazon woman. I like this image of Poseidon with Caenius, and the horse of Poseidon in the sea (from wikipedia: Poseidon and Caenis, woodcut illustration of Ovid by Virgil Solis, 1563. Cf. the myth where Caeneus is defeated by pilling pine trees on top of him as he was immune to weapons (Cf. para 460). The weight of the trunks pushes him in to the ground. He 'split' the earth with his foot. In a version of the myth he rises as a bird with golden wings.).

(from wikipedia)
virgil_solis_-_neptune_caenis.jpg

§441 The typical elements of the libido myth.

§446 “That the torment which afflicts mankind does not come from outside, but that man is his own huntsman, his own sacrificer, his own sacrificial knife, ….”
Cf.

§447 “As we know that the arrow is a libido-symbol, the meaning of this “piercing” is clear: it is the act of union with oneself,, a sort of self-fertilisaton, and also a self-violation, a self-murder, … If a man reckons the unconscious as part of his personality, then one must admit that he is in fact raging against himself.” (Well that sucks! :) …Jung goes on here, and this part is interesting. It seems to me odd that he throws it in…I wonder if it was for himself. It seems to me a little too leading, as though something people would aim for. I say this in the context too that it is very Jungian to get excited about “archetypal” dreams.) “But, in so far as the symbolism thrown up by his suffering is archetypal and collective, it can be taken as a sign that he is no longer suffering from himself, but rather from the spirit of the age. He is suffering from an objective, impersonal cause, from his collective unconscious which he has in common with all men.”

§448 “Being wounded by one's own arrow signifies, therefore, a state of introversion. What this means we already know: the libido sinks “into its own depths” (a favourite image of Nietzsche's) and discovers in the darkness a substitute for the upper world it has abandoned - the world of memories … the strongest and most influential of which are the earliest ones. it is the world of the child, the paradisal state of early infancy, from which we are driven out by the relentless law of time.” …worth reading on in to the next para.

§449 ”…the libido streams back to the fountainhead (he mentions earlier, 'the navel, where it first entered the body = the mother.) - and that is the dangerous moment when the issue hangs between annihilation and new life. But if the libido manages to tear itself loose and force its way up again, something like a miracle happens: the journey to the underworld was a plunge into the fountain of youth, and the libido, apparently dead, wakes to renewed fruitfulness.”
56 … The Theseus myth is therefore a representation of the individuation process.

Ceremonies and rituals

This paragraph is in essence a summary of Jungian psychology and the individuation process, encounter with the unconscious. Very good…very helpful to read, and re-read.
§450 “These are the primordial images, the archetypes, which have been so enriched with individual memories through the introversion of libido as to become perceptible to the conscious mind, … Since these introversions and regressions only occur at moments when a new orientation and a new adaptation are necessary, the constellated archetype is always the primordial image of the need of the moment. Although the changing situations of life must appear infinitely various to our way of thinking, their possible number never exceeds certain natural limits; they fall into more or less typical patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. … ” Definitely worth reading further here on the idea of the challenges faced in life, in individuation. They are like themes that repeat, but in an infinite number of guises..although the themes are typical, and the same, finite. Corresponding archetypes are activated when these themes occur. The archetype is numinous, i.e. possesses energy; “it will attract to itself the contents of consciousness - conscious ideas that render it perceptible and hence capable of conscious realisation. Its passing over into consciousness is felt as an illumination, a revelation, or a “saving idea.”” Think here of fairytales and how the 'saving idea' is manifested in many different ways, often through animals.
This next bit is really good, and puts the construct of rituals and ceremonies in place. Jung just words it nicely, and shows the need for ritual and ceremony, very important I think:

“…whenever a critical situation arises, the mechanism of introversion is made to function artificially by means of ritual actions which bring about a spiritual preparation, e.g., magical ceremonies, sacrifices, invocations, prayers, and suchlike. The aim of these ritual actions is to direct the libido towards the unconscious and compel it to introvert. …“
“If the libido connects with the unconscious, it is as though it were connecting with the mother, and this raises the incest-taboo. …“
“The rejection of the unconscious has unfortunate results; its instinctive forces, if persistently disregarded, rise up in opposition… The more negative the attitude of the conscious towards the unconscious, the more dangerous does the latter become.57

Being bitten on the foot by a snake, or injured on the foot

§451 “This very typical injury also destroyed Ra, …” The others mentioned here are Philoctetes. See footnote 60, page. 295 for more detail, and a discussion on Heracles. Cf. para. 458. In the humn about Ra, the snake formed by Isis (his sister-wife) is created from his spittle, a libido symbol.

§452 In the context of the hymn about the snake injury to the sun god Ra; “The serpent symbolises the mysterious numen of the “mother” (and of other daimonia) who kills, but who is at the same time man's only security against death as she is the source of life.62 Accordingly, only the mother can cure him…” §455 “What Isis (Ra's mother) demands is the transference of libido to the mother. …”

§456 “The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater become the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. … fear of life and people cases more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally “into the mother.””

§457 “This fear of life is not just an imaginary bogy, …its real source is unconscious and therefore projected: … The fear seems to come from the mother, but actually it is the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious, inner man who is cut off from life by the continual shrinking back from reality. If the mother is felt as the obstacle … It is rather the mother-imago that has turned into a lamia.63 The mother-imago, however, represents the unconscious, and it is as much a vital necessity for the unconscious to be joined to the conscious as it is for the latter not to lose contact with the unconscious. ” (Emphasis mine) “Nothing endangers this connection more in a man than a successful life; …”

§458 “The demands of the unconscious act at first like a paralysing poison on a man's energy and resourcefulness, so that it may well be compared to the bite of a poisonous snake.” More here in this paragraph on the “sister-wife-other” woman in man who shows up to effect change in him.

§459 The myths of Heracles and Gilgamesh would say that the confrontation affords the opportunity for a heroic conflict. With this in mind, the notion of the maternal archetype orchestrating such confrontations in order to get the best from us comes to mind. “The hero's victory over the “mother,” … is never anything but temporary. (in the latter half of life) The assimilation of contrasexual tendencies then becomes a task that must be fulfilled in order to keep the libido in a state of progression. The task consists in the integrating the unconscious, in bringing together “conscious” and “unconscious.” I have called this the individuation process, …” (Emphasis mine) ”“Entry into the mother” then means establishing a relationship between the ego and the unconscious.”

Carrying the cross

§460 Christ carrying the cross. Comparisons are made with Jesus, Heracles, Samson and Simon, the guy who helped Jesus (from the Synoptic gospels). “The cross, or whatever other heavy burden the hero carries, is himself, or rather the self, his wholeness, which is both God and animal - not merely the empirical man, but the totality of his being, which is rooted in his animal nature and reaches out beyond the merely human towards the divine. His wholeness implies tremendous tension of opposites paradoxically at one with themselves, as in the cross, their most perfect symbol.”

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VII The Dual Mother 464 - 612

(See para's 493ff for the 'dual mother' explained…or part thereof at least.
§465 “When a person remains bound to the mother, the life he ought to have lived runs away in the form of conscious and unconscious fantasies, which in the case of a woman are generally attributed to some hero-figure, or are acted out by him, as here. He is the one who then has the great longing for an understanding soul-mate, …”

Σ §466 “The libido that will not flow into life at the right time regresses to the mythical world of the archetypes, where it activates images which, since the remotest times, have expressed the non-human life of the gods, whether of the upper world or the lower. … Herein lay the vital importance of myths: they explained to the bewildered human being what was going on in his unconscious and why he was held fast. … These ingredients can also be found in the Christian myth, but it is too veiled to have enlightened our author (Miss Miller).”

§467 “As we have already explained, the phenomena of the unconscious (Notice the use of the word 'phenomena' here, important I think - it is the experience then, the 'happening' of the unconscious) can be regarded as more or less spontaneous manifestation of autonomous archetypes, … the archetype has a numinous character” it exerts a fascination, it enters into active opposition to the conscious mind, and may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognised until long afterwards.”

§468”…the mother-imago, which in women personifies a special aspect of the unconscious. It does not, like the anima, stand for the chaotic life of the unconscious in all its aspects, but for the peculiarly fascinating background of the psyche, the world of primordial images. There is always a danger that those who set foot in this realm will grow fast to the rocks, like Theseus and Peirithous, who wanted to abduct the goddess of the underworld. it happens all too easily that there is no returning from the realm of the Mothers.“

§469 “The hero as an animus-figure acts vicariously for the conscious individual; that is to say, he does what the subject ought, could, or would like to do, but does not do. … What happens in fantasy is therefore compensatory to the situation or attitude of the conscious mind. This is also the rule in dreams.”

§471 A really lovely quote here by Nietzsche.

One may suppose that a spirit in which the type “free spirit” is to become fully mature and sweet, has had its decisive event in a great emancipation, and that it was all the more fettered previously and apparently bound for ever to its corner and pillar. What is it that binds most strongly? What cords are almost unrendable? In men of a lofty and select type it will be their duties; the reverence which is suitable to youth, respect and tenderness for all that is time honoured and worthy, gratitude to the land which bore them, to the hand which led them, to the sanctuary where they learnt to adore, their most exalted moments themselves will bind them most effectively, will lay upon them the most enduring obligations. For those who are thus bound the great emancipation comes suddenly, like an earthquake; the young soul is all at once convulsed, unloosened and extricated it does not itself know what is happening. An impulsion and compulsion sway and over-master it like a command; a will and a wish awaken, to go forth on their course, anywhere, at any cost; a violent, dangerous curiosity about an undiscovered world flames and flares in every sense. “Better to die than live here ” says the imperious voice and seduction, and this “here,” this “at home” is all that the soul has hitherto loved! A sudden fear and suspicion of that which it loved, a flash of disdain for what was called its “duty,” a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically throbbing longing for travel, foreignness, estrangement, coldness, disenchantment, glaciation, a hatred of love, perhaps a sacrilegious clutch and look backwards, to where it hitherto adored and loved, perhaps a glow of shame at what it was just doing, and at the same time a rejoicing that it was doing it, an intoxicated, internal, exulting thrill which betrays a triumph - a triumph? Over what? Over whom? An enigmatical, questionable, doubtful triumph, but the first triumph nevertheless; such evil and painful incidents belong to the history of the great emancipation. It is, at the same time, a disease which may destroy the man, this first outbreak of power and will to self-decision, self-valuation, this will to free will; and how much disease is manifested in the wild attempts and eccentricities by which the liberated and emancipated one now seeks to demonstrate his mastery over things!

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1878), Human, All Too Human. Translation by Helen Zimmern. p.3ff

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Mater saeva cupidinum (savage mother of desire)

§473 “The libido that is withdrawn …from the “mother” turns into a threatening serpent, symbolising the fear of death - for the relation to the mother must cease, must die, … the violence of the separation is proportionate to the strength of the bond… the stronger this broken bond was in the first place, the more dangerously does the “mother” approach …in the guise of the unconscious. This is indeed the Mater saeva cupidinum, 'savage mother of desire,' who in another form now threatens to devour … (Note the snake symbolism.)”

§474 Jung talking on his extensive use of ideas and extrapolation of myths and content from the Miss Miller fantasies. Cryptomnesia etc ” … Because the basic structure of the psyche is everywhere more or less the same, it is possible to compare what look like individual dream-motifs with mythologems of whatever origin.“

Hiawatha

Interesting (if it is true) and something to keep in mind, about Longfellow's intentions behind the character of Hiawatha (from wikipedia):

Longfellow had originally planned on following Schoolcraft in calling his hero Manabozho, the name in use at the time among the Ojibwe of the south shore of Lake Superior for a figure of their folklore, a trickster-transformer. But in his journal entry for June 28, 1854, he wrote, “Work at 'Manabozho' or, as I think I shall call it, 'Hiawatha' —that being another name for the same personage.” Hiawatha was not “another name for the same personage” (the mistaken identification of the trickster figure was made first by Schoolcraft and compounded by Longfellow), but a probable historical figure associated with the founding of the League of the Iroquois, the Five Nations then located in present-day New York and Pennsylvania.

§476 11On the motif of the “friend,” see my paper ”Concerning Rebirth“ CW 9i, (Swiss edn., pp. 53f.).

Gitche Manitou (Gitche Manitou, Kitchi Manitou, etc.) means “Great Spirit” in several Algonquian languages. (from wikipedia)

§478ff From the Hiawatha poem; the motif of water flowing from the footprints of Gitche Manitou …just an interesting snippet about footprints.

§479 “It is not only the feet themselves that have a fertility significance, it also seems to extend to their activity, treading.” And also kicking, or stamping it seems, and dancing.

§481 “The foot and the treading movement are invested with a phallic significance, or with that of re-entry into the womb, so that the rhythm of the dance transports the dancer into an unconscious state.”

Footnote 18, on page 316, the motif of associating the wind with soul - from the Mithraic doctrine.

§487 ”… the moon is the body of a grandmother … According to the ancient belief, the moon is the gathering-place of departed souls21 (fig. 31), a guardian of the seed, and hence a source of life with a feminine significance.“
See footnote 21 for some interesting bits about the should descending from the sun, but ascending through the moon disc. 'the disc of the moon is filled with souls.' Regarding Nokomis - Hiawatha's grandmother (who was living in the moon incidentally having been thrown up there and then fell to earth) who gave birth to his mother: “The throwing upward of the mother, her fall, and birth-pangs, seem to be something altogether typical.”

§488ff The motif of impregnation or fertilisation by the wind. Cf. paras. 102, 150, 379, 422 (references horses as symbols of the wind. They too are life, or libido symbols. Think unicorn.) As well as fertilisation by a Theriomorphic symbol, Cf. para 492

§489 A nice poem here :)

§490 Interesting footnote in this para, footnote 25. Still on the topic of divine impregnation. Interesting to note a comment here:
25… According to a medieval tradition, Mary's conception of Jesus took place through the ear.

§492 ”…fertilisation by a theriomorphic symbol, the elephant, … In Christian picture-language the unicorn, as well as the dove, is a symbol of the spermatic Word or Spirit.26 (Cf. pl. VIII)“
26Cf. Psychology and Alchemy pars. 518ff.

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The virgin birth The Annunciation.

As this is developing we're seeing the birth of the hero, Hiawatha, come about through the West Wind. Nokomis (the grandmother) fell from the sky. When she fell, she gave birth to a daughter, Wenonah (Hiawatha's mother). Wenonah was seduced / wooed by the West Wind and impregnated her. She gave birth the Hiawatha, the hero. So we have a virgin birth of the hero, not unlike Christ - where Mary was impregnated by the Spirit - the immaculate conception, informed by the Annunciation. So an interesting comparison.
Why the miraculous conception? Cf. para 497.

§493 ”… As a general rule, however, the story of his origins is miraculous. The singular circumstances of this procreation and birth are part and parcel of the hero-myth. What is the reason for these beliefs?(Emphasis mine)

Σ §494 “The answer to this question is that the hero is not born like an ordinary mortal because his birth is a rebirth from the mother-wife. That is why the hero so often has two mothers. … ”
“The dual mother may be replaced by the motif of dual birth, which has attained a loft significance in various religions. In Christianity, for example, baptism represents a rebirth, … Thus Christ's redemptive death on the cross was understood as a “baptism,” that is to say, as rebirth through the second mother, symbolised by the tree of death.”
28The rapid death or the mother, or separation from the mother, is an essential part of the hero-myth. The same idea is expressed in the myth of the swan maiden, who flies away again after the birth of the child, her purpose fulfilled.

§495 “The dual-mother motif suggests the idea of a dual birth. One of the mothers is real, human mother, the other is the symbolical mother; in other words, she is distinguished as being divine, supernatural, or in some way extraordinary. She can also be represented theriomorphically.” And now Jung says something very interesting I think, explaining the 'innumerable variations on this motif'; basically, the cultural, social, and chronological epoch - what he calls, 'the immediate environment' - has an impact, archetypal projections of human 'proportions' on to the divine mother. Projections from the age of the time, the immediate environment. In consequence, there are 'innumerable variations'.
“In certain cases she has more human proportions, and here we are dealing with projections of archetypal ideas upon persons in the immediate environment, which generally brings about complications. … There are innumerable variations on this motif, especially when we add individual elements to the collective mythological ones.” (Emphasis mine)

§496 “He who stems from two mothers is the hero: the first birth makes him a mortal man, the second an immortal half-god.” Read further for parallels with the 'pre-existence of the hero figure', for Christ too.
29The bear is associated with Artemis and is thus a “feminine” animal. …

This whole paragraph needs copying out - it is very interesting and explains the virgin birth motif…
§497 “Because the reborn is his own begetter, the story of his procreation is veiled beneath strange symbolical events which conceal and reveal at the same time. Quite in keeping with this is the extraordinary assertion about the virgin conception. The idea of supernatural conception can, of course, betaken as a metaphysical fact, but psychologically it tells us that a content of the unconscious (“child”) has come into existence without the natural help of a human father (i.e., consciousness). … It tells us, on the contrary, that some god has begotten the son and further that the son is identical with the father, which in psychological language means that a central archetype, the God-image, has renewed itself (“been reborn”) and become “incarnate” in a way perceptible to consciousness. The “mother” corresponds to the “virgin anima,” who is not turned towards the outer world and is therefore not corrupted by it. She is turned rather towards the “inner sun,” the archetype of transcendent wholeness - the self.30(emphasis mine)
30Cf. Layard, “The incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype,” pp. 254ff.

I find this interesting, the land - water development…

§498 “As is consistent with the birth of the hero and renewed god from the ocean of the unconscious, Hiawatha passes his childhood between land and water, …”

§500 ”… the mother, who was our first object, with whom we were truly and wholly one. She was our first experience of an outside and at the same time of an inside: from the interior world there emerged an image, … - a mother who changed back into a Kore, into an eternally youthful figure. This is the anima, the personification of the collective unconscious .“

There is a great footnote on page 324, footnote 31, it end with the following quote from Karl Joel: ”…All life is a loss of balance and a struggling back into balance. We find this return home in religion and art.“

Page 325, footnote 32 - I'm writing down this next footnote in support of my space and time thoughts :). Also, I'm not sure I understand the footnote exactly…Cf. the first part of para. 500 that I think explains this.
32By “primal experience” is meant that first human differentiation between subject and object, that first conscious objectivation which is psychologically inconceivable without an inner division of the human animal against himself - the very means by which he separated himself from the oneness of nature.

The quote at the end of para 500 is very nice, about the moment of coming to consciousness, the “primal experience”. It seems that here Jung is referring to the participation mystique and the breaking away, coming to consciousness from this state of things. Cf. start of para 504

§501 Mention here of a Jelly Fish as a symbol related to the maternal waters of the ocean. He goes on to discuss the 'blessed state of sleep before birth and after death' …that most happy place, the happiest of places next to sleep.

§503 In the context of Hiawatha of course: “The animal is a representative of the unconscious, and the latter, as the matrix of consciousness, has a maternal significance, which explains why the mother was also represented by the bear. All animals belong to the Great Mother … Whoever succeeds in killing the “magic” animal, the symbolic representative of the animal mother, acquires something of her gigantic strength.” (Hence Hiawatha clothes himself in the roebuck skin; gloves and moccasins. By wearing the animals skins there is somewhat of a resurrection of the animal and the hero has gained some of its powers.)
36… Water as an obstacle in dreams seems to indicate the mother, or a regression of libido. Crossing the water means overcoming the obstacle, i.e., the mother as symbol of man's longing for the condition of sleep or death. See my CW7 "On the Psychology of the Unconscious", p. 87.

§504 Cf. para 473, 'mater saeva cupidinum', the savage mother of desire.
Also, noteworthy; footnote 38, page 328 - Jung mentions Spielrein's development of the 'death instinct' of the back of the Terrible Mother;
”…who devours and destroys, and thus symbolises death itself.38

façon de parler ('“way of speaking'”, '“manner of speech'”)

§505 “In reality the whole drama takes place in the individual's own psyche, where the “parents” are not the parents at all but only their imagos: they are representations which have arisen from the conjunction of parental peculiarities with the individual disposition of the child.39Definitely worth reading further where he discusses the instinctual aspects and the theriomorphic symbols that arise for the instinctual forces. “All the lions, bulls, dogs, and snakes that populate our dreams represent an undifferentiated and as yet untamed libido, which at the same time forms part of the human personality and can therefore fittingly be described as the anthropoid psyche. Like energy, the libido never manifests itself as such, but only in the form of a “force,” … Libido is therefore tied to definite forms or states.” I find this interesting, the state of things…an interesting idea to ponder on when considering where the state may be at a certain time and is it just our perception of the state that makes it so, or is it that the libido is actually in that form per se? I am thinking more from a time perspective…the libido is in us though, and not - perhaps - a direct representation of the unconscious, but more of our instinctual states. As such, it is still our perception of the unconscious and the psyche and the archetypes…in as much as the unconscious remains stateless, but our perception of the state is what we see. ”… But these phenomena are never impersonal; they manifest themselves like parts of the personality. The same is true of complexes: they too behave like parts of the personality.“
39An essential part of this disposition is the a priori existence of the “organising factors,” the archetypes, which are to be understood as inborn modes of functioning that constitute, in their totality, man's nature. …
The parents here too are the immediate choice in some ways because as we saw earlier (Cf. para 263) the parents are most often the more immediate memories of childhood and thus suitable connections as instinctual representations of the archetypes.

Regression

§506 “It is this anthropoid psyche which will not fit into the rational pattern of culture - or only ver unsatisfactorily and with extreme reluctance - and resists cultural development to the utmost.”
Cf. this with:

“It is as though its libido were constantly striving back to the original unconscious state of untamed savagery. The road of regression leads back to childhood and finally, in a manner of speaking, into the mother's body.”
I mention this 'cause I think there is definitely some overlap with Freud's theory here of the id, super-ego and ego, where the id is forever seeking pleasure - Pleasure Principle, it is unconscious and impulsive, child like and seeking gratification. The ego - consciousness, having to balance, and regulate this desire. I don't readily agree with Freud, Jung's view seems more evolved and mature to me, more correct.
I've emphasised the word 'road' as this is important, the libido does traverse a gauntlet of personal memories so to speak as it latches on the symbols and artifacts for expression in the journey back towards the unconscious, primal images, the archetypal images. Here again, the mother and the father imago - our parents, take center stage.

”… and the anthropoid psyche is also the aim and end of every regression, which immediately set in whenever there is the least hesitation to adapt …“

§507 Moral society in the guise of religion and convention fights against the ostensible goal of regression thinking - along the Freud lines, that it is the incest desire. This is not the case. Moreover, regression and investigation around this journey is shunned and devalued, resulting in man remaining unconscious to these things, or, completely misunderstanding them with the lens of Freud's incest taboo.
“But anything that exceeds the bounds of man's personal consciousness remains unconscious and therefore appears in projection; that is to say, the semi0animal psyche with its regressive demands against which he struggles so desperately is attributed to the mother, and the defence against it is seen in the father.”
Projection as a cure - while everything seems fine on the surface, but internally things are not good: “In that way the devil is cast out by Beelzebub.”

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§508 “As against this, therapy must support the regression, and continue to do so until the “prenatal” stage is reached.”
“The “mother,” as the first incarnation of the anima archetype, personifies in fact the whole unconscious.”
Mother imago = gateway into the unconscious → “realm of the Mothers” → to the prenatal realm of the “Eternal Feminine” → “thronged round with images of all creation” = creation symbols → to the “divine child” = germ of wholeness.

§510 “It is these inherent possibilities of “spiritual” or “symbolic” life and of progress which form the ultimate, though unconscious, goal of regression.”
Speaking here of the hero's journey - it's a nice definition of the hero…
“The hero is a hero just because he sees resistance to the forbidden goal in all life's difficulties and yet fights that resistance … strives towards the treasure hard to attain, and perhaps unattainable - a yearning that paralyses and kills the ordinary man.”

§511 All in the context Hiawatha, Jung talks here - in a fairytale sense, of the West wind - Mudjekeewis, Hiawatha's father as the focus of the battle, and therefore, the battle is in the West, with the father - for rebirth in the Western Sea. Sometimes, it is the devouring mother; “In other cases the fight in the West is a battle with the devouring mother.” I mention this mostly 'cause it's an interesting motif.
“As we have seen, the danger comes from both parents: from the father, because he apparently makes regression impossible, and from the mother, because she absorbs the regressing libido and keeps it to herself, so that he who sought rebirth finds only death.”

§512 “The “three days” are a stereotyped expression for the “night sea imprisonment” (December 21 to 24).”

The father-in-law

§515 “The archetype of the wise old man first appears in the father, being a personification of meaning and spirit in its procreative sense.44 The hero's father is often a master carpenter or some kind of artisan.”
44Cf. my ” Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales.“

§516 “Finally, father-attributes may occasionally fall to the son himself, i.e., when it has become apparent that he is of one nature with the father.
The hero symbolises a man's unconscious self, and this manifests itself empirically as the sum total of all archetypes and therefore includes the archetype of the father and the wise old man. To that extent the hero is his own father and his own begetter.”

Alma mater = 'nourishing mother'

§519 “Incest is not the only aspect characteristic of regression: there is also the hunger that drives the child to its mother.” So, nourishment.
“But when the regression is only apparent, and is in reality a purposive introversion of libido directed towards a goal, then the endogamous relationship, which is in any case prohibited by the incest-taboo, will be avoided, … Such an attitude compels the libido to switch over to a symbol or to a symbolic equivalent of the “alma mater,” in other words, to the collective unconscious.”

§521ff. The motif of the God who is eaten
In the context of Hiawatha: “But the deepest tie is to the mother. Once he has conquered this by gaining access to her symbolical equivalent, he can be born again.” (The symbolical equivalent, the nourishment from the alma mater can now be taken through the god who is eaten. The Christian Mass is equivalent to this idea. ”… The mystery of the “mother” is divine creative power, which appears here in the form of the corn-god Mondamin.“ (The god that may be eaten…'cause he's made from corn :) )

§523 “Hiawatha wrestles with himself in order to create himself.51
51“You sought the heaviest burden, and found yourself.” - Nietzsche [Cf. par. 459. above.]

§524 “It is not man who is transformed into a god, but the god who undergoes transformation in and through man.” This is very interesting in the light of individuation and consciousness - by god, we could say archetype, and by archetype, we could say our symbol, our view, our conscious understanding of the archetype, our relationship to it. This is important as the change is within, and then is manifested in consciousness, on the outside. Consciousness is not - as the antecedent - the seat of change as ego centric man thinks it is. ” …experience death and rebirth, … The onslaught of instinct then becomes an experience of divinity, provided that man does not succumb to it and follow it blindly, but defends his humanity against the animal nature of the divine power.” Cf. the anthropoid psyche above, para. 505ff.

§525 “The devil, too, “as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.54
541 Peter 5:8
I just mention this as an interesting reference about the devil and a lion.

There is an interesting bit here in para 526ff and footnote 57 about eating of the Gods, as in the Eucharist, also in Dionysus (Zagreus) and Mithraic rituals.. The part I find interesting is the quote from Jung about an old Pyramid text that made me think of the eating of the son in the Juniper tree fairytale; page 339
57…they cut them up and cooked them in hot cooking-pots. And the king consumes their strength and eats their souls. He devours the great gods for breakfast, the middle gods for dinner, and the little gods for supper…

Jung talks of Samson and the lion here, mentioning the riddle that Samson posed:

“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness”

Judges 14:14
Referring here to the bees that had made a nest/hive in the carcass of the lion he had killed. They had made honey that he ate and also gave to his in-laws to eat. So the answer to the riddle is honey from the lion.

§527 Iacchus - the puer aeternus

§528 “The part of Demeter, who, abstaining from food and drink, wanders over the face of the earth seeking her lost daughter, has, in the American Indian epic, been taken over by Hiawatha. …” There is further discussion here on the decent to darkness, introversion, the 'the Mothers' …to return with the thing hard to find. Jung relates it to (see footnote 62, page 341) Odin returning with the runes, Hiawatha with corn, Prometheus returning with fire, etc. There is a heiros gamos. “The descent into the earth is a piece of womb symbolism and was widespread in the form of cave worship.”
§529 “A further piece of Eleusinian symbolism relating to the celebration of the hieros gamos is the mysterious baskets …”
This makes me think of the cornucopia, the 'horn of plenty' sometimes shown as a weaved basket in the shape of a horn in more modern depictions. This could relate to the Cista.

§530 It isn't clear to me what Jung is communicating here in this para. (Cf. para 536) There is much about the snake, and the symbolism of the 'snake through the lap' (or in the lap). “The snake signifies the danger that comes from the regressive movement of libido.” (This should be read in context of course). There is a lot more here about different rituals.

§531 “The parallel to the motif of dying and rising again is that of being lost and found again. I appears ritually at exactly the same place, in connection with the hiros-gamos -like spring festivities, ….”

Ω §532 “We can see from these accounts how comforting the Eleusinian mysteries were for the celebrant's hopes of a world to come. One epitaph says:

Truly the blessed gods have proclaimed a most beautiful secret:
Death comes not as a curse, but as a blessing to men!

Σ §536 “These parallels show how little there is of the human and personal in the Christ-image, and how strong is the universal mythological element.”
There is a lot to think about in this comment I think, lots to ponder on when I think of the personal connection people have with the church and perceived personal understanding of Christ. The personal connection must of course be internal and personal but Christ - against what Jung says here - was not someone that, firstly, is human…so difficult for us to really relate to him. Secondly, his myth is universal - so not as unique as people think.
A good paragraph to read…
“All over the earth, in the most various forms, each with a different time-colouring, the saviour-hero appears as a fruit of the entry of libido into the maternal depths of the unconscious.” (Emphasis mine)

Spelaeum = latin for cave. Derived from the Greek word spelaion, σπήλαιον (a cavern; by implication, a hiding-place or resort)

§538 The battle with the sea monster = the night-sea journey.

§539 “It is easy to see what the battle with the sea monster means: it is the attempt to free the ego-consciousness from the deadly grip of the unconscious. The making of the fire in the monster's belly suggests as much, for it is a piece of apotropaic magic aimed at dispelling the darkness of unconsciousness. The rescue of the hero is at the same time a sunrise, the triumph of consciousness.”

§540 “Unfortunately, however, this heroic deed has no lasting effects. Again and again the hero must renew the struggle, and always under the symbol of deliverance from the mother.” Wow!!…and crap! Importantly here, the symbol of the mother, or 'under the symbol of deliverance from the mother' is significant. It is a repeated struggle throughout life it seems. ”… Man with his consciousness is always a long way behind the goals of the unconscious; unless his libido calls him forth to new dangers he sinks into slothful inactivity, or in the prime of life he is overcome with longing for the past and is paralysed. But if he rouses himself and follows the dangerous urge to do the forbidden and apparently impossible thing, then he must either go under or become a hero. The mother is thus the daemon who challenges the hero to his deeds and lays in his path the poisonous serpent that will strike him.” Great!!…we're all fucked.

§543ff Lots here about Hiawatha's 'night-sea' journey. An interesting comment in this para though, on the negative mother represented by a masculine principle corresponding therefore to the animus in the Terrible Mother. So I need to keep an eye out for that. It makes me think of the Juniper tree a little - the father who eats his little boy (unknowingly in the tale), but still, a little ignorant and perhaps then part of the evil step mother as her animus figure - dulled and overpowered by her??….I digress.

§545 This is interesting, Jung mentions here the anthropomorphism of trees and cites the example of the peepul or aswatha tree in India. He then goes on in the next paragraph to mention the “village linden-tree” implying the similarity between the Linden and aswatha tree where Brahma, Vishnu and Maheswar live and are worshiped, i.e. a trinity.

§546 “This well-known “village linden-tree” is clearly characterised as a mother-symbol: it contains the three gods.”

In my ongoing obsession with the Juniper tree fairytale, there is an interesting note about the Cinderella fairytale in footnote 91, page 352:
91In the story of Cinderella, the helpful bird appears on the tree that grows out of her mother's grave.
I have read in one version that it was a hazel tree.

Speaking of helpful birds, Jung mentions here the woodpecker. §547 “The woodpecker owes his special significance to the fact that he hammers holes in trees. …he was honoured in Roman legend …was the possessor or ruler of the sacred tree, and the prototype of the pater familias.”

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Speaking about Hiawatha, but nonetheless applicable in general I think: §548 “He can only turn to his human side after he has fulfilled his heroic destiny:

  • firstly the transformation of the daemon from an uncontrolled force of nature into a power that is his to command; (Instinct??)
  • secondly the final deliverance of ego-consciousness from the deadly threat of the unconscious in the form of the negative parents.

The first task signifies the creation of will-power, the second the free use of it.”

§549 ”… an old man is changed back into a youth by crawling through a hollow oak-tree.95
95This is synonymous with entering into the mother, becoming immersed in oneself, crawling through something, boring, picking the ear, driving in nails, swallowing snakes, etc.

The world egg symbol mentioned here, with the four winds…
§550 ”…. a quaternity-symbol, which psychologically always points to the self.96 It therefore depicts the uttermost circumference and the innermost centre, the infinite and the infinitesimal, …”

§551 Here, the snake - serpent - depicting evil: “The spirit of evil is fear … he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious.”
It is the hero's task to face fear.

§552 It is interesting, in the context of Hiawatha Jung talks of the fifteenth canto onwards where Hiawatha's friends die, first the amiable player and singer, i.e. the joker. Then his friend Kwasind, “the embodiment of physical strength”. “These events are omens of the end, like the death of Eabani in the Gilgamesh Epic.” So I wonder here, if humour, the joker, then the physical aspects depart…how to read this in life?

a good summary

Ω §553 The sun's journey as a primordial image of life. Worth a read - its a long one. The longing for the mother, for 'the stillness and profound peace of all-knowing non-existence'.
“Even in his highest strivings for harmony and balance, for the profundities of philosophy and the raptures of the artist, he seeks death, immobility, satiety, rest.”
Σ ”… the young person should sacrifice his childhood and his childish dependence on the physical parents, lest he remain caught body and soul in the bonds of unconscious incest. This regressive tendency has been consistently opposed from the most primitive times by the great psychotherapeutic systems which we know as the religions.“
Footnote 97, Zosimos
”… So, as soon as we feel ourselves slipping, we begin to combat this tendency and erect barriers against the dark, rising flood of the unconscious and its enticements to regression, which all too easily takes on the deceptive guise of sacrosanct ideals, principles, beliefs, etc. If we wish to stay on the heights we have reached, we must struggle all the time to consolidate our consciousness and its attitude.“ This is not as positive as it sounds, read further to understand that these ideals we hang on to with our consciousness do not last…'we must struggle' as he says!
” … Everything young grows old, all beauty fades, all heat cools, all brightness dims, and every truth becomes stale and trite. For all these things have taken on shape, and all shapes are worn thin by the working of time ; they age, sicken, crumble to dust - unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark that generated them is potent enough for infinite generation. … “ (Emphasis mine)

§554 What Jung does here in this paragraph is segue's into other material related to the archetypal themes in Hiawatha, and of course others 'which rise up again and again'…he does this to bring in Siegfried I think in the next para.

§555ff Wagner's Siegfried (from Sigurd in Norse mythology) and Brünnhilde.

§557 “The sword denotes solar power, therefore a sword goes out from the mouth of Christ in the Apocalypse (cf. pl. Vb), namely the procreative fire, speech, or the spermatic Word.”

§558 “The transformation of Logos into mother is not really surprising, since in the Acts of Thomas the Holy Ghost is addressed as the mother, and it is always the mother-imago which proves to be the hero's greatest danger but is for that very reason the prime source of his deeds and of his ascent. His ascent signifies a renewal of the light and hence a rebirth of consciousness from the darkness, i.e., from regression to the unconscious.”

§560ff The feminine as logos. The “Mother of Wisdom” (para 561).

Another mention of some interesting mythological themes - particularly around hero's, are mentioned again here. These theme's have all been mentioned earlier.

Son superseding father:
§565 ”…for she (Brünnhilde) has taken over the role of Isis and through the birth of a son has deprived the old man of his power.“ As with Zeus and Chronos, and Uranus his father before him…the son conquers the father.

Hero raised by foster parents:
§566 “The foster-parent who brings him (Siegfried) up is not a woman, ….” The hero, often born of divine circumstance is raised by a foster-parent.

The terrible mother who lays a snake in the path of her son:
§567 ”…he (Mime) is a masculine representative of the Terrible Mother who lays the poisonous worm in her son's path.110
110The dragon (In this context, I think he is referring to the dragon Fafnir) in the cave is the Terrible Mother. In German legend the maiden in distress often appears as a snake or dragon that has to be kissed; then it changes into a beautiful woman. Certain wise women are supposed to have a fish's or a serpent's tail. …

p362 Footnote 107 Mímir or Mime - (Old Norse “The rememberer, the wise one”) or Mim is a figure in Norse mythology renowned for his knowledge and wisdom who is beheaded during the Æsir-Vanir War. Afterward, the god Odin carries around Mímir's head and it recites secret knowledge and counsel to him.

§569 “The mother apparently possesses the libido of son (the treasure she guards (talking about the terrible mother dragon Fafnir in this context I think) so jealously), and this is in fact true so long as the son remains unconscious of himself. In psychological terms this means that the “treasure hard to attain” lies hidden in the mother-imago, i.e., in the unconscious.”

I don't know why but thought I'd note the quote from Pausanias in §570 that Jung references here. Pausanias mentions a temenos dedicated to Gaia. “Here the ground is torn open …”, gifts are cast in to the fissure and water flows from the fissure. This made me think of Essays on a science of mythology and the descriptions about how cities were founded and holes were dug at the center of a city before founding the city.

§571 “The Deluge is simply the counterpart of the all-vivifying and all-producing water, of “the ocean, which is the origin of all things.”120
120Iliad, CIV, 246.
I find it interesting that the flood as something known predominantly from the Bible - Noah and the ark, was also an event from Greek mythology. Zeus sent a flood - a deluge - to destroy all the evil on earth after he'd sent Pandora's and her box to earth with the opposite consequences to what he'd hoped. Only Deucalion the son of Prometheus and his wife Pyrrha were saved, as the re-start of all human life (made from throwing rocks over their shoulders :) )

Ω §572 ”… There was also an ” Acherusian” lake.122 This chasm, therefore, was the entrance to the place where death had been conquered.“

Theme of the dragon in the cave
Paras. 570-574. Following on from Fafnir - there seems to be a theme here of the dragon - or monster - in the cave that is slain or locked up. There is reference to the book of revelation too and this theme. The dragon seems to pierce with a sword, or his tongue the sacrificed person, very often a girl.

Σ §575 I am intrigued by what Jung says here…worth reading the context of the statement, but interesting in that it gives a hint to much of the way Jung writes I think, and the reason so many things are important: “This formulation is not to be taken as anything more than a psychological interpretation of the crucifixion symbol, which, because of its long-lasting effects over the centuries, must somehow be an idea that accords with the nature of the human soul.(Emphasis mine)
”… Here, as everywhere else in this book when discussing the psychology of religious figures, I am no concerned with the theological point of view. … The unconscious, it appears, does not obey the same laws as the conscious - indeed, if it did, it would not be able to fulfill its compensatory function.“

Σ §576 “Christ, as a hero and god-man, signifies psychologically the self; that is, he represents the projection of this most important and most central of archetypes. The archetype of the self has, functionally, the significance of a ruler of the inner world, i.e., of the collective unconscious.130 The self, as a symbol of wholeness, is a coincidentia oppositorum, and the therefore contains light and darkness simultaneously.” …worth reading on here. ”… Christ and the dragon of the Anti-Christ lie very close together … The dragon legend concealed under the myth of the Anti-Christ is an essential part of the hero's life132 and is therefore immortal. Nowhere in the latter-day myths are the paired opposites so palpably close together as in the figures of Christ and Anti-Christ. …“

At the end of para. 576, a brief mention here of a typical schizophrenic patient mechanism to 'rationalistically' reject the self elements as an apotropaic attempt of protection.

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Hecate

§577 An interesting point of note where '365 days' is mentioned ; “The descent of the 365 steps refers to the course of the sun and hence to the cavern of death and rebirth.”

Discussing Hecate
“Her symbols are the key,135 the whip,136 the dagger, and the torch … As the deadly mother, her attributes are dogs, … As guardian of the gate of Hades and as the triple-bodied goddess of dogs, she is more or less identical with Cerberus. Thus, in bringing up Cerberus, Heracles was really bringing the vanquished mother of death to the upper world.”

Empusa - [from wikipedia] (Ancient Greek: Ἔμπουσα, Empousā, of unknown meaning) is a demigoddess of Greek mythology. In later incarnations she appeared as a species of monsters commanded by Hecate (known in English as an empuse). … Empusa was the beautiful daughter of the goddess Hecate and the spirit Mormo. She feasted on blood by seducing young men as they slept (see sleep paralysis), before drinking their blood and eating their flesh. Empusa is pictured as wearing brazen slippers and bearing flaming hair. By folk etymology, her name was said to mean “one-footed” (from Greek έμπούς, empous: en-, one + pous, foot). This gave rise to the iconography of a one-legged hybrid, with a donkey's leg and a brass prosthetic leg. She was mistaken many times for a vampire, a mortal meaning for Empousa.

Cf. Lamia or Lamiai above. THE EMPOUSAI (or Empusae), MORMOLYKEIAI (Mormolyceae) and LAMIAI (Lamiae) were fearsome underworld Daimones who lured young men in the guise of beautiful women to their beds to their flesh and blood. Behind the deceiving illusion of a beautiful woman they were truly demonic–the Lamiai had serpentine tails in place of legs, while the Empousai had flaming hair and mismatched legs of brass and donkey.
Later authors described the Lamiai as haunting ghosts (phasma) which also employed illusion in the seduction of young men. They were companions of Hekate, the goddess of witchcraft and haunting ghosts, who came forth with her from the depths of the underworld. The Empousai and Lamiai were the ancient equivalent of vampyres and succubi.

Referring to Hecate as the goddess of the crossroads; “Where the roads divide, where there is parting, separation, splitting, there we find the “division,” the cleft137 - the symbol of the mother and at the same time the essence of what the mother means for us, namely cleavage and farewell.”

§579 “The development of this symbol, showing how the crevice in the earth (the cave, hollow, vessel, hole, cup, cavity, chamber, stable, pregnant, etc. see § for more), interpreted on the primitive level as the “mother,” came to signify the place of the treasure, therefore corresponds to the etymology of German Hort, 'hoard,' …”

Page 374, Footnote 151. Apis - [from wikipedia] In Egyptian mythology, Apis or Hapis (alternatively spelled Hapi-ankh), is a bull-deity that was worshipped in the Memphis region. Occasionally, the Apis bull was pictured with her sun-disk between his horns, being one of few deities associated with her symbol. When the disk was depicted on his head with his horns below and the triangle on his forehead, an ankh was suggested. It also is a symbol closely associated with his mother. The Apis bull is unique as he is the only Egyptian deity represented solely as an animal, and never as a human with an animal's head'—perhaps, because from the earliest of Egyptian religious practices, they were animals sacrificed to the cow goddess and represented the resurrected, renewal of life (Hapy and later Osiris).
It was required to have a white triangle upon its forehead, a white vulture wing outline on its back, a scarab mark under its tongue, a white crescent moon shape on its right flank, and double hairs on its tail.
The bull which matched these markings was selected from the herd, brought to a temple, given a harem of cows, and worshipped as an aspect of Ptah. His mother was believed to have been conceived by a flash of lightning from the heavens, or from moonbeams, and also was treated specially.

The snake

§580 “The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life: it is himself, new-born from the dark maternal cave of the unconscious where he was stranded by the introversion or regression of libido.” … “According to Philo the snake is the most spiritual of all creatures … It is both toxic and prophylactic, equally a symbol of the good and bad daemon (the Agathodaemon), of Christ and the devil. Among the Gnostics it was regarded as an emblem of the brain-stem and spinal cord (Cf. Kundalini Serpent), as is consistent with its predominantly reflex psyche (instinctual nature). It is an excellent symbol for the unconscious, …. Taken purely as a psychologem the hero represents the positive, favourable action of the unconscious, while the dragon is its negative and unfavourable action - not birth, but a devouring; …” (Emphasis mine)

§581 “Every psychological extreme secretly contains its own opposites or stands in some sort of intimate and essential relation to it.154 Indeed, it is from this tension that it derives its peculiar dynamism. … the more extreme a position is, the more easily may we expect an enantiodromia, …”

An interesting note in para 581 about language that gives a real hint to Jung's view on etymology I think and how much he used it; “What happens everywhere in language happens also in mythology: …”

Some interesting etymology in footnote 160, page 377 :
160 Testis originally had the double meaning of 'testicle' and 'testimony.' [Cf. the Biblical custom of swearing an oath by placing the hand “under the thigh”; Genesis 24:2f and 47:29f. - Editors]

§584f and footnote 157, p376 : kiss of the snake, or serpent kiss, snake-kiss and more about the snake related to the mother. Cf. Attis and Priapus.

§585 “Being bitten in the genital region by a snake reminds us of Attis, whose self-castration was occasioned by his mother's jealousy.” Cf. para 680f below.

§587 “The unconscious insinuates itself in the form of a snake if the conscious mind is afraid of the compensating tendency of the unconscious, as is generally the case in regression. But if the compensation is accepted in principle, there is no regression, and the unconscious can be met half-way through introversion.” read further …interesting note about the compensatory aspect of the unconscious that is not always able to be accepted: ” … where compensation appears in a form that cannot be accepted and could only be overcome by something that is equally impossible for the patient. Cases of this kind occur when the unconscious has been resisted for too long in principle, and a wedge violently driven between instinct and the conscious mind.“ (Emphasis mine. Interesting that Jung uses 'instinct' here, not 'unconscious'.)

Δ §588 (Cf. para 587) “Through introversion, as numerous historical witnesses testify, one is fertilised, inspired, regenerated, and reborn.” Cf. the example of Prajapati creating the world the an 'introversion' motif. §589f Prajapati . Also, see footnote 169 on page 381. This idea of introversion, 'Self-incubation' or 'self-castigation', the act of 'self-abnegation'…is similar to the alchemical view of the closed alembic (i.e. us, and the boiling of libido, our own heat to create) for the purpose of rebirth and creativity.

§592 “The hero who sets himself the task of renewing the world and conquering death …coiled round its own egg like a snake, …”

§593 “The hero is himself the snake, himself the sacrificer and the sacrificed , …” (Emphasis mine)
Cf. CW13, 'The visions of Zosimos' para. 91ff

§594f The act of skinning a sacrifice. Also flaying motif. See CW11 'Transformation Symbolism of the Mass'.

Interesting comment in footnote 181, page 384. I think it important in its reference to time - immortality - the fact that we have both in us, even in life. We have these two worlds and it is not easy to live with both all the time. “That is to say, man does not change at death into his immortal part, but is mortal and immortal even in life, being both ego and self.”

§598f Cf. para. 165 above and the quote from Faust, when Faust is speaking with Care. I mention this as Jung here quotes Wagner's Siegfried and talks of Wotan “who is plagued by gloomy cares because the earth-mother Erda has laid the old serpent in his path in order to enfeeble him.” This inadvertent reference to care = serpent in his path makes me think of Faust, and also Orpheus and Eurydice (the snake in the grass). Cares do enfeeble.
§600 ” …it is not the mother who lays the poisonous worm in our path, but life itself, which wills itself to complete the sun's course, to mount from morn to noon, and then, crossing the meridian, to hasten towards evening, no more at adds with itself, but desiring the descent and the end.186
186It is a striking fact that the lion-killing heroes Samson and Heracles fight without weapons. The lion is a symbol of the fierce heat of the mid summer; astrologically he is the domicilium solis. Steinthal (“Die Sage von Simson,” p. 133) reasons as follows: “When, therefore, the sun-god fights the summer heat, he is fighting himself;
… the contradiction in the pagan gods: as forces of nature they are both helpful and harmful to men. … The contradiction is mitigated if each of the two sides of the force of nature is personified as a separate god, or both conceived as a single divine person, the beneficent and injurious sides each being assigned a separate symbol. …“
The hero has no weapons precisely because he fights himself.

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The hero

§611 A good summary of the hero's journey and confrontation with the terrible mother.
Then on to mythological interpretation :
“Modern psychology has the distinct advantage of having opened up a field of psychic phenomena which are themselves the matrix of all mythology - I mean dreams, visions, fantasies, and delusional ideas. …
Thus we know that dreams generally compensate the conscious situation, or supply what is lacking to it.190
…archetypal structures …which deserve the name of dominants. These are archetypes like the anima, animus, wise old man, witch, shadow, earth-mother, etc. and the organising dominants, the self, the circle, and the quaternity, i.e. the four functions or aspects of the self or of consciousness.
…myth interpretation… where it belongs, that is, on a psychic basis.”

homoousia

Σ §612 “Looked at in this light, the hero myth is an unconscious drama seen only in projection, like the happenings in Plato's parable of the cave.” Read further for a description of the hero… …“But Christ, from the point of view of psychology and comparative religion, is a typical manifestation of the self. For psychology the self is an imago Dei and cannot be distinguished from it empirically. … The hero is the protagonist of God's transformation in man; he corresponds to what I call the “mana personality.”191 The latter has such an immense fascination for the conscious mind that the ego all too easily succumbs to the temptation to identify with the hero, thus bringing on a psychic inflation with all its consequences. For this reason the repugnance … for the “inner Christ” is understandable enough, at least as a preventive measure against the danger of psychic inflation …”

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VIII Sacrifice 613 - 682

§614 “She will seek him in vain, just as he seeks her; in other words, there will never be any possibility of a meeting or union of conscious and unconscious, the one thing needful to compensate the conscious attitude and create wholeness.”
I find it very interesting that Jung uses the word here compensate…this for me puts consciousness as the center to some degree, the captain of the ship, and the unconscious the ingredient or necessary map/compass needed to guide the ship of consciousness. Often in Analytical Psychology consciousness as the thing that leads is spoken of as a inferior and is given over to the unconscious which is perceived as the thing that dominates. Here it seems Jung is giving the conscious ego some real credibility in its role, task or responsibility.

§615 ”…and the snake is the representative of the world of instinct, especially of those vital processes which are psychologically the least accessible of all. Snake dreams always indicate a discrepancy between the attitude of the conscious mind and instinct, the snake being a personification of the threatening aspect of that conflict. The appearance of the green viper therefore means: “Look out! Danger ahead!””

Ω §617 “If it is not possible for the libido to strive forwards, to lead a life that willingly accepts all dangers and ultimate decay, then it strikes back along the other road and sinks into its own depths, working down to the old intimation of the immortality of all that lives, to the old longing for rebirth.”

Σ §622 “In the Dionysus legend the ass plays an important part as the steed of Silenus. The ass pertains to the “second sun,” Saturn, who was the star of Israel and is therefore to some extent identical with Yahweh.”
Cross reference here the Golden Bough notes on Dionysus.

§625 “Regression is also an involuntary introversion in so far as the past is an object of memory and therefore a psychic content, an endopsychic factor. It is a relapse into the past caused by a depression in the present. Depression should therefore be regarded as an unconscious compensation whose content must be made conscious if it is to be fully effective.”

Ω §630 “Near is God, And hard to apprehend. But where danger is, there Arises salvation also.” From 'Patmos'

Speaking of the hero remaining in the unconscious…
§644 “That such a step includes the solution, or at least some consideration, of the sexual problem is obvious enough, for unless this is done the unemployed libido will inevitably remain fixed in the unconscious endogamous relationship to the parents and will seriously hamper the individual's freedom.”
I think here of Oedipus and his inevitable fate, although he was destined from birth to kill his father, I can't remember if the Oracle foretold that he would also marry his mother. Psychologically speaking, I wonder what it was that his parents or he did that caused him to be locked in the endogamous relationship of marrying his mother ….if my analogy is correct here.
This passage also seems to point directly to Freud and Jungs confrontation with Freuds view on sex and libido. Where Freud thought much of regression was due to the sexual energy, Jung is saying it is just a part of it. Moreover, Jung is saying the endogamous archetypes/forces of the mother were there from the start whereas Freud, I think portrayed this as a repressed urge. Jung goes on…

Σ §644 “We must remember that Christ's teaching means ruthlessly separating a man from his family, and we saw in the Nicodemus dialogue how he took especial pains to give regression a symbolic meaning. Both tendencies serve the same goal, namely that of freeing man from his family fixations, from his weakness and uncontrolled infantile feelings….His destiny no longer lies in his own hands” his (fortunes and fates) fall from the stars. The Stoics called this condition Heimarmene, compulsion [as opposed to obsession, the individual is compelled by the archetypes, “he falls under the spell of unconscious compulsion”] by the stars, to which every “unredeemed” soul is subject.” (square brackets mine)
In the Summa by Thomas Acquinas he says something to the effect that it is impossible for the intellect to understand anything without the mind forming phantasms, that is, mental images. So before we do something, or think something we imagine or fantasy about it. Aristotle claims too that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.” I find this interesting as we read John 3 v1-16, the dialogue of Jesus and Nicodemus where Jesus says:

10“You are Israel's teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11 Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12 I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven'—the Son of Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God'’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

It seems to me here that Jesus is talking of experience…and also of course the symbolical rebirth as mentioned in Jung §644, the start of a new man as Jung said, separated from his old family.
cf CW 12, §40

Jung continues…

Ω Σ §644 “When the libido thus remains fixed in its most primitive form it keeps men on a correspondingly low level where they have no control over themselves and are at the mercy of their affects. …and the saviour and physician of that time was he who sought to free humanity from bondage to Heimarmene.35
35This was the real purpose of all the mystery religions. They created symbols of death and rebirth. As Frazer points out in The Golden Bough (Part III “The Dying God,” pp. 214ff.), even primitive peoples have in their initiation mysteries the same symbolism of dying and being born again as Apuleius records in connection with the initiation of Lucius in the Isis mysteries, “I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Proserpine's threshold, yet was permitted to return, rapt through all the elements.” The rites of initiation “approximate to a voluntary death” from which Lucius was “born again”.
This is fantastic - if the experience of Lucius is not similar to skydiving and extreme sports I'm not sure what is. The touching the threshold of death only to return 'rapt through all the elements' is an amazing description! I really enjoyed that.

Σ §652 “It is evident that by this is meant not a physical, but a psychological cosmogony. The world comes into being when man discovers it. But he only discovers it when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of the unconscious.”

misoneism = the hatred or distrust of new things or ideas

§658 “The position of the horse between the two vessels, which represent the birth-giving and devouring mother, hints at the idea of life enclosed in the ovum; consequently the vessels are destined to “surround” the horse. That this is in fact so can be seen from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3, 3 (“Where the offerers of the horse sacrifice go”):
…There44 is a gap as brad as the edge of a razor or the wing of a mosquito.”
44Deussen says ( Sechzig Upanishads, III, p. 434): ”'There,' on the horizon where the sky and the sea meet, between the two shells of the world egg, is a narrow crack through which one can get out onto 'the back of the sky,' where…union with Brahman takes place.”

I found this really interesting, and I like the imagery. With reference to the horse;
The devouring mother = mouth,
Birth giving = womb, vagina
therefore the horse in the middle = ovum, i.e. life.
I also really like the view of the two halves (sky and earth) of the world egg having a gap. Where the sky meets the earth = horizon, I think of the god Aker, the moment of the horizon.

§659 “The sacrifice of the animal means, therefore, the sacrifice of the animal nature, the instinctual libido. This is expressed most clearly in the cult legend of Attis. Attis was the son-lover of Agdistis-Cybele, the mother of the gods. Driven mad by his mother's insane love for him, he castrated himself under a pine tree. The pine tree played an important part in his cult; every year a pine tree was decked with garlands, an effigy of Attis was hung upon it and then it was cut down. Cybele then took the pin-tree into her cave and lamented over it. The tree obviously signifies the son - according to one version Attis was actually changed into a pine-tree - whom the mother takes back into her “cave”, i.e., the maternal womb.”

§662 “In the legend of Pentheus, which is bound up with the Dionysus myth, there is a striking counterpart to the death of Attis and the subsequent lamentation: Pentheus53 curious to see the orgies of the Maenads cut down the tree, and Pentheus, taken for a wild animal, was torn to pieces by them in their frenzy,54 his own mother being the first to hurl herself upon him.”
53Another hero with a serpent nature; his father was Echion, the adder.
54The typical sacrificial death in the Dionysus cult.
This reminds me of the fate of Orpheus

§668 “Since sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart, they must be somehow typical of the period between the first and third centuries of our era. The morbid facial expression points to the disunity and split-mindedness of the sacrificer: he want to, and yet doesn't want to. This conflict tells us that the hero is both the scrificer and the sacrificed. Nevertheless, it is only his animal nature that Mithras sacrifices, his instinctuality, always in close analogy to the course of the sun.”

This is excellent:
§669 “The essential thing in the mythical drama is not the concreteness of the figures, nor is it important what sort of an animal is sacrificed or what sort of god it represents; what alone is important is that an act of sacrifice takes place, that a process of transformation is going on in the unconscious whose dynamism, whose contents and whose subject are themselves unknown but become visible indirectly to the conscious mind by stimulating the imaginative material at its disposal, clothing themselves in it like the dancers who clothe themselves in the skins of animals or the priests in the skins of their human victims.”

§671 “We have already pointed out the reciprocal relationship between bull and snake, and we saw that the bull symbolises the living hero, whereas the snake symbolises the dead, buried, chthonic hero. But as the hero, when dead, is back in the mother, the snake also stands for the devouring mother.”

Σ §671 “At the same time the act of sacrifice is a fertilisation of the mother: the chthonic serpent-demon drinks the blood, i.e., the soul, of the hero. In this way life becomes immortal, for, like the sun, the hero regenerates himself by his self-sacrifice and re-entry into the mother. After all this we should have no difficulty in recognising the son's sacrifice to the mother in the Christian mystery. Just as Attis unmans himself for the sake of his mother, and his effigy was hung on the pine-tree in memory of this deed, so Christ hangs76 on the tree of life, on the wood of martyrdom, the (some Greek txt here) and mother (cf. pl. XXXVI), and ransoms creation from death. By entering again into the womb of the mother, he pays in death77 for the sin which the Protanthropos Adam committed in life, and by that deed he regenerates on a spiritual level the life which was corrupted by original sin.”

Σ §674 “Belief in dogma is an equally unavoidable stop-gap which must sooner or later be replaced by adequate understanding and knowledge if our civilisation is to continue.”

§678 “Green, the life-colour, suits her very well; it is also the colour of the Creator Spiritus.”

§678 “I have defined the anima as the archetype of life itself.85 Here, because of the snake symbolism, she must also be thought of as having the attribute of “spirit.” This apparent contradiction is due to the fact that the anima personifies the total unconscious so long as she is not differentiated as a figure from the other archetypes.”

§680 “The conflict between horse and snake or bull and snake represents a conflict within the libido itself, a striving forwards and backwards at the one and the same time.86 It is as if the libido were not only a ceaseless forward movement, an unending will for life, evolution, creation… like the sun, the libido also wills its own descent, its own involution. During the first half of life it strives for growth; during the second half, … it points towards an altered goal. … This apparent contradiction in the nature of the libido is illustrated by a statue of Priapus …: Priapus, with a sidelong smile, points with his finger to a snake biting his phallus. (pl. LXIb)“
§681 ” … This motif illustrates the meaning of the end of the world.87
The snake plays an important role in dreams as a fear-symbol. Because of its poisonousness, its appearance is often an early symptom of physical disease. As a rule, however, it expresses an abnormally active or “constellated” unconscious and the physiological symptoms - mainly abdominal - associated therewith.”
87The role played by the serpent in mythology is analogous to the end of the world. … Cf. Jung is here referring to the Midgard Serpent, the World serpent of Norse Mythology known as Jörmungandr. Jörmungandr was one of Loki's three children: Jörmungandr, Hel and the wolf Fenrir (or the Fenris wolf in “Old Norse”) … In the story of Red Riding Hood, the serpent or fish is replaced by a wolf, because he is the typical destroyer. Cf. with Herzog, Edgar (1966) Psyche and death p438

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IX Epilogue 683 - 685

§683 The need for symbolic thinking.

“The aim of psychotherapy is therefore to narrow down and eventually abolish the dissociation by integrating the tendencies of the unconscious into the conscious mind.”

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