4

Psychological Interpretation of Children’s Dreams
(Winter Term, 1939/40)

1. General Remarks

(PROFESSOR JUNG)

Professor Jung: This year I would like to forgo a longer introduction to the technique of dream analysis, and just briefly address a few general questions. As you know, we apply a structure to the dream, that corresponds to the pattern of a drama. We distinguish four elements: the introduction often specifies place and time, as well as the actors (dramatis personae) of the dream action. There follows the exposition, which unfolds the problem of the dream. It contains, so to speak, the theme, or maybe the question posed by the unconscious. From this arises the peripateia: the dream action leads to increasing complexity, until it reaches a climax and changes—sometimes in the form of a catastrophe. Finally, the lysis gives a solution or the result of the dream.

As you know, in every interpretation of a dream we first of all ask: How does such a dream come into being? What caused it? What are the experiences of the previous day? What happened? Is there a remarkable situation? An important additional question is also whether the dreamer is conscious of anything about it; this must by no means be taken for granted. In the case of children’s dreams as remembered by adults, we are only exceptionally able to ascertain the situation out of which they arose. And yet we have to try by all means to search for it, and to keep in view the question of causality, even if we cannot answer it empirically for the time being. We have to reach a point where we can deduce the preceding situation from the dream itself. Our dream analysis is of value only if we can subsequently detect, from the interpretation, what caused the dream. Naturally this has to be done with the necessary care, because one can go considerably astray.

In addition, we subject each detail of the dream, its symbolic figures, and the sequence of the actions to a careful examination. Whenever possible, we take note of the context of each idea or image. By context, I mean the association material in which the idea is embedded. When someone says, for example: “I dreamed of a glass,” do we then understand what this means? We don’t understand anything yet. It could be a wine glass, a beer glass, a test-tube, a bottle, or a window pane. First we have to know in which context the image “glass” is situated. So we can’t avoid asking about it, and then, sure enough, we may often hear the most astonishing answers. In the case of banal ideas—as they so frequently occur in dreams—it perhaps suffices to confine ourselves to taking note of the context; this will not always be sufficient in the case of more complicated ideas, because often precisely the very important things are held back, as the complexes prevent the person from making the statement. We also know this from the association experiment.1 In these cases, we are forced to delve deeper into gathering information on the context, which I have called amplification. In the interpretation of children’s dreams, too, we will have to revert to this method. As I explained last winter, we have always to reckon with the fact that the child cannot provide any associations to the dream. In addition, precisely the most important children’s dreams are frequently told only much later, so there is no possibility of getting information on the context.

This method of amplification is an expansion, a conscious enrichment. I make the dreamer focus his interest on the image, and to bring up all associations linked to the image. This must not be confounded with free association, in which we glide from one association to another, without regard to the initial idea. In doing so, however, we lose the certainty that the final element still has a relation to the initial one. Of course we encounter complexes, but for that we need no dream, and moreover we don’t want to discover complexes anyway; instead, we want to know what the dream says. Freud adhered to this method of free association, and he could do that because for him the dream is not the essential thing, whereas for me it is. For him, it is the façade, for me, the essence. In this I rely on a Jewish authority, the Talmud, where it says: “The dream is its own interpretation,” meaning that we have to take the dream for what it is.2 We should not see in the dream something different from what it expresses, but we actually have to learn to see differently—that’s the difficulty. When I analyzed an Asian, I noticed the difference: he had an amazing ability to “smell” his context. Unabashedly, he said out loud what we ourselves would have noticed only with great difficulty. The natural faculties Asian people show in this respect are astonishing. They are helped, however, by their language, with its richness of images, in which everything is already given. On the other hand, they are not used to designating something precisely. Tell an Asian man, “Please, bring me a blade of grass,” and he will bring you the whole meadow. We have lost the larger context, because we see only the separate details; Asians, however, always have an overall picture. William McDougall has something characteristic to say about this. He had the typical Western mind, stuck on details. He was interested in Chinese philosophy, and had trouble understanding the notion of Tao. So he asked a Chinese—his pupil—about the meaning of Tao, but did not understand anything of what the Chinese explained to him. So the latter grew impatient, dragged the professor to the window and asked him: “What do you see?” “Houses, cars, people; and also trees, clouds; it is raining and the wind is blowing.” And the Chinese said: “Well, you see, this is Tao.”

We have to try to gain such an overall picture with the help of amplification, even in the case of very simple dream images. So, for instance, what does it mean if someone dreams of a rabbit? Then we must not look at it separately, by itself, but we have to see it in the field, notice how its fur matches the earth; we must also feel that the hunter belongs in this context, and the dog, the corn in the field, and the flowers. Only then will we know what a rabbit is. In interpreting the single dream elements, I proceed in this complementary way. Only from this general view do I realize the meaning, and I’ve had quite a few surprises. If someone dreams of a bicycle, for example, I will ask: “How would you describe it if I had never seen a bicycle before?” The dreamer has to create an image for me, to write an elementary school composition, so to speak, so that I will know how he sees it. A downright “myth” of the bicycle can result from such a description. Perhaps we discover that it is a sun wagon, in which a ghost journey is made. The primitive mythology of the European may come to light on such an occasion.

In using this method, we are not necessarily bound to the concrete statement of the dreamer, but can amplify the dream images ourselves. In this, we have to revert to those images we all have in common, namely, the archetypal images of the collective unconscious, as they are found in language, myths, and so on.3

So we explain a dream by amplifying the range of the image for each single element, in using all our knowledge. To verify an interpretation, we must have a look not only at the dream by itself, but maybe also in the context of a whole series. Then we will often discover that the dreamer had a dream right before or afterward, in which our interpretation is already contained. In a series we can compare dreams with one another and thus eliminate errors. Let me give you an example for such a verification: I was told a dream in which the patient’s father holds a globe, trying to divide it into two halves, such that there would be exactly the same number of people in the East as in the West. The dream reminded me of the history of creation in Genesis, in which God also makes a division, when on the second day He divided the waters that were under the firmament from the waters that were above the firmament.⁴ From this I concluded that a process of growing consciousness had occurred in the dreamer, that he had started to think consciously and autonomously. This hypothesis could later be verified. This person had already dreamed of the act of creation the night before; he had dreamed that God had created a world with lightning and thunder. Of this dream, however, I knew nothing. You see how we can retrospectively verify the interpretation of a single dream image in the context of a dream series.5

2. Dream of a Ten-Year-Old Girl of a Snake with Eyes Sparkling Like Diamonds⁶

PRESENTED BY MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ

Text: A snake with eyes sparkling like diamonds chases me in a forest or in my bedroom. This dream frightens me so much that I no longer dare move in the bed, because even when awake, everywhere in the room I see the glowing eyes of the snake that wants to bite me.

Ms. von Franz: As is evident from the text, the dream has often recurred. When a dream appears with such forcefulness, we have to conclude that it will be of central importance for the dreamer’s psychology, indeed, that the situation here depicted will perhaps govern her whole life. Already among the primitives, recurrent dreams are accorded a very special importance.⁷

Now, the difficulty in the interpretation of this dream lies in the fact that it does not really have a plot or activity, but only contains one single image; therefore, we are not able to apply the usual dramatic schema (exposition, statement of the problem, peripateia, lysis or catastrophe). In fact, the dream takes the form of a vision, of an apparition, which is also confirmed by the fact that the dreamer still sees the snake “even when awake”—we would say half-asleep. She does not dare move in the bed, “because even when awake, everywhere in the room I still see the glowing eyes of the snake that wants to bite me.” Thus, the image appears so intensely that, like a vision in the waking state, it is even able to interrupt the continuity of waking consciousness.

So we have only the image of the snake by which to orient ourselves, an image which, as you know, is so enormously widespread in all religions and myths of the world that, frankly speaking, I was able to draw only very general conclusions regarding the situation of the dreamer. A few details of the description, however, may perhaps show the path to the particular way in which the dreamer reacted—that is, the emphasis on the gaze of the snake, the eyes, described first as sparkling like diamonds, then, in a gradual increase of its evil character, as glowing, and, by the final sentence, that the snake “wants to bite her.”

As far as the snake in general is concerned, it nearly always belongs to the chthonic-female element of religions, indeed it very often is its embodiment proper. In dualistically oriented systems, therefore, it often stands in opposition to a bright, male, spiritual world, from whose perspective it represents the demonic-evil. Through the story of Paradise, the snake has, as it were, taken this meaning for the whole Christian world. Philo of Alexandria in particular, probably under Persian influence, contributed to this snake symbolism and to the development of the devil concept. For him, however, it is at the same time also the most spiritual animal, of a fiery nature and of great velocity. Through its ability to shed its skin, it is even immortal.8 But in other cultures, too, the snake plays the role of the primal enemy of the upper world of the gods: the Midgard snake, together with the Fenris wolf, threatens the gods in Asgard by creating a flood. In Greece it is Gaia, the earth goddess, who creates half-snakes, the Titans, who storm Olympus and wrestle with Zeus. Simultaneously, she is the mother of Echidna (= snake), of the Sphinx, Cerberus, and others. Leviathan, too, the antagonist of Jehovah, is a snake, a dragon at the bottom of the sea. In the Mithras cult, the snake is the animal opposed to life that, together with the scorpion and the ant, absorbs the life-giving effect of the bull sacrifice. It is the antagonist of the lion, the damp, cold, dark animal in contrast to the animal of the heat of the sun. It devours the vital force of the sacrificed bull, or it wraps itself around a Kratér (vessel), with the lion facing her.⁹

It stands in a similar opposition to the lion as it does to the eagle, which is the sun-bird and spiritual principle. Thus, an eagle sits on top of the Germanic world tree, but a dragon dwells below, while the squirrel Ratatwiskr (bearer of discord) transmits mutual insults. In Indian mythology and in fairy tales, the races of the snakes and eagles are eternal enemies, and seek to destroy each other. Once, the snakes outwitted the eagles, which then had to serve them, but the eagle Garuda, Vishnu’s mount, stole the soma, the drink of immortality that he was supposed to obtain for them.

A North American fairy tale recounts that a child-stealing witch seizes the hero Tsoavits, but an eagle leads him back again. At this, the witch seeks help from her grandfather, the giant snake, but is devoured by him on the spot. “Ever since all witches have been snakelike.”

The snake is also closely related to the basilisk or dragon, whose defeat signals the beginning of nearly every heroic legend. I will mention only Heracles and the lernaic snake, and Siegfried and the Christian St. George, both modeled after him. In wanting to help the bright upper world to achieve victory, indeed by embodying the new sun himself, the hero stands in opposition to the snake. It is because of this that two snakes—sent by Hera, the evil Great Mother—already threaten Heracles in his crib; later she sends him fits of madness, during which he even kills his own children. A snake also steals the herb of immortality, obtained with great difficulty, from Gilgamesh, while he is inattentively bathing in a pond. The hero Philoctetes, too, a figure identical with Heracles, is bitten by a snake in the foot because of the curse from the nymph Chryse, whose love he did not requite; he slowly wastes away from the wound.10 In a very similar way, the son god Re is poisoned, according to an Egyptian hymn,¹¹ by a venerable worm, formed out of his own saliva and laid in his way by Isis, who is enraged at him. She then heals him only after he discloses his name to her, but his power remains broken. Apollo also had to first conquer the python in Delphi before he could create his oracles there. Strangely enough, such prophetic abilities often arise out of defeating a dragon, just as Siegfried understands the voices of the birds after having eaten Fafner’s flesh.12

As far as the especially numerous snake and dragon fights in Greek mythology are concerned, it should be pointed out that matriarchy had ruled in the Aegean culture before the Indo-Germanic populations of the Greeks invaded it about 2,000 B.C., and that the cults of the Great Mother, later worshipped as Cybele, Agdistis, Mountain Mother, Artemis of Ephesus, and so on, stem from this time. (As a matter of fact, we know about the free status of women in Crete.) This Great Mother was often depicted together with a snake. The shield goddess Athena, too, is pre-Greek, and often the snake is her companion (compare Phidias’s depiction). Hence, for the Greeks, overcoming the snake means at the same time overcoming the goddess of the ground, overcoming the unconscious reemergence of the pre-Greek layer, which in the postclassical period broke through again in the mysteries of Cybele, Sabazio, the Phrygian Mother goddess, and others, and which has inundated the whole spectrum of Mediterranean culture.¹³

It is quite clear from this compilation of images that the snake symbolizes the vital, instinctual, and drive stirrings in man, his unconscious dark side in contrast to brightness, to the conscious side of his nature. Scientifically speaking, the snake has only a cerebrospinal nervous system, and so represents all the stirrings originating in this sphere. In various Gnostic systems it is identified with the human spinal cord, proof that already then one was aware of these correspondences. This is a direct parallel to the Indian Kundalini snake in Kundalini yoga, climbing up and down in the spinal cord.¹⁴

In the contexts previously described, the snake plays the role of an evil demon, hostile to light, and represents a dark, ambiguous deity of the depths. But this is only one side of its being; at the same time it is also a god of healing and salvation. In the mysteries of Sabazios it represented the highest deity: according to the testimony of Clement of Alexandria,15 a snake was pulled through the abdomen of mystics. Arnobius also testifies that a golden snake was drawn through the clothing of the initiated. The snake is the , and the ritual signifies the mystical unification with the deity, toward whom the mystic is in a feminine position.¹⁶ Similarly, the snake is the animal accompanying and, in earlier stages, personifying Asklepios; according to Artemidorus, its appearance in dreams of the sick signals healing and the return of vital power. A Grimm fairy tale shows particularly well how strongly it is associated with the mysterious vital power of a human being: a child who eats with a snake thrives until his mother slays the snake. From this moment on the child, too, loses weight and wastes away until he finally dies. Likewise, Porphyry writes in the biography of his revered teacher, Plotinus, that the latter’s disciples had observed by his bedside, a few days before his death, how a snake came out of Plotinus’s mouth and left; the master died shortly thereafter. For these reasons the appearance of a snake at the sickbed can also mean death. It was also generally assumed that the souls of the dead would live on as chthonic snake gods, as inhabitants of the underworld where they became guardians of a treasure.¹⁷ Thus, snakes were ritualistically worshipped in holes and crevices in the ground in the Asklepieias of Ptolemy and Hygieia. At the so-called Arrhetophorias, obols¹⁸ and cakes in the form of a snake or phallus were sacrificed in crevices in the ground.¹⁹ An erect snake made of granite was found in the pits. Thus the snake becomes the guardian of the secret treasure, and very often also the possessor of the herb of life (compare the Indian fairy tale in which it wants to have the soma potion) with which it can reawaken the dead.

A Greek saga recounts that the hero Glaucus, sitting next to the corpse of his murdered friend Polyeides, catches sight of a snake, which he slays. Thereafter a second snake appears, fetches an herb, returns, and reanimates its dead friend. At this they disappear together and leave the herb for Glaucus, who revives his friend Polyeides with it. This motif emerges in identical form in the Grimm fairy tale “The Three Snake Leaves,” and in numerous other fairy tales. When the snake, as I mentioned in the beginning, steals the herb of life from Gilgamesh in a moment of inattention or unconsciousness, this somehow belongs to this same sphere. The snake arrives there, attracted by the scent of the flower that Gilgamesh had fished up from the bottom of the sea along with the herb, and, one is almost tempted to say, takes back what is hers. Perhaps you recall the dream series that was discussed at the end of last winter,20 in which a boy dreams that he is searching for a transparent stone and that a lion, also wanting the lapis, appears at that moment—similarly, the snake is also a lover of stone or the herb of life. (Incidentally, in that series, a white snake with black crosses on its back appears in a dream directly preceding the former, a symbolically depicted sōter snake, the serpens mercurii, which dwells in the earth. And earlier still, it was the spring, the water of life, with which it is identical.)

The snake is not only the guardian of the stone or herb, however; it is essentially identical with it, or contains it in itself. The Indians believe that the cobra carries a diamond in its head; and an Indian fairy tale recounts that a snake daily brings a scholar a gold piece for reading to it from spiritual works in a garden, until the old man’s greedy son hits the snake on the head and breaks the jewel inside; the snake kills the son in revenge and disappears, lamenting: “Woe, who has shattered my jewel?”

The particular reason why I presented this fairy tale is because such an association may resonate in the expression of our dream text: “eyes sparkling like diamonds.”

As already suggested, the snake and its relation to the lapis play an essential role in alchemy. Thus, a text from the Musaeum Hermeticum says: “A terrifying dragon lives in the forest who lacks nothing; when it sees the sun’s rays, it forgets its poison and flies so dreadfully that no living animal can resist and not even the basilisk is its equal. Whoever knows how to kill it wisely . . . will escape all dangers . . . and its poison turns into the ultimate medicina. Suddenly it swallows its own poison by eating its own poisonous tail. It is forced to complete all that within itself. Then a magnificent balsam will flow forth from it.” A thought parallel to this is that the gold is already present in the initial situation, but that it is either old and sterile or compositum;21 this gold is dissolved in a type of aqua fortis, which corresponds to the snake. Yet, the whole process is something taking its course within itself, which is why it is also said that a punctum igneitatis²² exists in Mercury himself through which that (immanent) dissolution happens.

I do not want to go into this alchemical problem here any longer, but to address instead a source of alchemical symbolism, the concepts of the Gnostic sects of the Ophites and Naassenes. Ophis is Greek for snake. Likewise, Naas is the Hebrew word for snake. The Gnostics gave themselves these names in saying “that they alone could grasp the depths of God.” Thus the snake is the deus absconditus,²³ the dark, deep, incomprehensible side of God. The so-called Perates, too, especially elaborated on the theory of the snake. “The primeval power originating from the father, the logos, is a snake; so are the stars, but they are the evil snakes. This is why Moses shows the perfect snake to the children of Israel. . . . Whoever sets his hopes on it will not be destroyed by the snakes of the desert, that is, the gods of creation. This all-encompassing snake is the wise logos of Eva, this is the mystery of Eden, this is the river that flows out of Eden.”²⁴ This explains the meaning of the words “and as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.”²⁵ The snake is the “great beginning,” of which it is said: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”²⁶ What is made by it is life. The snake stands for vital power, as we have seen. Eve originated through it; Eve is life. This Eve is the mother of anything alive. The evil materia, however, in contrast to the logos, is also, in the final analysis, a snake. At first, it is the water to the Perates, flowing around the world as in a ring; it is Kronos. They say of it: “It is a power bright as water, and no creature can escape this power, Chronos; it is the reason why each creature is doomed to perish; it is the water of Styx.” One can view the battle of these two snakes in the sky: “The logos is the constellation of the dragon; to the right and left of it are the crown and lyre. In front of the dragon kneels that pitiable man, Heracles. Behind his back the evil master of this world, the constellation of the snake, draws nearer so as to steal the crown from him. The bearer of the snake, however, keeps them together and prevents it from touching the crown.” Here again, the snake is aiming at what is most valuable. The main ritual of the Perates, the evening meal, proceeded as follows: they piled loaves of bread on the table and summoned the snake that, as a holy animal, was cared for in a container box. The snake came near and slithered on top of the loaves. Through this the breads were consecrated. Each member kissed the snake on the mouth and prostrated himself before it.27 Thus logos is present in the form of the snake at the Lord’s Supper. It is Christ both as logos and as snake. The rituals of the Sabazios mysteries, mentioned earlier, also belong to this area; they are the coniunctio with the divine logos. But in other cultures as well, the snake is the savior of the logos: Quetzalcoatl, the god of the Toltecs, is a winged snake, the son of the “cloud snake,” who appears as the bearer of culture and savior. Upon Tollan’s fall, he again disappears in a lake in the form of a snake. According to the Gnostics, the evil snake, too, was not evil originally, but became so as follows: Justinos recounts that on his journey west, Heracles had united with a virgin, half snake, half human (cf. Herodotus), in order to regain his stolen horse. Elohim likewise is said to have united with a virgin half-snake and half-human, called Eden or Israel, and to have procreated with her twelve paternal angels and twelve maternal ones. He then leaves her and returns to the upper, good god. Out of her sorrow at having been left, she then becomes that evil power, hostile toward God. Her servant, the angel Naas (snake), later brings about the crucifixion of Christ; Christ, however, left Eden his body on the cross, with the words: “Woman, behold thy son!”28 But these are the very words Christ spoke to Mary when he entrusted John to her. So John is, as it were, the body, the mortal part of Christ! Strangely enough, in medieval art John, too, has the characteristics of a snake. In a picture of Quentin Matsys, he holds a communion cup containing a small dragon, which he consecrates.²⁹ In the great division of the cosmos, shared by nearly all Gnostic sects, there are three realms, and always right at the bottom there is the snake leviathan,³⁰ the ouroboros, reappearing in alchemy. But the latter is Eve, that is, life. Leviathan is the master of this world, of whom it is said in Isaiah 27:1: “In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” Alchemy also knows—besides the tail-eater who unites the opposites in itself—the image of two snakes uniting, a fleeing and a wingless one (see also the contrast eagle—snake).

I turn now to one last aspect of the snake, actually already contained in the preceding one: the snake as a time symbol. It is the snake that is Chronos, Greek for time. It is the ring of coming into being, the (one and all). “All cults and mysteries serve it. As Oceanos or Jordan it is the humid substance, and nothing in the world—immortal or mortal—can exist without it. Everything is subject to it, and it itself is good, and, just as in the horn of the onehorned bull (Moses), it embraces the beauty of all other things . . . like the river rising in Eden and dividing itself into four origins.” Simon Magus, however, says: “And it is always one and the same, that which is living in us, that which lives and is dead, and which is awake and asleep, and is young and old. When it changes, the latter is the former, and again the former, when it changes, is the latter.”31 Meister Eckhart calls this “the river flown into itself.” Christ was also interpreted in this sense as the great ecclesiastical year; he was the Zodiacal snake, whose pictures represent the twelve apostles. The Indian god of creation Prajapati, too, is the world year. The idea that the snake represents time, the coming into being, and the durée créatrice is probably connected with the fact that it sheds its skin. Many fairy tales of the primitives interpret this as a reincarnation, and infer the snake’s immortality from this. We have also heard that Philo regarded it as immortal. So that is probably also the reason why it is in possession of the herb of immortality. In Mithraism one has also found the figure of a god with a lion head, on whom a snake winds upward, laying its head upon his. He is the god Aion or Zervan, the god of eternal duration. Similarly, in Kundalini yoga the snake, climbing up the spine and touching the various chakras in a temporal development, stands for the vital force by which man is simultaneously put into the course of time. It stands for nature in contrast to the spirit, yet at the same time it is the principle leading to the lapis, to perfection beyond nature.

It is quite impossible to bring some order into the whole wealth of this material, and still harder to interpret the meaning and the real essence of the snake as a symbol. When I stressed three main aspects—the snake as earth demon, as savior, and as time symbol—this was just an attempt to organize the many aspects. When the snake appears in a dream, you basically have to take into account all three aspects. I now come back to the dream to evaluate the remaining details of the description.

The snake appears to the girl either in the forest, or it chases her as far as into her bedroom. The encounter in the woods is, so to speak, the more natural place, because the forest stands for the dark, unconscious side, where one meets one’s animals and projections. Initially it looks as if the dreamer came to meet the snake. But then the situation is reversed; the snake chases the dreamer as far as into her bedroom. There exists an intense attraction between the snake and the child; the snake becomes active and the child thinks it wants to bite her. It haunts her with glowing eyes, sparkling like diamonds. The snake is famed for its gaze, by which it hypnotizes its victims, to devour them afterward; one also says of certain women, the “vamp” type who exerts a kind of terrifying attraction, that they would have that snakelike gaze.32 Its eyes sparkling like diamonds could be an indication that the snake does after all possess the diamond, the lapis, carrying it in its head, whereby it would not only have the pure, negative instinctual characteristic, but also, as seems to be indicated, the possibility of higher consciousness. The glowing eyes are easy to explain. As has often been said, the snake is connected with the secret fire; it carries within itself the punctum igneitatis of self-destruction; it is also in connection with the fiery lion. Mercury is the kyllenian fire, and many dragons in mythology are fire-spitting monsters; all of this has to do with the fact that it dwells in the depths of the earth, psychologically speaking, that it has to do with the sphere of emotional outbreaks, with the drives. By the way, the motif of the snake’s eyes is sometimes accentuated in other contexts, too. You may remember the vision of St. Ignatius, from the lecture at the beginning of this summer, to whom a snake with many eyes appeared after rigorous ascetic exercises.³³ He says that a certain something appeared to him, beautiful and great, greatly comforting him. Sometimes it would have been a snake full of sparkling eyes, although it was not eyes. Later he interprets this as a vision of the devil, and wards it off. Argus, too, is such a dragon figure with innumerable eyes. This multiplicity of eyes may be connected with the multiplicity of subliminal perceptions: man is, so to speak, more clear-sighted in the unconscious than in the conscious, and, above all, sees into many more directions simultaneously. Hence the snake’s power of prediction, also bestowing the gift to understand birds’ voices.

The last remaining statement of the dream says: “the snake that wants to bite me.” It is questionable if this is so objectively. In any case the child supposes this, because she is frightened. Because she flees the snake, the latter chases her, for it just wants to get near her. Obviously, it wants to unite with her in one form or another, and chases her as far as into her bedroom, that is, into her most intimate living space. The girl rejects it, however, being frightened by its instinctual, negative, demonic aspect. Incidentally, in many Asian fairy tales we find the motif that girls transform themselves into snakes at night, or, conversely, that snakes walk as girls, or one sees how at night snakes glide into a girl’s mouth. This is interpreted as possession by a demon. So we might assume that the dreamer has a conscious attitude that cannot accept this power the snake stands for, a so-called Christian attitude, which, of course, can only be the result of the milieu; or else a too orderly, well-behaved, rational scope of consciousness, which naturally provokes, attracts, and at the same time rejects the snake as its counterpart. The girl being young, the snake might well rather stand for temptations of a worldly nature, that is, for life and “the lord of this world,” whom the snake after all represents. If she cannot accept it, the snake will probably poison her and create a flood, that is, an inundation of her consciousness with unconscious images. For the rest, it can be said of the problem that the child faces a rather common situation, which makes a solution more likely.

Professor Jung: In her exhaustive paper, Ms. von Franz has very beautifully pointed out the three main aspects of the snake symbol: the aspects of the chthonic snake, the sōter, and the time snake. You can now picture how ambiguous this symbol is, and how manifold its manifestations are. The snake touches on the deepest instincts of man, so that from time immemorial one thought it to be in possession of great secrets. Let us now deal with our dream in detail.

It is a snake vision. The girl is threatened by an enigmatic snake that is very intense and alive. That it assumes such a concrete form is striking and indicates that it plays an important role in the dream.

Participant: Doesn’t the frequent recurrence of the image also point to its importance?

Professor Jung: Yes, we have to assume that the dream has quite a special importance for the psychic disposition of the child. What follows from the snake’s assuming such a concrete form and from the intensity for the dreamer?

Participant: That the unconscious seeks to forcefully assert itself.

Professor Jung: When is this the case?

Participant: When consciousness is split off from the unconscious.

Professor Jung: Yes, there has to be a strong splitting off of the unconscious, probably having existed for years. There are many reasons for such a phenomenon of splitting. As a rule, they lie in the environmental conditions, for example, in the relationship of the parents to each other. It is not uncommon that the split in the child is a reflection of the conflict between father and mother. Here we may thus assume that there is a certain tension between the parents, not allowing the child to find herself.

Of course, there are also other reasons for the split that needn’t be related to the parents or other environmental factors, but are determined purely intrapsychically. What could those be?

Participant: Perhaps a psychic trauma?

Professor Jung: That, too, would somehow be determined externally.

Participant: It could be an inherited disposition to anxiety.

Professor Jung: This, too, would follow from the parents’ psychology. In addition, the fear of the snake cannot be readily explained in the context of inheritance; it is simply there. Either you fear a snake, or you don’t. There are individuals for whom a stay in the tropics becomes a perfect hell because of their constant fear of running into a snake. After all, it is very inconvenient to suddenly discover a snake in your bed, or in your shoes, in your trousers, in the cupboard, or in all sorts of impossible places. Snakes are always where you don’t suspect them. The uncanny thing with these animals is that they are completely inhuman; they aren’t in any rapport with human beings. The snake wardens in the zoos know this. For some time, the snakes let one do anything with them, and one day they wind themselves around the warden with lightning speed, trying to squeeze him to death. You can make contact with nearly all animals, but there seems to be no possible psychic bridge to the cold-blooded animals any longer, although they let themselves be hypnotized, as we know. No “niceties” any longer here.

But now back to our question: What would an inner motive for the split be?

Participant: There could be too great a stress on consciousness.

Professor Jung: But this again would be related to the environment; we have to find an inner cause.

Participant: Maybe the child is strongly determined by the former ages, through the “Bardo,”34 and has difficulties in developing into reality.

Professor Jung: I am thinking of something else, namely, of cases in which a content emerges from within quite spontaneously, without causal involvement of the environment.

Participant: Could it be a psychic inclusion?

Professor Jung: Yes, that’s what I mean. I am calling this a psychic teratoma. This is a term borrowed from medicine. There it refers to a kind of tumor as the result of a developmental disorder, and containing parts of a twin, for example, hair, teeth, finger parts, an eye, and so on. Teratomas are to be conceived of as an incomplete development of a fetus that is included in the other, fully developing twin. Something analogous exists in the psychic realm too; though one can’t talk of a psychic twin, but rather of an encapsulated entity of inheritance. You all know what an entity of inheritance is, don’t you? You know, for instance, the peculiarity of the lower lip in the Habsburg family, although it has nothing to do with a teratoma. Now, if an entity of inheritance simply grows along unbeknownst to the individual, then we are dealing with a kind of teratoma. It is like the inclusion of something alien that is not properly connected to the surrounding environment. This creates a character who, on the one hand, may have a normal disposition, but in whom, on the other, something is hidden that doesn’t want at all to connect with the rest of the person. It’s not always easy to identify a teratoma; when folks say, for instance, “Now that’s a very nice guy; unfortunately he’s inherited that particular family trait that ruins his whole life,” there needn’t necessarily be a teratoma present, but it may point to some manifest feature, such as mendacity, alcoholism, or the like. If something completely incommensurable is enclosed in the character, however, something that in no way would fit the character or could be derived from his mentality, then we can assume the existence of a teratoma. When this part of the soul becomes conscious it can cause immense disturbance. That is why one may touch this encapsulated world only with utmost caution, because otherwise there is the danger that all of a sudden a second personality erupts. Such cases can be observed in the mentally insane. Do you think that the present case could point to such a teratoma?

Participant: No, it wouldn’t manifest itself as such a general symbol.

Professor Jung: Quite right. As I described it, the characteristic feature of the teratoma lies in the fact that it is a pathologically grotesque phenomenon, for example, consisting of only one eye, or two teeth, and so on. The snake in our dream has no such pathological character at all, but is a general symbol. So, by no means is it a teratoma. What then can, on the contrary, be concluded from this universal symbol?

Participant: That the child is not abnormal.

Professor Jung: Yes, that she is quite normal overall. Only the facts of concretism and the force personified in the snake are striking, both being strongly accentuated. So where must we locate the reason for the split?

Participant: In environmental influences.

Professor Jung: Yes, very probably there must exist parental influences, affecting an in itself normal disposition of the child, and causing there a split that is an adequate answer to the situation at home.

The cause of the split, with which we are obviously dealing here, is thus clarified. We now arrive at the question: “How should we conceive the character of the split?” Naturally, such a disturbance affects the child’s whole behavior. Don’t forget that this anxiety-triggering figure is very dynamic and contains very much energy. What does this mean for the consciousness of the child?

Participant: There is a certain paralysis of expression.

Professor Jung: Yes, one could say that.

Participant: The instinct is missing.

Professor Jung: Yes, the instinctive is missing. With what influence on consciousness?

Participant: Problems in adaptation.

Professor Jung: Well, I am thinking of a certain, and quite frequent, form of difficulty to adapt. The snake represents, as we have seen, the instinctive, unconscious life, which actually contains the complete expression of the unconscious. There lies in it a blind naturalness closely connected with instinct. If all of this is unconscious, the conscious personality will lack it. What impression does it then make?

Participant: An intellectual or not genuine impression.

Professor Jung: That is too negative an expression; I’d rather say: it makes the impression of an artificial personality, imitating what it finds in its environment. For instance, it lets itself be governed by the opinions in its environment and adapts to these with a minimum of effort. It lacks, as it were, the “real” thing. A relatively normal person can get away with this attitude for a long time. Quite a few individuals live with an artificial personality, and they also get away with it—until the point when the function of instinct is absolutely of the essence. Now, which moment is that?

Participant: When you fall in love or marry.

Professor Jung: Yes, when someone marries, or just falls in love. Then you are challenged. Because then you can’t enforce it any longer with the artificial personality, then you have to be connected to the deeper sources.

If the entire snake entity is in the unconscious and therefore invisible, then the conscious personality will be more or less artificial. But there are cases in which the snake entity is, at least partially, absorbed by the conscious personality. How does such a person strike you then?

Participant: As very contradictory.

Professor Jung: Yes, these individuals have a double personality. On the one hand, they are reasonable and adjusted; maybe too much adjusted, you know, just a bit subdued, not very obviously, or yet a bit obvious on the one side, be it intellectually or emotionally, depending on their talents. In the main, the differentiated function will take over and will lead the personality. On the other hand, this is somebody who is very different. These cases are very frequent. There are also children who show this double quality to a more or less high degree; above all, it’s the well-bred children who suddenly play all kinds of mischievous tricks round the next corner. In the grown-up it often takes just a bit of alcohol to make the other personality come to the fore. Then you say: “I had no idea you could be like that.” Often, the person concerned didn’t know it either, until it just happened to him and the other side of his personality broke through. Such individuals are often the “other” at the wrong place. It is in this way, as we know, that many things come to light. In a way, they are committing indiscretions toward themselves. In the case of these splits, the one personality often has a taste contrary to that of the other. What will happen then?

Participant: Such a person will, for instance, say at home just the opposite of what he says outside of it.

Professor Jung: Yes, a devil at home and an angel on the streets. This expresses itself in a child so that at school he shows a completely different character from at home. This expression is only too well known. Children with a striking split, for instance, behave quite atrociously toward their mothers, while they are polite and nice with other people, or, conversely, they are lovely and nice at home, and somewhere else behave like the worst street kids. Such children find special fun in deceiving the adults, and in doing so feel like little martyrs: “Oh, if you only knew how I really am. You really deserve it that you hurt me.” They find it extremely attractive to think: “If you only knew how I suffer, but I just don’t tell.”

I remember my own school times in Basel. There was a kid who had to wear white gloves on Sundays. Once she came to the countryside; there, she raised her head, marched into the meadow in her white lace, and finally put the excrement found there into her mouth. Such piggery would never have entered the heads of the village kids. It is precisely the well-bred children who develop such obsessions. They think of the oddest things, because these belong to the side of their personality of which they hadn’t had any idea. When they see something horrible lying in the street, a toad, for instance, they have to eat it. As a rule, children with such splits really develop two characters.

So, if we know about this split, what would we then tell such a child?

Participant: That he is at odds with himself.

Professor Jung: Yes, one could tell the child that to his face. You are at odds with yourself; you say “yes,” and it says “no,” or the other way round. The child actually understands such language: You want to obey the parents, and then something happens that comes in between. You should do your homework, and then you can’t do it. You also should be nice in school, and then it doesn’t work. These are opposites in which the split manifests itself, and which the child knows very well. He will also tell you examples of his own, and then you can quite naturally bring up the question of how all this feels for the child, and how one could possibly address this situation.

Participant: Couldn’t one also ask him how and when he feels best?

Professor Jung: That is too complicated a question. I’d rather ask: “Say, how come you’re so different at home from at school?” Or: “Really, how come in school you’re so terribly naughty?” It wouldn’t make much sense just to ask with regard to the school alone, because the school is only secondary to the child, but he may well know to tell a quite different tale about the parents.

Participant: But perhaps the child doesn’t yet know anything about that.

Professor Jung: Perhaps—but a ten-year-old girl usually knows already much more than the parents would guess. In these years the question already arises: “How do I tell my parents?” I myself have unlearned being naive about children. I’m no longer naive about a ten-year-old girl.

You are pointing right to the center of the problem with all these questions regarding the child’s being at odds with herself. If you focus completely on this schism, you will understand not only the dream, you will also understand the child.

The dream not only describes the situation of the child, but also allows us to say something about the prognosis. Which details of the dream could we take as a starting point here?

Participant: The snake wants to devour the dreamer.

Professor Jung: Yes, this stands for an intense relation between the halves split off from each other. What do you conclude from that?

Participant: That the dreamer wants to assimilate the snake.

Professor Jung: Of course, both attract each other with great force. The snake wants with all its might to come near her, and she is fascinated. So you can bet that both halves will come together at some point, that under favorable conditions, in other words, the split will be overcome. The prognosis of this split is good, because the child and the snake are intensely relating to each other, which, it is true, still expresses itself in the child as strong anxiety. At that moment the unification of the opposites was quite impossible for the child; but one may assume that in the course of time the mutual attraction will eventually make itself felt.

Now we still have to deal in more detail with the nature of the snake! In this dream the eyes in particular are very impressive. They are described as sparkling like diamonds and glowing. Ms. von Franz has, therefore, correctly stressed their importance. The eye really is the seat of fascinating fright; the attraction and the threat come from it. A good parallel to this is the snake with the many eyes in the vision of Ignatius.35 The stress on the eyes differentiates the snake in the dream from the dim poisonous snake and points to the fact that it contains an inner light and fire. What would you conclude from that? To what could this point?

Participant: That the snake contains the light of consciousness.

Professor Jung: Yes, that it has a consciousness in it, that it is, so to speak, the second person of the dreamer who, however, has completely merged with the unconscious. What meaning, then, does the snake have here?

Participant: The meaning of the sōter snake.

Professor Jung: Quite so; one could conclude with some certainty from the dream that this snake is a kind of bearer of the light, or at least a bearer of the diamond, the glowing stone. In alchemy we find the idea that the stone, the lapis philosophorum, can be found in the brain and is, therefore, also called the brain stone. The same idea can be found in our dream, too: there seems to be a light hidden in the brain of the snake. It announces the capability of an extended consciousness, not yet present at the moment. For the time being, there is a restricted consciousness, as is normal for the child; at the same time, the possibility that at some later point consciousness can expand is hinted at. The reason why we may draw this conclusion is that the snake here is a sōter snake. The chthonic snake, with its character of the earth demon, of evil, would not directly lead to a healing outcome, because it is only drive, which, as such, brings hardly any promise with it.

Participant: Could one assume that in life the child is fascinated by precisely those figures in which the quality of light is prominent?

Professor Jung: This is a quite natural conclusion, as the whole religious question is being raised with the image of the sōter snake. The sōter snake has a distinctly spiritual meaning. That’s why Christ is often depicted as a snake. Such representations are frequent in the Middle Ages. The snake is the symbol of secret wisdom and promises the revelation of hidden things and knowledge. It offers instinctive, as opposed to intellectual, knowledge. What’s the term for this?

Participant: Intuition.

Professor Jung: This is not knowledge, but a perception.

Participant: Inner view.

Professor Jung: That’s right.

Participant: Illumination.

Professor Jung: That’s its consequence.

Participant: Revelation.

Participant: Belief.

Professor Jung: That’s quite right, but not in the sense we today conceive of belief, as scientia fidei, as science of belief. What I mean is gnosis. This is knowledge of an irrational nature, different from the arbitrary act of thinking. It is an event, a self-revelation, a mental activity, the result of a quite peculiar spiritual situation. When you study the Gnostics you will find similar ideas. The Gnostics preach snake wisdom, that is, knowledge coming from nature itself. There is also a specifically Christian gnosis. You can barely trace the secret of this knowledge. Rationally, it can’t be explained at all. You get an idea of this difficulty when you ask how the dogma of the trinity came into being. This is gnosis, knowledge springing from inner experience.

Participant: Couldn’t one call this knowledge also mystical knowledge?

Professor Jung: That would be a metaphysical term. We view this question, however, from the psychological standpoint. Then we understand that there is still another way of gaining knowledge that is simultaneously a life process. Naturally, these things are alien to us, but they become more understandable if we make ourselves acquainted with the psyche of Eastern man. In the East, the intellectual thinking processes recede very much into the background; the whole philosophy of the Upanishads and classical Chinese philosophy, for instance, stem from life processes whose nature is, at the same time, a process of gaining knowledge. This is a thinking out of the bowels,36 out of the depths. This stands in contrast to the academic intellect that is often empty and, as we know, doesn’t always do us any good. For women particularly, it has something destructive. For what basically concerns her is not the intellect either. What concerns her is gnosis. That’s why so many women are most deeply disappointed by their university studies, particularly by philosophy, because nowadays philosophy, too, is treated intellectually, in contrast to antiquity, when it was still a life process. Then it was gnosis, a drive, a fact of nature, an inner need. It was like water seeping into dry ground. Gnosis is knowledge stemming from blood. Thus the alchemists say of the stone: “Invenitur in vena, sanguine plena,” that is, the stone or lapis is found in blood-filled veins. That’s why it is also called sanguineus, or carbuncle, or ruby.

This form of knowledge is also expressed in the above-mentioned eye snake of Ignatius. When he strove for knowledge of God, that snake appeared to him, as if it wanted to tell him: “I am the one with the one hundred eyes that see all and are all-knowing.” These many eyes are, so to speak, as many possibilities of consciousness, corresponding to decentralized functions of consciousness. The objects of gnosis are quasi self-glowing, and reveal themselves in their own light. That is also why this process is so often described as a revelation, as an eruption by which the individual is overwhelmed. It is always a process reposing in itself. That’s the meaning of the snake when one experiences it from within.

The image of the many eyes also appears in alchemy. The alchemists referred to a passage of the prophet Zechariah,37 where it says that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth. They are seven eyes, and according to the testimony of the prophet, they are on the foundation-stone of the new temple. But the eye is also the self-perception of an unconscious illuminated or capable of being illuminated. This the alchemists knew and thus they also saw corresponding phenomena in chemical transformations. They report, for instance, the lighting up of the dark, simmering compound in the flask; they took this to be oriental jewels, which they described as fish eyes; for the so-called piscis rotundus,³⁸ too, the eyes would have been important: this fish also appears in an Arab legend,³⁹ where it has only one eye. It embodies a being living in darkness and possessing, owing to its eye, a peculiar capability of knowledge. From such inner perceptions stem the images of God. For everything originating in this inner knowledge forms the basis of such experiences. The commonness of these experiential processes has also led to the fact that we find concordant God images in the most various places. We no longer know about these connections and, therefore, think that the God images had been “invented.”

That might be the essence of what one can say about this dream. There still remain the details of the forest and the bedroom. The forest is a symbol of the unconscious. There you can see all kinds of things, but the vision is restricted, just like in water, in which you also can’t look into the depths. The bedroom is one of the symbols of the unconscious. But what is the essential difference between forest and bedroom?

Participant: The forest is something collective, the bedroom is a symbol of the personal unconscious.

Professor Jung: Yes, that’s right. The personal unconscious has an atmosphere one can humanly empathize with; it is personal and intimate. So we can very well call the bedroom a symbol of the personal unconscious. Just as the dreamer is displaced from the wide space of the forest into the narrow personal space of the bedroom, so the collective unconscious borders on the personal unconscious. A process of separation is under way. This separation is necessary because a clearing of consciousness cannot take place as long as the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious are still undivided.

The personal unconscious is like a laguna that is cut off from the sea by a strip of land, and is forming a little lake or a basin itself. Just like the latter, the personal unconscious is surveyable, and one can venture out without danger. Out there, however, is the ocean, the collective. This difference is crucial for the interpretation of our dream: for when the snake is encountered in the forest, this is more or less a natural phenomenon. But when it comes into the bedroom, panic arises. Why?

Participant: Because it concerns the dreamer personally.

Professor Jung: In the forest I encounter the snake “by coincidence,” but in the bedroom this goes under my skin, I am most personally touched by it. This advance of the snake into the personal unconscious is another sign of a good prognosis. The possibility of a merging of the separated forms is thus hinted at.

Participant: Doesn’t the frequent recurrence also speak for a good prognosis?

Professor Jung: This shows the urgency of the problem that will make itself felt in one way or another.

Participant: But if the importance of the snake is so great, why does the dreamer feel frightened by it?

Professor Jung: It often happens that one fears what has to be, what in the deepest sense belongs to one. One fears it, and yet wants it at the same time. One should really press the fear to one’s heart and say: “This is, after all, precisely what I want.”

Participant: Is the fear of being bitten justified?

Professor Jung: Of course, because the snake wants to penetrate her inside, wants to be absorbed in her. Simultaneously, the poison infiltrates her; the poison, however, that is also a remedy. It is fate, and that’s why one fears it. In the end, one always fears oneself; I don’t mean the “I,” but fear of the Other in us, the Self. Here, one’s fear is justified, because it is a superior force of which one knows: “It belongs to me, and I belong to it.” They both belong together. And yet it is terrible.

3. Dream of a Ten-Year Old Girl of Sinking in the Water40

PRESENTED BY MARGRET SACHS

Text: I go from the Bellevue⁴¹ across the Quaibrücke and I’m scared, because I know what will happen. Suddenly, between Bauschänzli and Quaibrücke, I fall into the water in an upright position. Slowly I am sinking deeper and deeper, until I reach the bottom. I nearly drown. Then I wake up.

Mrs. Sachs: This dream is from the same girl whom we know from the last meeting.

First let us try to structure the dream systematically:

Locale:	From Bellevue across the quay bridge; the water.
Dramatis persona:	The ego of the dreamer.
Exposition:	“I’m scared.”
Peripateia:	“Suddenly I fall into the water in an upright position.”
Lysis:	The dream shows a possible solution only with the word “nearly.” So something is there that saves the dreamer from the final catastrophe; some yet unknown eventuality might still occur, a backdoor for an escape has been left open.

The frequent recurrence of the dream—it was dreamed “innumerable times”—indicates its importance and its certainly fateful meaning.

To start with, let us try to have a closer look at the locale: “I go from Bellevue across the quay bridge.” Zurich seems to be the home town of the dreamer, so she does not cross just any bridge in some unknown environment, but the dream is situated in her city, in a place well known to her—an indication that the dream also concerns her own affairs. She comes from “Bellevue,” a beautiful square in Zurich, which is called “beautiful view” to boot. For a ten-year-old child, the place with the beautiful view—now lying behind her—might be her past childhood, the security she felt within the family. From there she comes, and now she crosses the bridge. Although she does not mention that she has to cross the bridge, she wouldn’t do it if it were up to her, because she is scared. This is probably a process at the mercy of which she fatefully is; her whole behavior in the dream is also completely passive. She has already left the place with the beautiful view, the place where life and future seemed “beautiful.”

She is already on the bridge. Three particular characteristics can be found for “bridge”: it connects two banks, two places of solid ground; it forms a secure way across the water flowing underneath it; and, third, it is not a natural formation, but man-made. Bellevue, the bygone beautiful childhood, was solid ground for her. So there would be adulthood on the other side, and the bridge would represent the transition from childhood to adulthood, namely, puberty. But Bellevue could also represent any other beautiful point of departure, a secure place, from which she has to move on. Because of its frequent occurrence, however, the dream can not only stand for a momentary slight difficulty that has to be “bridged,” but has to create an image that throws light on a fundamental situation of the dreamer. We have to resort to interpretations, therefore, that do justice to the dream’s importance. For this purpose let us have a look at some examples from history and mythology concerning the keyword “bridge.” The following examples have been taken from the seminar in the winter term of 1936/37.42 It is said that in a text of the Koran a bridge over hell is mentioned, thin as a string and sharp as a sword, which only the righteous can cross. A Muslim legend further tells of a bridge between the Temple of Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives, between the East and the West. Below is hell, into which the unrighteous fall. From the songs of praise of the later “Avesta,”⁴³ in the compilation of Schaeder,⁴⁴ we quote the passage about the “Chinvat bridge, made by Mazda.” It is the place of the spiritual deities, the point of transition through the ordeal of fire. “The comely, strong, shapely maiden drags the souls of the bad and deceiving into the darknesses, and leads the souls of the truthful over the Hara brzati and lets them cross the Chinvat bridge. The ‘Good Sense’ rose from his golden throne and said: ‘How did you get here, oh you truthful one, from the sorrowful existence to the sorrowless existence?’ ” As you can see, this bridge leads from this world to the nether world. Life, too, is the bridge between the cradle and the grave, the bridge between the past and the future. Thus the bridge takes on a cosmic and religious meaning.

In Gnosis, Leisegang gives an account of the ophitic sect of the Perates, whose name means “traversing,” derived from the Greek word peran. Philo of Alexandria writes: “We alone, who have realized the necessity in creation, and the ways in which man came into the world, have also profoundly learned it—to traverse—and are also able to cross transience.” It is an interesting fact that the sect of the Perates venerated the serpent as an expression of the Logos. Thus we have found a connection to the vision of the child with the snake, which, there too, means Logos or sōter. As a result, the problem with which the dreamer will certainly be confronted in the long term will revolve around “traversing transience” to reach the “sorrowless existence,” revolve around being reborn, not only of water, but also of the spirit, and revolve around the snake of salvation, the sōter snake.

Another mythological concept of the bridge is based on the idea that a spirit or a water demon, a bridge ghost, would be underneath it. By building the bridge we would have escaped his direct influence, but various sacrifices were made to him, human beings at first, and later man-shaped dolls, among other things. In ancient Rome, in the month of May, a yearly procession led to the Pons Sublicius, the oldest and most famous among Rome’s bridges. On the way, twenty-four chapels, the Sacella Argeorum, were visited, and from each an Argei, a doll representing an old man, was taken along. Chanting hymns and prayers, the Vestales threw these dolls into the Tiber. It is assumed that this is a relic from an older epoch, when old men, who were no longer fit for military service, were sacrificed as a yearly tribute to the river god, who had been affronted by the building of the bridge (Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics). London Bridge is said to have been made durable by being sprinkled with the blood of little children, and legend has it that human sacrifices were made in a bridge building, of the bridge in Arta in Italy, whose pillars collapsed until the bridge builder walled up his own wife in them. The last relics of these ideas are the chapels built on the former sacrificial sites on the bridges. On the Spreuer bridge in Lucerne, adorned with pictures of Holbein’s Dance of Death, a sanctuary lamp is still burning today in a small altar niche, built in a little oriel above the river Reuss, and many a passerby raises his hat, makes the sign of a cross, or even murmurs a prayer in passing by.

The bridge phobia is a well-known form of phobia, in which even today people are seized—despite all their enlightenment and all the ferroconcrete—by sudden and inexplicable fears, nausea, and pallor when they have to cross a bridge, because the demons of the depths have come to life again for them.

Let us summarize: the bridge is a place of danger for the deceiving and the bad, because they might fall down; but it also symbolizes the situation of a transgression of transience, the path to sorrowless existence. Significantly, the Pope has taken over the name of Pontifex Maximus, supreme bridge builder, which previously was carried by the Roman emperors.

In the light of psychology, the bridge represents a dangerous, precarious part of consciousness, a path that offers few possibilities of giving way. The fact that it is man-made, not a natural formation, may indicate that active forces will have to play a part for the “bridging” to be successful. The bridge arch, stretching from one bank to the other, from one solid place to the other, can also represent that psychic capability which moves on with certainty, with strength, and with confidence about the unknown, as a movement out of itself, into the future to a new task.

Künkel45 talks about the “suspense arc” [Spannungsbogen] of children, which must be big and long enough to carry the child from one developmental stage to the other, from one difficulty to be mastered to the next. If the suspense arc is too small, and is insufficient, the child will shy away from his task, will hole up in previous positions, drop back in his development, fall into a great introversion, or even into a regression.

It is for a very good reason that the primitives have their puberty rites, which help “bridge” the transition from childhood to adulthood, from the security in the ritual house to strife and freedom, from innocent ignorance to responsibility. The separation from the mother, the fasting of many days’ duration, the painful tattoos, the inflicting of pain, for example, knocking out the teeth, and then the bestowing of a new name, as well as the rituals of being devoured and eaten up, with the ensuing salvation and rebirth, as reported by Lévy-Bruhl, Frobenius, and others, all these symbolize the transition, the passing into a new phase in life. The performance of these rites of passage helps to safely master the transition into the new life situation. Although our dreamer is not devoured by a giant monster, only to be dragged out of its belly again, she falls prey to another uncanny element that scares her: the water. The dream situation shows that for the moment she is stuck in the monster’s belly. Her psychical abilities of bridging, of walking across, are obviously insufficiently developed. Her bridge fails, it does not stretch to the other side, and she is afraid, “because she knows what will happen.” She is in the middle of a process that befalls her with fateful irreversibility, she is at its mercy. Her failure can either be determined by a lack of vitality, caused by an artificial attitude toward life, a one-sidedly accentuated persona stemming from an incorrect education, or it can be determined by the fact that the child’s problem makes such great demands that involuntarily she flinches from addressing it, because she is not yet able to cope with it.

It seems that the indication of the sōter snake in the child’s vision discussed earlier, symbolizes the problem of growing up, the transition in puberty, and at the same time the religious problem of transgressing transience to immortality, from sorrowful to sorrowless existence, and also being reborn of water and the spirit. The child is afraid “because she knows what will happen,” the unconscious senses the danger, the inability to cope with the problems she is confronted with.

“Suddenly, between Bauschänzli and the quay bridge, I fall into the water in an upright position.” For the dreamer, these are not the bright waters of the river Limmat, but the uncanny floods with their frightening depths and dangers, commonly seen as a symbol of the unconscious. Like the unconscious, the water is the element of being transported away, of change, of the secret. It wells from unknown depths, floods with torrential force, possesses overwhelming power, devours its victims and covers them. Because of its unfathomable depth, the water is a symbol of the unconscious, and a symbol of life because of its flowing changeability. In this dream, the accent is on its depth; therefore, we may reasonably assume that here it is rather a representation of the unconscious.

The waters of the rivers Styx and Acheron carry the dead to the other side, from the upper world to the underworld. The dead haunt fathomless lakes, such as the Mumel lake or the legendary Pilatus lake.46 According to Virgil, the entrance to the realm of the dead is at the Lago d’Averno. Poets and fairy tales tell of the dangers of the depths; the Lorelei draws ships into the vortices of the river Rhine, “half drew she him, half sank he down.”47 The water is also the place of transformation: Proteus, the water god, turns into a lion, a snake, a tree; Thetis, the Nereid, transforms herself into a bird and a tree while courting Peleus.

As far as the situation of the dreamer at that moment is concerned, it seems as if only the negative aspects of the water would have to be taken into account; for just as she fled from the snake in her vision, she here is afraid of the water and nearly drowns in it. At the moment it has, just like the snake, a frightening and nearly destructive influence. If we focus our interest on the possibilities of a later solution of the problem, however, we will have to consider also some positive aspects of the water, above all its changeability and healing power. In Zimmer’s book Maya we find the following passage referring to this: “The waters are the Gegenwelt [counterworld] to the dry sphere of the waking day, into which the eye looks outward; in them the hidden nature of things is mirrored to the inner view. . . . Down into the water means down into knowledge. The ageless waters, taking all forms of nature, circulating as its life, know everything, they have been present since the beginning and conserve everything in their liveliness—nothing is forgotten. Thus Vishnu speaks to the holy Naranda: Immerse yourself in water, and you will know about my Maya.” In another place he writes:

The waters of life are the womb of all forms of the world, as well as their grave in which they are reborn, they circulate in and build, they carry and dissolve every form, they are the palpable element of the all divine Maya, whose nature the saints and seers tentatively try to grasp. They hold the secret of this Maya as the force of their own, versatile nature, and do not yield it, but let it be tasted when someone opens up to them. How the world comes into being, every hour, outside as world gestalt in the flow of coming into being and happening, coming to the fore, as gestalt of the inner world, from the darkness of the unconsciousness into the light of consciousness—all this can be experienced, but how could it be fathomed?

Zimmer also quotes the wondrous motif of someone who immerses himself in water and emerges into a new life, sinking from life dream to life dream in doing so:

The Brahmin Sutapas went into the sacred waters in Benares. The Brahmin turned into a girl of a Chandala family48 that dwelled near the sacred bathing place at the mouth of the Koka. The girl was beautiful, grew up, and was married to an unsightly man. She bore him two sons, who were both blind, and later a daughter, who was deaf. Her husband was poor. The young, naive woman went to the river, and there she always sat and cried. Once, however, when she had gone to the river to fetch water with her jug, she went down in the water to bathe—and out of the water reemerged that Brahmin Supata, the pious, agile ascetic. The Chandala came to look for his wife and wept for her; the Brahmin comforted him and taught him also to dive into the metamorphosed waters; he had barely dived into the water when he was freed of all stigma, thanks to the magical power of the sacred bathing place. On a carriage of the gods he went heavenward before the eyes of the Brahmin, light as the moon. The Brahmin, however, full of sorrow, also went into the waters of the Koka, and ascended into the highest heaven, only to come to earth again and live in a middle-class family. Being ill and suffering, he recalled his former life, went again into the waters of the Koka to ascend into heaven, to be reborn again, and to tell this story as Prince Kamadamana.

The cleansing, healing power of the water is also known in Christianity, as the baptismal water that washes away original sin and admits the baptized child into the Church, the Corpus Christi. The Jews also baptized, and admitted the proselytes into the community. The Gospel of John quotes Christ’s words to Nicodemus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again [of water and the spirit], he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Above all, however, we would like to refer to the Revelation of John: “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal . . . on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month” (22:1–2).

So far the water, into which our dreamer fell, showed only negative aspects for her. The possibility is open, however, that what she fears will change and bring her salvation.

Between the Bauschänzli and the quay bridge she suddenly falls into the water in an upright position. We see from this that she crossed the bridge on the right side.49 Could this suggest that she has always been conscious of her difficulties and of her failure? Or that her failure lies in the field of outer reality?

It is striking that she falls into the water “in an upright position,” which she expressly mentions. This can be interpreted in two ways: it can mean that, despite everything, she “keeps her head held high,” or that the heavy weight that pulls her down is not in her head, but rather in the instinctual sphere. I do not know if we may interpret that circumstance—her falling into the water in an upright position—in this way.

“Slowly I am sinking deeper and deeper.” This might symbolize a slowly progressing process of being flooded by the unconscious. “I nearly drown” has a parallel in the story about the vision of the snake: “I no longer dare move in the bed, because even when awake, everywhere in the room I see the glowing eyes of the snake that wants to bite me.” Her light consciousness of the day is flooded and disturbed by the frightening snake image from the unconscious, so she is deprived of her freedom of movement. Here, she nearly drowns—the capabilities of her senses are minimized by the unconscious content entering in her ears, nose, and mouth. She is prevented from seeing, hearing, and speaking, and can hardly breathe at all. So she is in an extremely reduced state; there is hardly any possibility left to contact the outer world, life. Psychologically speaking, this could indicate a nearly autistic state, or a very great introversion, which severely restricts the possibilities of her moving or expressing herself.

Without the word nearly (she says: “I nearly drown”) we would have to fear the worst. This little word, however, extenuates the seriousness of the prognosis a bit—it leaves a door open, and is a mere hint of the possibility of salvation. We can’t exactly deduce the dreamer’s difficulties from this dream, but it can be assumed that she will have a hard time in her fight against powerful psychical forces, not only as a child, but also in her later life. The dream indicates, by its frequent recurrence and by the intensity of the images and the danger, that this is not about just a temporary difficulty in finding the way from childhood to adulthood; these elements symbolize the fateful meaning of a great life task, and grave problems that touch on her innermost being. Her future prospects may well be alarming, being threatened by the archetypal powers of the snake and the water; both of them, however, also hold great possibilities of healing and rebirth. There is legitimate hope that she will reach the other side after all.

Professor Jung: The dream is of the girl whose snake vision we discussed last time. Again it is a dream that has a surprising effect in its simplicity. But precisely these “simple” dreams are not simple at all. Here we will practice the art of making simple dreams “complicated.” To do so, we first of all have to take into account the language of the images used in the dream. We do this with the help of mythological parallels and amplifications, which may sometimes seem somewhat superfluous to us. We so often believe that children think in a very simple way, but that is precisely the error. The language used by children is much, much older than they themselves. The whole mental and spiritual culture is handed down in language, and in language lies the whole prehistory of man. When we speak in this language, we also speak this prehistory. So if we do not find out and are not clear about the meaning or the connotations of the images in this language, we won’t be able to approach the meaning of the dream. It is not always easy to comprehend these linguistic images, the more so as the German language shows a certain primitiveness: its most important terms are ambiguous and fluoresce in all kinds of colors. You can imagine what happens when these images are dreamed to boot, the various meanings coalesce, and a complex mix-up of images ensues.

So if, for instance, as in our dream, the quay bridge appears, at first it seems natural to us to assume that this is the quay bridge—and nothing else. But we forget that this is a dream image that emerged from the richness of the unconscious. This makes even our unpretentious quay bridge a bridge, a bridge of a highly general meaning. In dreams, that is, in the language of the unconscious, even the best-known and most mundane bridge, and be it a little footbridge, is after all “the bridge.” The same is true of many concrete objects we are dreaming of: banal as they may seem, they refer to all kinds of philosophical and religious problems, or to dark places in human nature. We can observe this phenomenon also in psychopathology; in cases of schizophrenia, psychical problems of a definitely complex nature are often expressed in quite banal images. The patients can’t help but think that way; they have only their appalling platitudes at their disposal. If we were able to understand the general meaning of these images, however, we would be able to grasp the meaning of the psychoses.50 We could even heal a patient if we succeeded in making the general meaning of his images clear to him. Then we’d have to tell him, for example: “Well, look, this isn’t about this quay bridge at all, it’s about the bridge as such.” And what does bridge mean? This idea refers to a great multiplicity of possibilities of psychic experience. It can mean: “To get to the other side,” “Crossing the great water,” or “Everything is transition.” It can contain the simplest meaning as well as the deepest wisdom. If a general symbol like the bridge appears, we must not let ourselves be misled by any commonplace views. But then, are we actually familiar with anything else but commonplace views today? Who is crossing the quay bridge, thinking: “Everything is transition”? In the Middle Ages this was different. At that time, people still had a relation to the symbol. So a chapel was built on the bridge, and a sanctuary lamp was put in it. There was a Saint Nepomuk51 and other saintly figures who guarded the bridge. They reminded the people of the fact that each bridge is “the bridge,” that everything is transition. At that time these things were experienced as real. They gave the medieval mind a strange aura, which we can no longer completely understand. Anything banal was, at the same time, also something general, and a part of the whole. For them, a stone is not just a stone, but it can also be the soul of an ancestor, ancestors can live in it; and an animal is not necessarily simply an animal, but it is also an ancestor, a totem father. The whole landscape is like the open book of your unconscious. Everything is ensouled by the unconscious of the people. When you walk through the landscape with a Negro, you don’t just take a walk in the “topography,” where everything is abstract and scientific, but you will experience mythology. When you climb a mountain or go into the bamboo woods with him, this is no ordinary venture, because you will come into the realm of the secluded spirits. In the soundless, green silence of the wood we feel as if we were immersed in the water of the sea. Then there is no more botany; the whisper of the bamboo leaves, the gentle murmur of the wind—these are the voices of the spirits, and they give people the shivers. This is an awe-inspiring experience. We all know this magic from childhood, when the world still had a certain golden glow and everything was still very strange. For the child, the world is mythology, as it is for primitive man, and this is also the atmosphere out of which dreams have to be understood. For this reason, I insist that in each dream analysis the whole spectrum of the linguistic symbol be staked out. This method is not without danger, because at first it leads you away from the personal psychology of the dream, and we are in danger of going astray. The wealth of the material can seduce us to such an extent that we no longer know where we are. We have to be very sure of our ground, otherwise we will become enmeshed in a formidable entanglement of possibilities. The dream analysis has eventually to come back, after all, to the child who dreamed these dreams in order to assess the meaning of the individual contents.

The particular motivation of the dream cannot be derived from the general spectrum of meanings of the images, but can only be deduced from the personal amplification, from the context, and from the individual situation of the child. Only if we know the whole psychological situation of the child will we be able to deal with the decision about practical questions. As I mentioned already, it is only in the most exceptional cases that we are in a situation to ask the child him- or herself about the context, considering that we are dealing with a remembered dream or that the child is still too little to answer. From a certain age onward, however, children are indeed able to answer. I once had a consultation with an eight-year-old girl. She came dolled up like a little monkey with a little purse, and told her dreams with all the tricks of the trade. With this little girl it was quite possible to have a conversation.

So let us suppose you are told the present dream by the child herself. What would you say to her? Of course, you must not disclose your mythological knowledge to her, for these are just your theoretical tools, and the practical side is quite a different thing. So imagine her to be an intelligent girl. What would you ask the child?

Participant: If she were afraid of the water?

Professor Jung: It would be more to the point if you asked her whether she were afraid of bridges.

Participant: If she had ever nearly drowned, or if she had ever had a frightening experience on the quay bridge?

Professor Jung: Yes indeed, we do have to ask such practical questions. Often it is only because of dreams that our attention is called to such experiences. If, for instance, an anxiety dream—and this is a typical anxiety dream—always happens at the same location, we have to ask ourselves why this place is so emphasized, if there is perhaps something special about it. Let us assume that this is not the case here. Then our next consideration has to be that the child’s route leads from Bellevue to Bauschänzli. What questions could be tied to this fact?

Participant: I’d ask where she lives.

Professor Jung: Yes, it would be important to know if she is leaving home or going home.

Participant: Or could one also ask: “Where do you actually want to go?”

Professor Jung: Yes, this could make her recall special experiences. But we don’t know anything about all that. So we can’t ascertain the specific meaning that the dream had for the child at the time. Something else can probably be stated about the dream, however. With what justification?

Participant: The dream recurred repeatedly, although the specific situation was different each time.

Professor Jung: Yes, we have to conclude that there is an inner constellation that did not change over the years. When a dream recurs so frequently, I usually refrain from searching for the specific motives. Moreover, I quite generally take the view that a neurosis is not of traumatic origin, that is, that it can’t be traced back to a singular frightening experience; I try to understand it in the context of its present meaning. For what lives and takes effect today is also recreated today, again and again. I also relate frequently recurring dreams to what is currently going on, therefore, and to what is recreated over and over again, and not to something that lies many years back. So this dream, too, refers to an inner constellation, which has not changed over the years.

We already know from the previous dream that there exists a certain splitting in the dreamer, that is, that consciousness and the unconscious are split off from each other. We further saw that the unconscious and consciousness even attract each other, as expressed in the threat that the snake poses to the dreamer. This dream goes a step further than the mere threat; the danger becomes manifest: the dreamer falls into the water, in which she is, so to speak, completely swallowed by the monster of the unconscious. We have to take into account a peculiar detail, the fact that she falls down in an upright position. This is very unusual, because usually one falls sideways one way or the other. When someone, as in this case, falls down with the hands on the body and with the feet first, this expresses a certain stiffness, as if one were enclosed by something. The feeling of suffocation the dreamer experiences when sinking also points to this tight enclosure. It is as if she were pulled into the mouth of a monster and swallowed. Myths express the sucking and suffocating aspect of water by populating it with monsters, dragons, or other water creatures. Many primitive heroic myths also tell the story that the hero is devoured by the dragon, complete with his ship. In the monster’s belly he is pressed to such an extent that, so as not to be crushed, he pushes the remains of the ship against the walls of the stomach. The experience of being pressed is a very important motif. In our dream it also finds expression in the feeling of suffocating. To what does this refer? From where do we have such a direct experience?

Participant: From birth.

Professor Jung: Although the newborn is not consciously aware of it, the nervous system registers these events. Dreams that refer back to birth, and seem to be based on a perfect knowledge of anatomy, are not infrequent. This led Rank52 to the assumption, for instance, that all neuroses can be traced back to the trauma of birth. Birth is indeed a trauma, an impressive moment, and it is also possible that such an impression continues to have an effect throughout life, especially if there were complications at birth. But we must not generalize this fact.

Participant: Is this dream not about a “reversed” birth?

Professor Jung: That’s right, it is like a retrogressive birth, a going back into the womb, into the prenatal state. This immersion into the unconscious actually represents a figurative death, a frequent motif of the transformation process, standing in close connection to the symbolism of rebirth. This is not at all evident from the dream at first sight, but we may add it from our knowledge. The dream itself describes only the danger; it shows that in each transformation, and whenever a transition occurs, the ground may cave in, so that we fall down into an unconscious state. When are there such transitions in practical life?

Participant: At the beginning of school, at the development from childhood to adulthood, at the beginning of professional life.

Professor Jung: These are transitions, transformations in life, in which we change from one state into another, from a previous situation into a new one. This we can only achieve if we are at one with ourselves. A split personality will have difficulties in all these transitions, comparable to a sinking in water. What does this mean in concrete terms?

Participant: That we are in over our head.

Professor Jung: Quite right. We also say: “I can’t keep my head above water,” or “In such a situation you’ll go under.” The difficulties may vary greatly, it could be overwhelming affects, or experiences we can’t cope with, but these are always very deep experiences into which we sink, so to speak. It is a fact, by the way, that persons with splits are particularly destined to have such very deep-going experiences. Why?

Participant: So that the split may be overcome.

Professor Jung: Yes, fate imposes hard experiences on them, to hit them in their innermost being, where they are still at one with themselves, that is, in the instinct. With their split, such persons will always blunder into split situations. They will have to endure things that stand in sharpest contrast to each other. So, for example, they will have friends of completely different characters. In all these cases, those persons never know who they actually are. They don’t know: Am I white or am I black? I’m actually both, because I’m the friend of A and of B. Something is bound to happen here. This situation downright invites fate to intervene with a blow, so that deep regions are touched and may grow again as a unity. Split persons always generate split situations, conflict situations. To such persons in particular, to those who do not know who they are, it happens that they are particularly confronted with decisions, whereas other people can go on living in their unambiguous situations. The treatment of such split persons is not easy. We often simply do not manage to reunite the halves, which have come apart, into a whole. We can only say: Hopefully something really overwhelming will happen to them, so that they realize who they are.

So this dream points to the fateful necessity of having ultimate experiences, so that the point is touched where the person is still one. Such a person has to be completely torn apart at first to recompose himself anew. This last unity has to be found, and this will happen only if the person is wounded in his innermost being, most often by someone chosen by fate to be the hammer, because as a rule he can’t do it on his own.

4. Dream of a Five- to Six-Year-Old Boy of a Pyramid and a Glass House53

PRESENTED BY ANIELA JAFFÉ

Text: I see a pyramid in front of me. On its top there is a house made of glass. There is somebody in it. As I come nearer, I realize that it’s me.

Mrs. Jaffé: In this dream we have to distinguish between a vision, as also stressed by the introductory words (“I see . . . in front of me”), and an action, which confines itself to seeing—approaching—realizing.

The locale of the events is not specified. Certainly a strange or remote place is implied, because pyramids are quite unfamiliar in the boy’s environment, and still completely unknown to him at this age.

Dramatis personae:	The dreamer and his ego.
Exposition:	“I see a pyramid in front of me. On its top there is a house made of glass. There is somebody in it.”
Peripateia:	“I come nearer.”
Lysis:	“I realize that it’s me.”

If we let ourselves be affected by the dream image, we will get the feeling that nature somehow speaks with friendly irony here. Seen from an inner perspective, that is, from how the little dreamer experiences it, something extremely important happens to him: he encounters himself; he sees himself far away, at the top of an immense edifice, and, moreover, in a glass house, a veritable castle in the air—and yet at the same time he is standing below. From an outer perspective, that is, from a reflective or critical observer’s view, the image of the little “Johnny Look-in-the-Air”⁵⁴ gives us the impression of a little helpless child, who will perhaps soon trip over some minor obstacle, with his eyes astray up on high. And when this same little child is simultaneously enthroned on top of the pyramid, even as if imprisoned in a very transparent, though not fully comprehensible glass house, we can leave aside the seriousness of the events for the moment, and take pleasure in the serenity of the image, the meeting of the great and the little, of the above and the below.

Obviously, this vision of himself is meant to convey to the dreamer an insight into his own nature. This image seems to tell him: This is you. Leaving aside all amplifications, the image and the language say something like this: You are sitting up there, high in the sky, and it’s terribly difficult, perhaps even impossible, to come up and reach you. It is also doubtful if you yourself can come down; you may be doomed to stay up there forever in your proud solitude, and to spend your life in this all-too-bright little attic room.55 In addition, you are imprisoned in a glass cage, which protects you from all direct contact; but woe betide you if you move too suddenly in it, or, as boys do, throw stones—everything will go to pieces. When the sun shines it will probably get unbearably hot in your hothouse, and you will start to sweat and suffer. Certainly you can look far into the distance from up there, and no light will be able to conjure up your shadow on the walls of your castle; and should it appear far down below on the ground, you will probably not be able to make it out. It is beautiful and important to live on top of this mysterious giant edifice, and yet it is remote, lonely, and enigmatic. And, on top of all that, you must not forget that you are actually standing down there, helpless and little. But now the uncanny question arises: where is reality to be found here?—So that’s what the image and the words seem to suggest.

Now I would like to come to the amplificatons. We are dealing with the symbols of the pyramid, the glass house, and the encounter with oneself.⁵⁶ Let us deal with the pyramid first. In the dream text it only says: “I see a pyramid in front of me”—no further details about its form or dimension are revealed. But we will hardly prejudice the meaning of the dream if we assume that this is a building of immense proportions—there is room for a whole house on its top, and in most cases the term pyramid generally indicates, in common usage, a high building that rises above a quadratic base. In addition, most often there is still another qualification: a pyramid as it is found in Egypt is a tomb of a Pharaoh. Pyramids as sacred buildings, however, have been erected not only in Egypt, but also in Mexico, China, and Java, in completely different cultural environments. They are an expression of an archetypal image. Of the many observations that have been made on the construction of those pyramids, so mysterious to this day, I would like to single out only those that seem to be important for the understanding of the dream, acting on the assumption that this is about the Egyptian pyramid. It has been observed that the pyramids, in whose interior the mummy of a Pharaoh was conserved in a burial chamber, had a glossy, polished, and reflecting surface. The rising triangular areas acted like gigantic mirrors that during the day reflected the sunlight onto the land like a gigantic cone of light, and at night showed the stellar constellations. The hieroglyph for certain pyramids,57 therefore, means source of light, and various inscriptions indicate its light symbolism. Something very strange or even contradictory seems to lie in the fact that these of all buildings symbolize light and radiance, because with all the impact of their completely unstructured, immense surfaces they seem to represent the impenetrability of stone and the epitome of structured matter. This double aspect is also expressed in the composition of the form: with their greatest width, the surface areas solidly rest on the ground, and then narrow more and more toward the top; they seem almost to dematerialize. Finally, coming from four sides, the surfaces meet in one single point of no square dimension at all. This point has always been considered the crowning feature of the whole edifice, however, its most sacred and mystic place. Often the tops of Egyptian pyramids were gilded or made of a specially gleaming stone. It was assumed that after the Pharaoh’s death his soul, that is, his image, the Ka soul, would travel through the underworld and then be transformed into the god Osiris, or rise to Atum, the highest god of light, exactly at this top of his grave. In the pyramid of Borobudur in Java, the picture of Buddha is clearly visible on the lower terraces, surrounded by scenes from his life. On the middle terraces it stands alone, without any narrative framework. Higher up still, its portrayal is hardly visible any longer, and finally completely eludes the human eye on the uppermost terrace. The pyramids are huge central edifices rising above a quadratic base, with a strong emphasis on the top as the actual center of the towering rock mass. Such a central edifice is a body mandala, that is, a sacred area that offers not only protection, but also a place in whose center the god is born or has his home. These royal tombs, deliberately built for eternity in the third millennium B.C. (the Cheops pyramid was built around 2800 B.C.), make an immense, if remote, impression even today; they are perfect and inaccessible at the same time, and, like something final or absolute, extend from the dim and distant past into our age. In such a perfect form, which cannot be surpassed in its simplicity, there is no twilight zone in which fairy tales or legends could emerge. As if in awe, neither language nor popular belief have taken possession of these monuments, and dealt with or shaped their meaning. With great aplomb, however, Goethe wrote to Lavater in 1780, at the age of thirty one: “the desire to acuminate the pyramid of my existence, whose base was given to me as a foundation, as high up into the air as possible, prevails over everything else, and makes immediate forgetting nearly impossible. I must not tarry, for I am already far advanced in years, and perhaps fate breaks me in two in the middle, and the Babylonian Tower will remain blunt and unfinished. At least it should be said: He was of audacious design; and if I live the forces shall reach, God willing, up to the top.”

To conclude, the symbol of the pyramid provides the following indications for our dream: it is an archetypal image, a body mandala, in whose depths the body of the king rests as a mummy, and at whose summit the glorification of the soul takes place. The composition of the form displays how matter becomes dematerialized, and the arrangement of the reflecting surfaces shows how mass reflects the Eternal Light.

Before I consider the psychological conclusions for the dream or the dreamer’s personality, I would like to say a few things about the house of glass on top, because this house will not alter the meaning, but only reinforce what has been found out so far.

Referring to the eternal Jerusalem, lying quadratically on top of the mountain, it says in the Revelation of John: “and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were, transparent glass” (Revelation 21:21). As Professor Jung told us last year, this corresponds to the alchemical idea of the vitrum aureum, the golden glass, by which the lapis, the eternal stone, was meant. We remember that the tops of the pyramids were gilded in antiquity, or made of a gleaming stone, and we are surprised that a child’s unconscious puts the glass house of the eternal city at the one and only correct place. Just as the enormous mass of the pyramid leads up to the highest point, whose nature was experienced as spiritual, there occurs the slow transformation—as we learned last year—of the heavy, dark earth into the diamond, which in its transparency and invariability stands for the true nature of man, his eternal home and his boundary, his self. Seen as a whole, the pyramid and the glass house with someone in it on top become a symbol for man in his uniqueness. I envisage it as follows: deep down, far below the burial tomb of the king, there is a cistern, remotely connected to the river that bestows growth and life upon the land, following the changing rhythm of the river’s rising and sinking—an image of man’s deepest roots in the unconscious, which also connects him with transhuman life, far beyond his personal boundaries. Above this there rests the body of the king, man’s image of his ancestors, of his totem that is indestructible and lives within him like the mummy. The externally visible edifice rises in four planes (corresponding to the four functions) that eventually come together at one point at the top—an image of the bodily here and now, of daily material existence which, however, reflects the sun, the light, and the stars as a medium, thus bearing witness to them. The point at the top has no dimension, and yet it is of the hardest, indestructible quality, a crystal, a glasshouse, both an expression for consciousness of individuated man in its most developed form. By its astronomical orientation the edifice of the pyramid is set in time, yet its five-thousand-year-old existence seems to transcend time and announce eternity.

This image also roughly corresponds to the developmental line that Professor Jung mentioned in his lecture: the pyramid rises as a mountain, or as the world mountain Meru, from the quadratic base that corresponds to the division into four quarters. On its top there is again a rectangular base, the quaternitas, the glass house, the monastery, in which there lives the child of the union, the living being, the “someone” of the dream.

But now back to the dream text, in which it says: “as I come nearer, I realize that it’s me.” What occurs here is the following: what up to that moment had been intuition, a vision of someone, of homo, now suddenly concerns the dreamer directly. It is no longer a general problem, but his own. Simultaneously, the image changes in that it no longer represents something absolute, or some final state, but is subject to the dynamics of life and of change. To understand this image better, we have to revert once again to the meaning of the glass house. It is not only the eternal house in celestial Jerusalem or the lapis, but also means—as in the developmental line I just mentioned—the vessel, the vas, the retort, in which the transformation of man happens. In fairy tales this vessel also appears as a glass casket, in which the soul slumbers, waiting for salvation (Snow White in the casket of glass). In the Visio Arislei,58 an alchemical text, a triple glass house is the place where the heroes are condemned to death in great heat, only to find new life again. This vessel corresponds to the uterus, the place of realization, in which the homunculus, the light man, is created, and which is often depicted at the center of a mandala. In the language of symbols, triangles standing on a base—in our case, the surfaces of the pyramid that rise from a broad base up to the glass—are licking flames; and thus the vision says that flames erupt from the earthen depths of man, giving birth to the spiritual body, to what is eternal within him. For the child, this image seems to be like something that points to his own future. A comparison with the suffering of the heroes in the glass house of the Visio Arislei shows how much pain and sacrifice of light day consciousness this process will cost. Another parallel may confirm this. The Aztecs had the following custom: a man had to slowly climb the steps of a temple pyramid, symbolizing the slow rise of the sun. Once he reached the top, however, he was sacrificed: the sun begins to set.

With the insight in the dream: “I realize that it’s me,” the problem of the dreamer and his double also arises, and with it, finally, the whole spectrum of questions concerning the current situation of the child and the dreamer’s peculiarities and difficulties. As Professor Jung explained to us last winter, in the first years of life the child still lives in a very close relation to the prenatal stage, the Bardo life. The child is, so to speak, not yet fully born into reality, but still much closer to the primordial ideas than the adult, the realistic person. Invasions of the unconscious may happen, and images or symbols may appear, which far exceed the comprehension of infantile consciousness—like the image of the vision of the pyramid in our example. As we heard last winter, because of the great susceptibility of children, such invasions of the unconscious always represent a grave danger of splitting and of disintegration. The child is so fascinated by the archetypal image that hardly any other reality can exist beside it. If looking into a mirror59 appears in a dream after such archetypal images, in most cases this will signify a way of rescue, leading into reality. The mirror is the rational intellect, which clarifies and structures the seemingly overwhelming situation; when you look into it, you will have to believe in your own existence and will no longer be able to lose yourself. It seems strange that in this dream the healing look at oneself looks like an enormous split, so that doom and salvation coincide, so to speak. This may be due to the following: although the child below sees his ego far removed from himself and at a very great height, this ego is in a very special place, namely, at the center of a mandala, which not only offers protection, but—similar to the North Pole in a dream discussed in the last seminar—also has centralizing power and thus averts the danger of splitting, although it may not eliminate it altogether. But what does this image mean, the image of the child appearing at the top of the pyramid while simultaneously standing on the ground? We are reminded here of the Germanic figures of the Fylgjas, the “following spirits” that accompanied a person either as his double, or sometimes in the form of an animal, and which protected him or warned him of danger; we are reminded of accounts of witches who slept in their beds at night, yet were seen to ride to the Brocken;60 of appearances of persons who in reality were somewhere else entirely; and of reports of persons living or dead. The idea of a double ego is not alien to children; when they illustrate their dreams, for example, they often draw themselves not only in the dream scene, but also a second time on the side as they sleep in the bed. The Egyptians, according to whose belief the soul consisted of about fourteen parts or forces, know a part of the soul they called the Ka soul. It was immortal and its body, conceived as half physical and half spiritual, was absolutely identical with the person, even after his death. It was his double, his Doppelgänger. The hieroglyph for Ka shows the hands raised in prayer, which perhaps already indicate the desire for height and light with their movement.

Paracelsus, too, hypothesized another body besides the physical one, called the sidereal body by him, a half-material body that represented the reversed image of its counterpart. In De lunaticis, he writes: “so there are two bodies in man, one composed of the elements, the other of the stars; therefore, these two have to be well distinguished from each other. In death the elementary body is buried together with its spirit, the ethereal ones are consumed in the firmament, and the spirit of the God-image goes to Him of which it is the image.” Paracelsus assumes that even after death a person’s sidereal body will roam, and simulate the appearance of the dead person. It is like the inner mirror image of man, a body whose flesh is, in his words, subtle flesh, and which does not depend on doors or holes, but walks through walls without breaking anything. Long after the dissolution of the elementary body in the earth, this sideric body will be slowly consumed by the stars.

The alchemists also knew about this second body, the incorruptible body, which is taken out of the physical body in the opus and transformed to perfection. Here I would like to quote a passage from Professor Jung’s “Representations of Redemption in Alchemy.” There it says: “Ruland61 says, ‘Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.’ This astounding definition throws a quite special light on the fantasy processes connected with the opus. We have to conceive of these processes not as the immaterial phantoms we readily take fantasy-pictures to be, but as something corporeal, a ‘subtle body,’ semi-spiritual in nature.” And later it says about this imagination, according to an alchemical text: “since divine wisdom is only partly enclosed in the body of the world, the greater part of it is outside, and it imagines far higher things than the body of the world could conceive (concipere). And these things are outside nature: God’s own secrets. The soul is an example of this: it too imagines many things [ . . . ] outside the body, just as God does.” And, finally: imagination is, therefore, not “a question of actualizing those contents of the unconscious that are outside nature, that is, not a datum of our empirical world, and therefore a priori of archetypal character. The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality that can be adequately expressed [only] by the symbol.”⁶²

When we apply this to our dream we could say that the Ka soul, the sidereal or subtle body of the child, sits on top of the pyramid: in general terms, the desire for perfection and boundlessness, for salvation and immortality, embodied in the dreamer.

But let us not forget that at the same the child is still standing on the ground, in all the reality of his little helpless body, looking up at himself. The result is an image of the insoluble tension between limitedness and eternity, reality and dream, actuality and ideal, body and soul, mortality and immortality. From time immemorial the motif of man’s encounter with himself has existed, of the fateful and ominous appearance of the Doppelgänger. While the dual motif, for example, of the Dioscuri or the two friends in the Upanishads, also expresses this dichotomy, these myths also give an indication of how the conflict can be sustained, even show that the two poles actually belong together, and that the two can form a unity only with each other, despite their dissimilarity. Both unite their forces in a joint act, in which each of them does what he can do best, and the two complement each other. Together the Dioscuri fight for the cattle herds, and despite all vicissitudes evoked by their past, Zeus grants them the final victory. In the Upanishads, for example, the two connected friends embrace one and the same tree; one eats the berries, while the other just looks down, to experience the tree in that way. It is different if the problem is expressed by the double; this always indicates that the problem is experienced in all its tragedy, nearly without a possible solution: the person who encounters his own ego no longer actually knows where his own reality is, but tries to identify first with the one ego, then with the other, only soon to experience the painful disappointment that he is at home neither here nor there, neither above nor below, neither within nor without. It is probably no coincidence that in Romanticism a great number of stories about doubles came into being. Tieck, Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Chamisso, and Heine write about this topic as an expression of the suffering from outer reality, which stands in a seemingly irreconcilable contrast with the experienced inner world. Unfortunately, it would lead too far to list all the Doppelgänger motifs here, and to give an account of the partly comical, partly tragic experiences and entanglements of the heroes and their mirror-egos, shadow-egos, or wax figure-egos. I would just like to mention that there was a renaissance of the literature on the Doppelgänger or double ego around the turn of the century; Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Stefan George, later Franz Werfel and, in modified form, also Herman Hesse and Hofmannsthal wrote about this topic. While the romanticists seem to have identified rather with inner reality, the turn of the century was a time when the development of consciousness “peaked” (to stay in the image of the vision), when one was about to tackle the solution to the riddles of the world with the intellect, and the intellect only, and when man, blinded by the results, identified only too readily with this efficient consciousness. In such one-sidedness, however, the double appears and will again have to lead man to the other side, which lies in the shade, in the night, in the unconscious.

To conclude, I would like to try to draw inferences from the dream image regarding the personality of the dreamer and his problem situation. As the dream recurred repeatedly, we are justified in assuming that something of special importance to the dreamer’s life is expressed in it, something that the unconscious repeatedly shows him by this. This importance is further underlined by the location where the child has the vision in the dream; although it is not specified, it is surely a remote and alien place, where important and meaningful things happen. I have tried at first to draw conclusions from the image of the vision alone, without any amplifications, regarding the child’s personality and his difficulties. This could be summarized as follows: this is a child who is up very “high,” in the glass house, meaning he is not yet fully in reality, but still very close to Bardo life. He is, so to speak, still in a supernatural uterus, with the possible effect that he lives in his fantasies and intuitions. To his environment the child will perhaps not let show too much—in the dream he is also standing on the ground. Basically, however, his adaptation to reality is only superficial, a pseudo-adaptation, because his soul is somewhere else entirely. But this inhibits the whole development of the personality, so that the child seems infantile. Being enclosed in the glass house intensifies the importance of the isolation. He will have difficulty getting in touch with other children, and he will radiate a chilly atmosphere, which in turn will make it difficult for others to reach out to him. Naturally the child will suffer for it, but in a way he will also feel important. He may be one of the many children who believe that they secretly descend from a royal couple, which gives them an inner feeling of superiority. The glass house could also indicate that the enclosure was reinforced by the parents’ spoiling the child, by an all-too-pointed education, which spoils the child—the glass house is also the hothouse—and produces a delicate, shrinking violet, instead of letting the child see the world of street life early enough. Soon enough the fear of his own evil will rise in the dreamer; for in his glass house he can be seen from all sides, he is under constant observation, and he does not have that wonderful place where children keep their secrets. This is his actual poverty.

From the frequent recurrence of the dream we may probably conclude that the tension between the two egos, between inner and outer reality, expressed therein, will still remain the problem of the grown man in much later years. When, in the development of this child, the great amnesia will have obscured the Bardo world with its primeval images, such a dream will shine like a spark from the lost paradise, and remind him that he, who lives down on earth, also has an immortal, versatile soul of divine nature. From the image, in which he sees this soul out there, far away, split off from him, and nearly unreachable, we might conclude that later on in life he will identify too one-sidedly with the conscious ego. Then, in the revealing look up to the high ego on the pyramid, however, he will be fascinated like a Narcissus by his own mirror image and by inner reality, blinded by the boundless possibilities of the soul. In fantasies and daydreams he will, for instance, climb heights that are denied to him by reality. Such a superior, light, and yet outwardly experienced image of the inner ego, however, will act as a frightening and ever-present demand for perfection, that is, to adjust to his height as well as possible. Each deviation from that will be experienced as a painful disappointment, through which the remoteness and dreamlike unreality of the ideal will be felt again and again. The results will be a feeling of his own inferiority and fear of life.

This image of the oppositeness of inner and outer reality, of ego and double-ego, however, also expresses the dreamer’s potentiality to reach greater consciousness despite all the dangers. Novalis says that no one knows himself if he knows only himself, and if he is not also somebody else. As Professor Jung said at the last meeting, each creation is preceded by being split in two. Here the dream has portrayed the soul in its two great opposites and, in addition, has indicated the way to change. Thus we may hope that this tension between the two souls will lead the dreamer—or has led him already—to the place where he will be able to tolerate the dichotomy, that is, to himself.

Professor Jung: The dream was told by a man whom I came to know when he was between forty-five and fifty years old. He was a man who had been on the “quest”63 all his life, and in the course of this search finally had come to me. Already when he was a child he was unable to take the world as completely real, but was eccentric and dreamy. Later he had difficulty in choosing a profession; he finally chose jurisprudence, but only half-heartedly, and only because he had to do something, after all. He then was a judge in the colonies for a couple of years, and worked in this capacity after a fashion and with more or less success. He greatly suffered in this life, because basically he was not interested in his job. He did not want to accept that being a jurist or a judge, with more or less chance of promotion, would be the great thing about life. So he never put his heart and soul into it. It was as if he had more than one string to his bow. After much hesitation, he married; the marriage was not a good one, however, but full of difficulties. But then he only put half his heart in it, and who knows where he put the other half. Generally, deep down he was unconscious of this whole other side. Only sporadically he had some little philosophical adventures, in which he looked for what his profession did not offer him. On one of these occasions he came across one of my books, which made a great impact. So then he came to me.

The dream clearly shows the other side of his nature. He himself, however, never made the connection to his state. From this you can see the extent of his split. With one foot he seemingly stood in eternity, with the other in reality. As the dream recurred many times, we may assume that it was very important to him and quite characteristic for the course his life took. It is actually a vision that contains, similar to the dreams already discussed, something completely unchildlike. The dream is very abstract and of a very general and extremely typical character. What do you think this implies for the dreamer?

Participant: That he has a normal constitution.

Professor Jung: Yes, that is correct. Or, in case there should be a neurosis, it would certainly not be serious, because the vision is not chaotic at all. On the contrary, the archetype is expressed with remarkable precision. But what is the difference from the previous dream of the bridge, which also was of a general nature?

Participant: Here the connection to everyday life is missing completely.

Professor Jung: Yes, this is an image you won’t encounter in reality; it is completely unreal, as opposed to the image of the quay bridge, which in its entirety is taken from the experiential sphere. The vision of the glass house is taken from a completely different experiential world, and even appears to be fabricated. If I hadn’t known the man personally, I’d be in doubt whether the image hadn’t been invented.

Participant: Does the dream perhaps stem from such a deep psychical layer that it is hardly possible to link its images with the outer world?

Professor Jung: Yes, the dream is a pure product of the prenatal psyche, and belongs, so to speak, to a virginal layer that hasn’t had any contact yet with the outer world. In such cases the images persist in their original form. This glass house does not correspond to any experience; otherwise, the dreamer might perhaps have rather talked of a “lantern,” and then tried to make a connection between this strange object and some known form. Here, however, it remains completely unreal. Even if he had once seen a pyramid, there certainly was no glass house on top.

During this winter term we will deal with some more of those abstract dreams. The dream in which four gods rise from the four corners also comes from layers that had not been in touch with the world before. In all these cases with such remote images, we have to consult an extremely multilayered symbolism to reach an understanding. Let us only add some few remarks to the exhaustive paper of Mrs. Jaffé.

It was mentioned that the glass house standing on top of the pyramid represents its center. We also find this idea of the vessel as the center of the pyramid elsewhere, for example, in the Maya culture. During the excavations of the great pyramid, a lime vessel was found beneath the altar inside, there where the ancient temple had stood. It contained a wonderful work of art in the form of a mandala, made of about three thousand small turquoise stones. It portrays four snakes aligned in such a way that they point to the four world regions.

The vessel also plays a crucial role in alchemy, where it appears in the most varied forms. As you have heard, it can also be a glass house, the domus vitrea. Often an old man sits in it, the senex, sweating, for the glass house is a sweat house. In the Visio Arislei,64 the king’s daughter and son are imprisoned in the triple glass house under the sea. It is unbearably hot there. In this heat the transformation of the dead prince takes place. To perform such transubstantiations, the alchemists often used round glass bowls, called uteri, whose roundness indicated perfection.

A beautiful parallel can be found in the Mountain Chant of the Navajo Indians.⁶⁵ It is a healing ceremony to which they subject themselves when they have had a bad dream, for instance, or do not feel well for some other reason. In this ceremony, a circle of about 650 to 1,000 feet in diameter is staked out. In the center of this circle, which represents a mandala, there is the medicine lodge with the sweat lodge⁶⁶ at its side. The latter is a little round hut built of branches and earth. Often the rainbow goddess is drawn with colored sand on its top, leaning over the hut as over her own uterus. The hut is heated up and the man to be healed crawls into it and starts to sweat. Do you know of a parallel in the heroic myths?

Participant: The night sea journey in the womb of the whale.

Professor Jung: Yes, there the hero sweats so much that he loses all his hair⁶⁷ and reemerges bald-headed, like a newborn child. As a matter of fact, he is reborn indeed.

In India the sweating corresponds to the tapas.⁶⁸ This is a kind of self-brooding. By the concentration of the soul powers on this one point, on the central point of the self, it is hatched like an egg. One is enclosed in it oneself, as in the retort or in the uterus. Where do we find similar ideas on transubstantiation?

Participant: In the Christian church, in the ritual of consecrating the baptismal water.

Professor Jung: Yes, this ritual of the benedictio fontis was performed on Holy Saturday. It goes back to the seventh or eighth century and is full of mysterious things. The regulations for this ritual are laid down in the Missale Romanum.69 After certain preparations of the water, for example, separating the water in the form of a cross, exorcizing, and benediction, there follows the fertilization with the help of the Paschal Candle. It is thrice dipped into the baptismal font, which contains the sacral water, the third time down to the fundus, the bottom of the font. This imparts the facultas regerandi to the baptismal water, the power to give new birth to man. Man is reborn into a new childhood through being touched by this magic water and is completely purified. This fertilization of the uterus ecclesia is a veritable coniunctio, because the candle represents Christ Himself, and the baptismal water the mater gratia, the Mother of Grace. In this union the transformation of the water to the aqua permanens occurs, the eternal divine water, as it is called in alchemy.

So here, too, we find that wondrous vessel in which a transformation takes place. Do you know of another parallel in the older literature?

Participant: The kratér of Zosimos.

Professor Jung: Exactly, we find this vessel of transformation in the writings of Zosimos, an alchemist of the third century A.D.⁷⁰ It probably goes back to the fourth tract of the Corpus Hermeticum, in which it is said that God had sent a vessel from heaven to earth, in which the humans could submerge in order to reemerge renewed in the state of ennoia.⁷¹

A medieval variation of this kratér is the Grail. It is a miraculous bowl from which Christ is said to have taken the Last Supper. Another legend says that Joseph of Arimathea had collected Christ’s blood in it. It is also a blood vessel, filled with the blood of Christ, with the spirit of God. The power of giving man new life by filling him with its spirit is inherent in both the kratér and the Grail. Wolfram von Eschenbach brings another version of the story of the Grail.72 Do you know about it?

Participant: He talks about the Grail as a stone.

Professor Jung: Yes, for him it is a stone. Wolfram von Eschenbach quotes a very strange expression in connection with the Grail, namely, lapsit exillis. Now this is bungled Latin; he himself did not understand Latin. Philologists have tried their hands at its interpretation in all kinds of ways. One of them interpreted it as “ex illis,” “from those” (i.e., “from those eternal stars”); another as “ex coelis,” “from the heavens.” In my view, however, this “lapsit exillis” could refer to the lapis. There is evidence for this. Arnoldus de Villanova, a doctor living around the year 1250, left some alchemical texts, in which the stone is called “lapis exilis” in a hexameter, meaning that the stone is one that can be had vili pretio, cheaply. It is found everywhere, in the streets, in dung, in toilets. An alchemist held that people would sell it at a quite different price if they only knew its value. This stone is, of course, the cornerstone that was discarded by the builders, and that is an allegoria Christi. The Christian Church also knew about the secret similarity between the stone and Christ. In the ritual of striking fire, the new fire, which is an image of Christ, is struck out of the cornerstone, the lapis angularis.⁷³ In 1330, Petrus Bonus for the first time expressed the idea that the stone was an allegory of Christ.⁷⁴

So this enigmatic expression, “lapsit exillis,” can be interpreted as “lapis exilis,” that insignificant, unimportant stone, to which nobody pays attention, although it is the greatest treasure. Do you know about a passage in the Old Testament where the stone plays a role?

Participant: The rolling stone in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel.75

Professor Jung: Yes, that dream speaks about a great, tall, and bright image of a terrible form. It was made of four different materials—gold, silver, brass, and iron—and its feet were of clay. While the king looked at the image, a stone rolled down the mountain and smote the image upon its feet, so that this great being collapsed. The strange thing about it is that the stone broke away from the mountain “without hands,” without being touched by anybody. In the Book of Daniel this stone became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. Daniel’s prophecy that this stone will smite and destroy all kingdoms, but shall stand forever itself, might well have been why Christ was compared to it in the patristic literature. Where else does the mountain appear in connection with the precious stone?

Participant: In your lecture⁷⁶ you mentioned that the city of Meru is on top of the mountain.

Professor Jung: Yes, this connection is found in the Indian ShriChakra-Sambhara Tantra. We also find it in alchemy, where the city, the vas hermeticum, is lying on top of the mons.⁷⁷

Often the image of the vitrum aureum, the golden glass, appears in connection with the idea of the eternal city. As you have heard in the paper, it says in the Revelation of John: “and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass” (21:18). What does this glass indicate?

Participant: Something hard and indestructible.

Professor Jung: This is characteristic not of the glass, but of stone in general. The wondrous thing about glass is the diaphanitas, its transparency. One has also tried to express the spiritual nature of the stone or the vessel with the help of this characteristic. The same is true when we talk about the lapis spiritualis, the lapis invisibilitatis, or the lapis aethereus, or about the diamond stone light as water. All these expressions are meant to illustrate the spiritual existence of the stone; they are about an object that is a body, yet at the same time transparent.

The glass house in the present dream also points to this spiritual existence. Mrs. Jaffé quite correctly interprets the Doppelgänger in the glass house as corpus subtile, as a subtle body,78 a spiritual mirror image, so to speak. One creates oneself in this transparent vessel; the double in the glass house is like a second one, who is also there, and who awaits his preparation there. This is a vision of what we have to call the Self. There the transformation to one’s own self occurs, the other within us is consolidated there. This other has miraculous qualities: he is transparent and has a subtle and incorruptible body. For the time being, he is still in a suspended state; he has not yet become. Through the union with the human being, he is clothed in matter, thus acquiring actual existence in actu and is saved from his potential existence. This idea is also at the base of the homunculus, that miraculous being that, so to speak, creates himself in the stone.⁷⁹

In the dream, the glass house is on top of the pyramid, and so there is also a connection between the double and the king, resting in the tomb as a mummy. The lapis is thus related to the grave, to death. Do you know anything from alchemy about this?

Participant: Before the lapis comes into being, the old king, the old sun, has to die.

Professor Jung: What does that mean—the old king, the old sun?

Participant: The prevailing opinions have to be overcome before something new can be adopted.

Professor Jung: Yes, what has ruled until then has to die and be buried so that the lapis can come into being. A basic idea in alchemy is expressed therein: the ruling principle, that which had been sun, consciousness, the aurum vulgare,⁸⁰ has to sink like the grain of wheat in the earth, so that it will be transformed into the eternal substance, into the incorruptible body. This suffering ruling principle is very often personified in the king, who, for example, calls from the depths: “Help me!” Often he greatly suffers from water, be it that he suffers from dropsy, or be it that he lies half-drowned in the sea. How do we have to conceive this state in psychological terms? When are we saturated with water to such an extent?

Participant: When we are unconscious.

Professor Jung: Yes, when we have sunk completely into the unconscious we suffer from “dropsy.” It can also happen that somebody sort of drowns himself by drinking a vast quantity of water. This happened to the king in the Aenigma Merlini, for example. Before he rode into the battle, he drank so much water that he dissolved himself. Afterward he was put together again by Egyptian doctors.81

These are illustrations of the fact that what rules has to go under, to make room for a different, renewed consciousness. As we have seen, this other consciousness is personified by the double, enclosed in the glass house. As you know, it is crucial that the dreamer unite himself with this corpus subtile. What does the dream tell about that?

Participant: The child stands on the ground beside the pyramid, so he is far away from it.

Professor Jung: Yes, there is a split. The dreamer has never really known who he is, where he actually belongs. You will find such a doubleness in those numerous people in whose soul prenatal remnants still exist. These may rise in visions or dreams, but mostly sink back into the unconscious again. It is only in a psychological treatment that these images are again remembered. The dreamer told me the dream more or less as a curiosity, but I could infer the core of his whole life from it. He lacked precisely this self-realization, the spiritual existence. His change subsequently showed that this was exactly what he had needed. The proof was that he then became a contented man. When he was told the meaning of the dream, both currents flowed together. Up to then they had never come together, and he had never really known: am I in this one or in the other one? Now he became a whole. He had found his soul. The two halves that were united were the man of consciousness, the ego, the mortal being, so to speak, and that other side, that complex of emotional values and attributes which accompanies us as a vague anxiety as long as we have not extracted the eternal being, the spark, the spinthēr82 in it.

Such a dream can be an experience of the greatest importance for somebody. If he grasps its meaning, it will become an experience for him that he will value more than all the kingdoms on earth. These are experiences we cannot rationalize. Neither can we argue about them, just as we cannot argue about Paul and the great vision he had on the road to Damascus. The transformation occurs when that inner growth, with all its original values and implicit meanings, enters into the empirical world. The experience of this wholeness can be so all-embracing that it has actually been called the medicina catholica, the panacea, the alexipharmakon, the antitoxin against all toxins. The highest attributes have always been ascribed to this idea, not out of rational consideration but because it expresses the deepest inner experiences of man.

5. Dream of a Five-Year-Old Boy of the Beloved Girl⁸³

PRESENTED BY DR. EMMA STEINER⁸⁴

Text: He sees a girl in the toilet, washing her hands. He loved her very much, but was very shy. He feels a pain of separation. The dream recurred again and again until his thirtieth year.

Dr. Steiner: This is not an actual dream, but a vision. Let us make a note of the fact that the dreamer himself only watches, that he is passive. This passivity will be the starting point of our interpretation in the second part. The dream has no lysis, therefore, and that is probably the reason for its perpetual recurrence.

Locale:	The toilet.
Dramatis personae:	The dreamer and the girl.
Peripateia:	The dreamer watches the girl wash her hands.

Let us proceed to the amplification. In the toilet: Even if we have to assume that it is a modern, hygienic, sparkling restroom, the place is still somehow suspect. The toilet has always been considered a gloomy and uncanny place, full of dangers, full of uncanny events. This is one of the reasons, apart from the obvious hygienic ones, why our ancestors did not include the toilet in the main house; a separate small hut, the Hüsli,85 was erected in the yard. Gradually, the toilet was built nearer and nearer to the house, until it became an annex. But even so, the toilet was considered a haunted place, where ghosts and devils were up to their tricks, and which one did not dare to enter alone at night. In Iceland, Scandinavia, Germany, and Arabia, too, to mention only a few examples, the toilet is seen as the place where the spirits of the dead and the devils appear.⁸⁶ In an Irish monastic regulation the toilet is described as such a place, and the monks are given a blessing formula that they have to speak when entering it. This concept of the toilet as an ominous place can also be found in various Nordic myths. In the saga of Thorstein, King Olaf expressly warns his guest against going to the toilet alone at night. Thorstein does it nevertheless and has to survive a dangerous adventure with a devil, who reveals himself as the spirit of a dead knight fallen in battle. Thorstein is saved only by the fact that at the last moment the church bells begin to ring. In a Sigurd legend, too, the shadows of death spirits appear in the toilet. The same idea—that this place is full of spirits—is widespread in Germany. A report by Thietmar von Merseburg⁸⁷ tells how uncanny demons rose from the toilet in the sickroom of a monastery, much to the horror of a gravely ill man. In the Canton of Aargau, people often say that if you let the child sit alone in the toilet, the Hoggema will come and get it. Healing magic and popular medicine also have often made use of the toilet.