Visions Seminar

2 December 1931  Visions Seminar  Lecture IV

Before I begin with the visions I want to show you some pictures.

We were speaking last time of the transformation of the principles of the Romanesque or Norman style into the Gothic, and Mr. Baumann has been kind enough to bring some pictures today which illustrate that.

They are chiefly of French Norman churches.

A particularly interesting one is this purely Norman motif in which animals crowd up a pillar on top of each other, and on top of the whole lot is man.

And there are some typical capitals consisting of animals and mythological monsters fighting with men.

One picture shows the principles of the so-called transition style, where the animals begin to be replaced by the plant, which of course leads straight to the Gothic.

The last of the series is the famous Prince’s portal of Bamberg Cathedral, where that plantlike character of the Gothic figures is particularly obvious.

One figure is standing upon the shoulders of another; they are like pillars, and pillars always have the tree quality.

A Gothic cathedral gives one the impression of a beech wood or a pine wood, anrl the human figure here assumes the same character.

We discussed the question of those two archetypal styles last time, in connection with the transformation of the animal into a tree, the strange fact of the bull that came down from the altar stone, and the tree that grew upon it.

Our patient seems now to be invoking the birds that live in the branches, for they descend upon her. What do the birds

symbolize?

Miss Taylor: Her intuitions.

Mrs. Crowley: Would they not be more the representatives of the Holy Ghost?-messengers, as it were?

Dr: Jung: Many little Holy Ghosts?

I think that would be depreciating the Holy Ghost a bit; if there are so many little editions he loses his uniqueness.

But they might be very ordinary birds.

Do you remember the man in the Jardin des Tuileries who feeds crumbs to the sparrows?

They descend upon him, but they have nothing to do with the Holy Ghost.

And you have often seen pictures of pigeons alighting on women without assuming that they are Holy Ghosts; we have rather a carnal idea about them.

For those white pigeons are also associated with what?

Mrs. Crowley: They are symbols of peace.

Dr. Jung: Oh, Mr. Ford was the main originator of that peace idea-the famous ship with the white doves.

Mr. Allemann: They are the birds of Venus.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the dove is the bird of Astarte, the goddess of love; it is a very unholy bird.

I remember a woman who was living at the Hotel Sonne in Kiisnacht once complained about the very indecent behavior

of the pigeons there; she discovered why they were called the birds of Venus.

They are really a very erotic crowd. So it is strange that such a bird should be the Holy Ghost.

It shows the very interesting female nature, also a bit of the hidden story of the Holy Ghost.

Her name was Sophia originally, and according to Gnostic teaching Sophia was the last form of a rather scandalous series of women.

It has always been terribly shocking, but we must mention it.

Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom, and in the early church the Holy Ghost was understood to be Sophia, the female corresponding to the male god, the wife of God and the mother of the Redeemer.

Later on that view was designated as heresy, but there are still traces of it. And that is the dove.

Sophia was the Gnostic idea of wisdom, a sort of abstract concept, yet it was very much personified.

You find her in the Bible.

She is described in that last chapter of Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, it is almost a personal figure, most tangible.

Ecclesiastes was of a very late date and was influenced by Alexandrian philosophy; it is a most remarkable piece of philosophy, a worldly, irreligious book.

Now that figure of wisdom is a maternal figure.

It is the highest form of the anima, one could say-the spiritual woman, or the universal mother-but originating in the beginning of things as Chawwa, or Eve, the primordial earthly mother.

There were four stages in that series of women. Chawwa would be the first, and Sophia is the fourth.

The second is Helen of Troy, and that Helen is referred to in the famous legend of Simon Magus, who plays such a role in the Acts of the Apostles.

Simon Magus is a tremendous figure who appears even in modern theology; the famous Tubingen school suggests that he was no other than St. Paul.

That is doubtful, yet it is discussed as a real possibility.

He was a great opponent of St. Peter, and it is said that, in the contest between Simon Magus and St. Peter, the early differences between the infant church of St. Peter and the claims of St. Paul appear.

Of course later on the church did everything to wipe out all traces of that controversy.

According to legend Simon Magus was a great sorcerer, he was called the arch-heretic, and he was supposed to be the father of the Gnosis. As a matter of fact he was not; he was apparently a contemporary of the Apostles, and the Gnosis existed before that time; Gnostic monasteries were described by Philo the Jew in 20 A.D.

We must also assume that the man who initiated Christ was John the Baptist, and he was surely pre-Christian.

Simon Magus was said to be a wise man and a wanderer,  ike Apollonius of Tyana, another great sorcerer, a man very similar to Simon Magus.

Now on one of his peregrinations Simon Magus went to Tyre in Phoenicia, and there in a brothel he found a girl in whom he recognized immediately the reincarnation of Helen of Troy.

She was quite a young girl, and he took her with him, and from that time on she always traveled with him.

So the wise man was with a woman of bad reputation, a prostitute. Helen of Troy, as you know, was a woman with a pretty bad reputation, but symbolically she is the second stage of the universal mother.

The third stage is Mary, the Mother of God.

That is most shocking. The church hated the idea and so it was repressed; it was naturally considered by the apologist literature of the church as a particular example of Gnostic offense.

Yet that story has been preserved in those old Gnostic fragments, and it can be interpreted as the true and unadultered

development of the anima. The first form of a man’s anima is his mother.

Eve the mother of all human beings, and the series culminates in Sophia. It is a Western form of the Kundalini yoga.

Mrs. Baynes:

What would you call Mary in the series?

Dr: Jung: What would you call her?

Mrs. Baynes: Oh, but I asked you first!

Dr: Jung: But my dear audience must think too! It is very simple.

The second stage is Helen, the typical adulterous woman; she ran away from her most respectable husband with Paris, that nice Valentino.

They went together to Troy and then there was that awful war-a terrible nuisance!

Magus’s infatuation with the woman he believed to be Helen of Troy.

If you have not read Helen of Troy, by the way, by your famous compatriot, you must do so.

It is most instructive, a remarkable piece of psychology.

Helen, then, was an adulterous woman, and if you look at it with unprejudiced eyes,  Mary was an adulterous woman too; she had an illegitimate relation with the Holy Ghost, and Christ would be the illegitimate child.

This story is found in old Jewish traditions about the origin of Jesus, in the Toldoth Jeshu, a book which was burned by the

church a number of times in the Middle Ages because it was considered to be most blasphemous.

In that book, it is said that Mary, though of royal blood, was very poor.

She was a woman’s hairdresser, and she had an affair with an Egyptian soldier named Pandira, and the boy born out

of that illegitimate union was called Jesus-Jesus, the son of Pandira.

So the story of the Holy Ghost is reduced to a very personal, rather delicate affair.

Yet that illegitimate relationship to the Holy Ghost is always on a higher level.

It is no longer the ordinary adulterous woman, or the street prostitute, it is the prostitute of the spirit. The bridge which leads from the one figure to the other, one might say, is the antique concept of the hierodule; doulos is the Greek word for slave, and hieros makes it the sacred slave-they were the slaves of the sanctuary.

There were temples with women priestesses who were also prostitutes, where prostitution was a sort of sacred rite.

That concept unites these two figures, Helen and Mary; the hierodule contains the lower form, Helen, and also the higher form, Mary.

The way from Chawwa to Helen is clear. Chawwa is the very passive earth that is fertilized by the sun, the completely inactive, merely conceiving primordial woman.

Then the next stage is a sort of progress, no longer the woman who merely conceives, but the pleasure-seeking woman who is looking for somebody definite-there is the element of choice.

The earth woman can be fertilized by anything that treads upon her, but the second stage is already the woman who seeks and who chooses, who is still collective but with some selective activity, some personal will connected with it.

Then in the third stage, that rather collective quality comes to an end.

It is now the exclusive woman that borders on the sphere of the spirit.

Mrs. Crowley: Very much like the Magna Mater?

Dr. Jung: Yes, but the antique Magna Mater was more at the Helen stage, because the cult of the Magna Mater was connected with temple prostitution.

Mrs. Crowley: Yet she meant the divine.

Dr. Jung: But in earlier times she did not have that aspect.

She took on that more spiritual aspect at the time of Christianity, when her cult was parallel with the cult of Mithra.

Mrs. Crowley: But Astarte?

Dr. Jung: Astarte was the Helen stage.

Of course, there was the spiritual aspect too from the very beginning, yet the cult was orgiastic, it was on a lower level.

Dr. Schlegel: On the other hand Mary is represented with the moon.

Dr. Jung: Oh yes, and Helen was also Selene. Selene is the Greek word for moon.

We know also that Isis and Astarte were moon goddesses, and Mary has been represented in famous pictures as standing on the moon.

Dr. Schlegel: The Madonna by Murillo.

Dr. Jung: Yes, there are a number, and also in Gothic sculpture, but all that does not take away the spiritual aspect of Mary.

In Sophia we reach the stage where the earthly quality completely disappears; therefore the personal or human character vanishes.

Chawwa is more earth than human, and Sophia is more spirit than human. Helen is the human stage.

If you meditate a bit on this series, you will learn a great deal about the anima of a man. Also about the character of women.

But you must look at it with unprejudiced eyes and not be shocked; the truth has peculiarly paradoxical aspects.

Mrs. Fierz: ls not the earth mother in the former visions a parallel with the first stage?

Dr. Jung: Yes, that earth mother is really the earth, Chawwa.

Mrs. Fierz: And now where would we be?

Dr. Jung: You are a bit higher up now, you are somewhere between Helen and Mary.

Mrs. Crowley: It is more or less the relationship to the animus?

Dr. Jung: It means the possibility of a relationship to the animus, but the funny thing is that our civilization really starts at the top.

We imagine that we are the happy proprietors of Sophia.

And there is hardly any woman who does not occasionally play with the idea of being a little Mary, particularly when she is misunderstood.

Frau Stutz: I think there is the same fundamental idea in Faust. Dr. Jung: Well, Faust contains the history of the development of the anima, and Gretchen is the first stage.

Gretchen would be the unconscious woman coming up as far as Helen.

Mary is in the second part of the book. The idea is also substantiated in the legend of Mary of Egypt.

Do you know that story?

Princess v. Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen: She was a prostitute and ran away from her husband, and her lover was drowned.

Dr. Jung: That was her early life, but later she became a great saint.

And once she was traveling, I don’t remember what her sacred errand was, but it was for the church.

Princess v. Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen: She was bringing the Host to the dying.

Dr. Jung: Ah yes, and for that purpose she had to cross a river at all costs.

But the man who should have taken her over demanded her as the fare, so she had to prostitute herself to him in order to fulfill the holy purpose.

This Mary of Egypt turns up in the second part of Faust as one of the four penitent women who plead with the Mater Gloriosa; Gretchen is another, and farther on in the book the celestial mother appears.

Then at the very end of the second part is the passage about ”Das Ewig Weibliche,” the eternal feminine, and that is Sophia.

So the whole scale is in Faust in these four forms.

Now our patient is, as I said, moving somewhere between Helen and Mary, but in the opposite sense; she has not developed up from Eve, she is really coming down.

The situation is reversed; she comes down because our civilization only goes about as far down as Mary, and below it is all unconscious.

We imagine that everything is in heaven and has no roots in the earth.

And they have not, that is why they have no sap, they are dried up with living; but through analysis, or through opening

up the gates of Hades, the sap begins to rise again.

She is now in the upper regions gathering the thoughts that come from that tree; the birds are again understood as from within-they are not the pigeons in the Jardin des Tuileries.

It is as if all the canals were filled with the original liquid; when the contact with the earth is reestablished, the blood comes up, the sap rises and fills the remotest branches of the tree once more.

Certainly that tree must be living because it is alive with birds, and they are symbols, winged beings, which since time immemorial have meant psychical facts, what one calls thoughts or ideas or intuitions.

Anything that has to do with the mind has an air quality.

As fishes are always contents of the sea, the unconscious, so birds are the contents of the mind or the spirit or the air-mental facts.

It is the same tree which we encountered in a former vision.

You remember she transformed into a tree; there she was identical with it, whilst here we have it as a detached vision.

It is the tree of yoga, the natural growth of          the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.

Or the tree of knowledge, of wisdom, which naturally contains thoughts.

So as soon as her development reaches the stage of the tree, it begins to function through the birds-the results of the life of the tree.

This vision ends with the statement that she is now filled with thoughts, but we don’t know what thoughts.

The next series of visions starts with the picture of marching men.

She says:

I beheld many men marching; I stood with the multitude beside the road watching them pass. They cried in a loud voice: “We are the way.”

Then I left the multitude beside the road and I entered into the ranks of the marching men.

Do you see in this picture the continuity with the vision before?

Mrs. Crowley: They are like the many birds.

Dr. Jung: Yes, many birds or many thoughts are here many men; and many men means of course the animus, who is, as you know, a multitude.

That the birds appear as men means what?

Mr. Baurnann: They are the collective opinions.

Dr. Jung: That is an interpretation, but I mean the psychological phenomenon.

It is important to read the symbols in such a way that one learns from their form in what condition they are in the mind of the patient, for from that form one can control or criticize the actual mental condition.

It makes a great difference whether the thoughts appear in the form of birds or in the form of men.

Mrs. Crowley: They are more human.

Mrs. Sigg: More conscious.

Dr. Jung: Not necessarily, something in the head of somebody else is not necessarily more conscious than if it were on a tree.

Dr. Schlegel: More spiritual.

Dr. Jung: That is not quite certain.

Dr. Barker: The opposite sex is constellated.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and in that case there is attraction; where there is opposition, there is attraction, so the thoughts will be attractive.

That is represented in the vision-she is holding up her hands and the birds come to her-but as long as they are birds there is very little psychical rapport; they are very shy and at any time may fly away.

But when birds take on human forms, and particularly the opposite sex, it means that a union is possible.

The unconscious uses that symbolism to express the idea of union or reconciliation, as for instance, the so-called sexual transference is used by the unconscious as a bridge.

Where there is a great gap between the analyst and the patient a sexual transference appears in order to bridge the gulf, a transference that disappears as a compulsory phenomenon as soon as the rapport is established.

Here, then, the birds appearing in the forms of men have lost their original strangeness, they become men and approach her.

At first she merely watches them, and then she leaves the multitude and joins their ranks.

What does that mean?

Mr. Allernann: That she accepts the thoughts and goes with them.

Dr. Jung: Or rather, that the thoughts accept her; it is a union, but she does not accept the thoughts, the thoughts accept her.

You see, these are living thoughts; you must not make the mistake of thinking that they are like what we ordinarily call thoughts.

There are thoughts which are abstract pale images, which we can handle like the pages of a book, and then there is the other kind which are real, full of life, and those thoughts come and go at their own pleasure. For instance, a certain

thought may appear in the early morning; when one gets up it is there, and then after an hour it is gone and one cannot recover it.

Or one may understand something very well before lunch, and after lunch one can no longer understand it.

For inasmuch as they are alive, thoughts are like living things.

They are here or there and do not necessarily obey one’s will. So you can be sure that thoughts that are in the form of birds easily disappear; but if they take on the forms of men they may be under her control, inasmuch as a woman can control men.

The character of the thoughts as a multitude of men, however, probably means that she is not able to control them, so the only thing that remains, if she wants to join them, is that she should be accepted by them.

It is the thoughts really which join her, not she who joins them.

Moreover, it is collective thought, it looks like a parade, a body of soldiers perhaps, something that contains definite power, so it would be a most collective movement in the mind, almost a thought system.

They would probably be part of a big army, or at all events representative of a big nation.

Or they might be a body of men representing a powerful, collective public institution; that is, a definite impersonal power which assimilates her rather than her assimilating it. Such things may happen in the mind.

One is afraid of the unconscious because one feels instinctively that there are trains of thoughts of a strange collective nature, not of a personal nature, which may catch you and carry you away with them.

So it is just as it might happen in reality; when she sees that body of men marching past she simply joins them and is carried away.

Then she says: “They led me up on a high mountain. There they dissolved and I stood alone in the snow.”

Now what has happened? Something very typical which we have already mentioned.

Mrs. Crowley: They accepted her, but she did not assimilate them.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that body of men, that animus, being an independent psychical fact, may be there or it may also be somewhere else.

It may leave her because she cannot control it; if they choose to disappear and leave her high and dry somewhere, they simply do so.

In this case they dissolve when she has reached the top of the mountain, and she is left alone in the snow.

What does that mean?

Mrs. Crowley: She is quite cold and absolutely alone.

Dr.Jung: Well, it is synonymous, to be cold and alone are the same. For being in the herd, or being surrounded by human beings, always has something of a very remote time, of a time when we were monkeys sitting on a branch close together.

Therefore people often feel particularly well in a crowd, and especially when they are pressed close together-it reminds them of those days.

It is not only a gregarious instinct, it is just the physical warmth.

It is a peculiarity which they don’t admit, though they might perhaps admit it between twelve and one in the morning.

It is an animal instinct to like just the physical warmth of other hairy bodies.

That is why the monkeys huddle together in long rows on the branches of trees on cool mornings; they are just warming each other, and that is quite human too.

So being left alone on the top of the mountain, isolated in the snow, simply means absence of any human contact, it means that she is deprived of animal warmth.

Naturally, the animus is apt tolead a woman to an inhuman region where no human warmth is provided, because the animus is not human.

Now what is going to happen next?

Perhaps we can make a prognosis.

She has been led away by a system of thoughts up to a high, lonely, and cold situation.

What would be the next psychical event?

Dr. Reichstein: An animal might appear again.

Mrs. Crowley: The human need.

Mrs. Sigg: Something superhuman.

Dr. Jung: What, for instance? Please be definite.

Dr. Reichstein says an animal would appear, and Mrs. Crowley says something human.

Frau Stutz: Instinct.

Dr. Jung: That would coincide with Dr. Reichstein’s idea; and Mrs. Sigg says something superhuman, but that is too vague.

Dr. Barker: A wise man, a single individual, in contrast to the marching army.

Miss Moffett: I think something warm should appear.

Dr. Jung: Now we shall see whether the humanists or the animalists are right. She says:

A lion appeared to me and I asked: “Why am I here, oh lion?” The lion answered: “Because you have taken the way.”

That cryptic answer of the lion brings us back to a point which we omitted, to the fact that the marching men were all shouting: “We are the way.” What does that mean?

Dr. Reichstein: It is just the collective way.

Dr. Jung: Yes, it is not her way, it is the way of the crowd.

The collective way in the form of some very benevolent individual, for instance, says:

You ought to live in such and such a way.

Or the Bible, or the penal code, says how you ought to behave; also father and mother, teachers in school, and godfather and godmother.

So those marching men were shouting a system of opinions that claims to be the way.

We know it well.

Yet when it comes to a culmination, that system of thoughts simply disappears and one finds oneself left high and dry in a most unpleasant situation.

Then up come the instincts.

Dr. Reichstein: You told in the German Seminar4 of a similar case where a woman came to a cloister.

Dr. Jung: That was just such a case.

Dr. Reichstein quotes the symbolism from the visions of another woman, where that system of ideas appeared, not in the form of a body of men, but in the form of a Christian symbol, a cloister, and the cloister prevented her from going deeper into the unconscious; it suddenly interfered with her way down under the water, she was caught by it. Then from the cloister she moved up to the top of a mountain, where she found herself in very much the same situation as our patient here.  The cloister represented another system of opinions, her Christian education and her Christian ideas. Here it does

not say what body of men this is, so we cannot tell what set of ideas it may be. That is left open. Now what do you think of her present problem? You saw it indicated in the vision before. What was the outstanding feature there?

Miss Hannah: That she could not stand the white city.

Dr.Jung: Yes, first she wanted to go there, but the giant was in the way, and when she overcame the giant and reached the white city, she could not stand it.

Miss Hannah: And then the bull came.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that descent where she met the bull worshippers and drank of the blood of the earth.

Then again came the suggestion of the way up, the tree rising, and she followed the intimation of the birds and went up into the kingdom of the air.

The bird is also the symbol of the spirit; air is wind, the spiritual gods were wind gods in the beginning.

She followed those various intimations, and we don’t know whether that is right or wrong in the long run; but in this particular case, she is to be criticized for following the intimation of the men.

They led her out of the human atmosphere, and it was a mistake that she should be led by them at all.

Now the lion comes in as a sort of compensation for the system of thoughts.

The lion would represent the instincts, but such a symbol should never be translated by such an exceedingly vague word

God knows what one designates by the instinct.

We had better follow the intimation of the unconscious and try to characterize the symbol.

Why not an eagle or a bull or a snake? Why just a lion?

Mrs. Crowley: Has it anything to do with the two different forms of ritual? First it was a bull, which belongs more to the Magna Mater cult, while the lion would belong to the Mithraic cult. You told us about those different classes of Mithraic worshippers, and one of them was the lion class, which is masculine.

Dr. Jung: Well, the bull would be masculine.

Mrs. Crowley: Then in differentiating those two cults, one would be much more emotional.

Dr. Jung: You mean the cult of the Magna Mater has more emotional quality?

But how do you link up the cult of the Mother?

Mrs. Crowley: With the bull, which was also very much in the Magna Mater cult, the bathing in the blood of the bull.

Dr. Jung: Ah, you mean the taurabolia. Yes, that is right.

And there is an old astrological connection between the bull and the mother.

The syncretistic cults of that era were based very largely upon astrological facts.

On the Mithraic altar-stones, for instance, are the sun and the moon and the signs of the zodiac, and it is evident that they are meant as astrological symbols.

In the Christian cult it was more hidden, but the philosophical systems of that time were filled with astrological connotations.

The bull in astrology is an earthly sign, it is the domicilium Veneris.

The cult of Attis belongs to that great group of mother cults, Attis is very much the son of the Great Mother; so the bull is very much connected with the cult of the Magna Mater.

Mithra himself really belongs to the same group.

He is a sort of sun too; like Attis, he is in a way the dying and the resurrected god because he himself is the bull.

The meaning of the famous bull sacrifice of the Mithraic cult was the sacrifice of man’s bull-like passions, or lack of discipline.

So Mithraism was chiefly the cult of the Roman legions.

Wherever there were strong Roman garrisons, one finds the remains of Mithraic temples.

A famous temple was excavated in Ostia and in many other seaports, as well as all along the frontiers of the Roman Empire.

There was one at Carnuntum near Vienna, and a number in the north, near the Main in Germany.

In Switzerland there are very few, because this was the old Roman soil that was inside of the boundary line of the Rhine.

The most beautiful remains are along the northern frontiers.

The lion plays an odd role in Mithraism, an indecisive, merely symbolical role.

There are remarkable representations of the Mithraic bull sacrifice in the British Museum, the Borghese Mithra, for instance.

The finest altarpiece of all is in Strassburg, where there was a beautiful temple with an enormous bas-relief; it was utterly destroyed.

They had to dig it piecemeal from the ground, but they were able to fit the whole thing together.

The representations are always of just the bull sacrifice, of the altar stone where the god kills the bull, and the lion appears somewhere below the sacrificial scene.

It has nothing to do with the ritual above.

The lion is sometimes opposite a serpent with an amphora in between them, and it looks as if the lion were competing with the serpent as to who would get at that vessel first.

In one case, the amphora is standing upon the ground with a flame rising from it, and the lion is in the air above, as if he were just precipitating himself into it.

The vessel is the female symbol; it has the meaning of the cauldron, the vessel of rebirth, or the uterus ecclesiae, so the lion was obviously making for rebirth in the fire.

The vessel is also called the krater, coming from the Greek verb kerannymi, to mix; it was originally the vessel in which wind and water were mixed.

We now use the word for the crater of a volcano which holds the fiery liquid lava.

The original idea was probably a vessel occasionally used in the secret rites, containing fire or perhaps burning oil, in which

magic transformation took place; it was a sort of alchemistic melting pot.

Possibly that Mithraic lion precipitating himself into the fire of the krater was an alchemistic symbol.

The idea of plunging into the crater for rebirth is very old. Empedocles, a Greek philosopher, was said to have ended his life in the crater of Aetna; when he became old he threw

himself into the flames of the crater in order to be united with the gods, to be reborn out of the crater of death as a god.

We know that the main purpose in those old cults was to be reborn as a god. In the Isis mysteries, for instance, the initiates were reborn as Helios, the sun god, and in Mithraism there was also the mystery of rebirth.

That can be seen from the representations on the altar slabs; they were usually huge stones, with an axis on which they could be turned round, so probably during the sacred ceremonial the slab was turned and the other picture appeared.

On one side was the usual sacrificial scene, Mithra sticking his sword into the bull, and on the other side of the slab the bull was dead but already in a state of transformation.

By his death the bull gave birth to vegetable life on earth.

Out of his spinal marrow “grew grain of fifty-five species and twelve species of medicinal herbs”; out of his nose grew garlic (one of the most important vegetables for the Mediterranean people); out of his testicles came all species of cattle, out of his horns came fruits, and out of his blood the wine.

But he reaches that stage of transformation only through the sacrifice, that is the central idea.

On the reverse side of the Heddernheim relief, Mithra stands with the sun god himself beside the body of the slain bull, and receives from the hands of the sun god a bunch of grapes.

As I said last week, the members of a certain degree in the Mithraic cult were called leontes, probably those who had not undergone trial through fire, who were still to be made over in the krater.

That is only a conjecture, but in all these ancient cults there were the lower degrees, from which people progressed to others, and each time they had to pass through the cauldron, through a rebirth ritual, so they were reborn numbers of times.

The lion is astrologically the highest position of the sun, the month after the summer solstice, the end of July and beginning of August, and the hottest time of the year.

You see, the zodiac was not invented in our climate; it was invented probably in Mesopotamia, and

in the month of July the thermometer is at one hundred five or more every day in the shade.

That is the lion, fiery, dry, and terribly hot.

And the serpent on the other side is cold and humid, a nocturnal, uncanny creature that creeps in the dark.

So there is the pair of opposites again.

Obviously when a modern patient dreams of a lion or produces a picture of a lion, it does not mean any particular lion, it is mythological.

Therefore we are justified in assuming that here it has the generally prevailing meaning, a principle which is fiery and strong and noble, all the old mythological qualities, which are very unlike the lion as a zoological specimen.

There he is anything but royal, he is a great coward in spite of his strength, he doesn’t play the game at all in reality.

But in the fantasy, we must associate the qualities which people have always associated with the lion. Now understanding all that, what would you say was the principle, or the instinct, in this woman which is characterized by the lion?

The lion is taking a lot of time, but the deeper we feel our way into it, the more we get out of it.

Remark: The lion is just the opposite of the cold snow.

Dr. Jung: That is true.

The lion is passionate, fiery, dangerous, and it is exceedingly male. The Chinese Yang principle expresses the quality of the lion.

China has really formulated that concept, and I know of no Western expression which conveys exactly that idea.

In our philosophical literature the lion does not exist, of course, but in our unconscious it does exist, so we ought to have a decent word for it.

And the best philosophic concept I know is that Chinese concept of Yang, the bright, shining, masculine principle, which is here in contrast to the snow and the cold. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 476-488