Visions Seminar

1932 20 January, Visions Seminar, Lecture I

Ladies and Gentlemen, we did not finish the series of visions we were dealing with in our last seminar.

We stopped at that strange Osiris figure, half animal, half man.

Mrs. Fierz: You said that it was the spirit of woman.

Dr. Jung: Yes, I said that masculine figure was a sort of animus that was obviously undergoing a resurrection or a rebirth ritual, and we were interested in the fact that he looked like a faun.

In a vision just before this one, our patient was drinking the blood of the bull, and there a faun also appeared, and very much earlier she was worshipping a sort of Pan, a huge satyr, a god of nature.

This is still the same form, and he is undergoing the rebirth ritual of an Osiris; he appears again out of the mummy case.

Now to what sort of mind would such an animus point?

Mr. Allemann: The Natural mind.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the so-called natural mind which says the absolutely straight and ruthless things.

The vision continues:

I saw that in one hand he held a staff and in the other hand a bowl. I looked into the bowl and saw reflected my own face. It was black and about my head was a white halo. I said, “This the sphinx has told me. The way is twofold.”

You see that figure now has attributes. What is the general meaning of the staff?

Mr. Allemann: It belongs to the leader, the Poimen.

Dr. Jung: Yes, it is the staff of the shepherd.

She painted it in the form of a crux ansata, but it looks like a shepherd’s staff. It means guidance.

Therefore one often finds the staff as a symbol in the Old Testament, in the Psalms as well as the Prophets, meaning a guide, the certainty of the road; God is a reliable staff upon which one can lean.

So that gives the natural mind the quality of the leader, the poi men, or the shepherd.

Then she looked into the bowl which reflected her face.

One is rather astonished that a bowl should be a mirror, but it obviously functions here as a

mirror as well as a bowl, so we may be sure that two functions come together in this symbol.

What would the mirror indicate in this case?

Mrs. Schlegel: Self-examination.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the understanding or knowledge of herself.

Generally a mirror symbolizes the mind or the intellect.

Schopenhauer uses that metaphor.

He says the intellect holds a mirror up to the blind primordial will, that it may recognize its own face and deny itself through that recognition of what it is, namely, a blind groping or urge which leads only to suffering; understanding the blindness of its purpose, it will deny it.

Thus the world comes to an end for the individual who has recognized the illusion of the world.

It is also the Eastern idea that through understanding one finds the roots of suffering which lie in the fire of desirousness, and if they are denied or uprooted, the world, inasmuch as the individual makes the world, comes to a standstill; if the individual comes to a standstill and recedes into nirvana, the world represented by that individual is at an end.

So this mirror is obviously a function of self-knowledge. But what is the bowl?

Mrs. Crowley: The two symbols together would perhaps suggest the Yin and the Yang.

Dr. Jung: That is true.

The bowl would be the female and the staff the male form, which means a union of opposites; the male and female are together in this poimen.

It also means neither male nor female.

That is expressed in the so-called Gospel according to the Egyptians, in the conversation of Jesus with Salome.

Salome asked Jesus when the prophecies would be fulfilled, and Jesus said: “When ye shall tread upon the vesture of shame, and when the two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor female. ”

That is, when a thing is yea and nay, then it is neither yea nor nay, it is both and therefore beyond.

The unrecognizable and incomprehensible thing can only be expressed by a paradox; when we cannot understand a thing in its essence, when we cannot grasp it by our means of reasoning, we describe it in such a form.

For instance, the Buddhistic concept of nirvana is positive non-being, or being, nonbeing.

It is the kingdom of things that are not.

The beginning of the world, the creative point, the origin, is also described by a paradox: a

completely empty fullness, or completely full emptiness.

And Jakob Boehme, that famous mystic and philosopher of the sixteenth century, said that the basis of the world is the nil, the Nichts, the non-being, and that it cannot be otherwise because the beginning is desire, longing, and only an absolute vacuum can have longing.

A vacuum, non-being, can by longing draw or attract into itself, while anything that is full already possesses and can desire no longer.

So this desire, and Schopenhauer’s primordial will, is something exceedingly positive because it creates the world; and yet it is nothing, for only where there is nothing can something come to pass.

The union of the male and female in this figure, then, simply means beyond sex; it is neither male nor female, it is something incomprehensible.

That is, the natural mind is no longer subject to a sexual point of view; it is neither a woman’s nor a man’s point of view, it is the point of view just beyond, and that accounts for its divinity.

Anything that is beyond the human is animal and divine, and neither animal nor divine: therefore the animal symbols for the divine, the Holy Ghost as a dove, for instance; all the antique gods have their animal counterparts.

So that natural mind is not a function of man; it is a part of nature, the mind of trees or rocks or water or the clouds or the winds, and so ruthless, so absolutely beyond man that it hardly takes him into account.

One always finds that the utterances of the natural mind have this quality of an almost animal ruthlessness, along with a strange kind of superiority which reaches far beyond man.

It contains a most fundamental truth which makes it superior, and because of that superiority it is also divine.

The natural mind is very apparent in prophetic women.

Tacitus says of the old Germanic women that they were reverenced for their wisdom and their gift of prophecy.

They were probably women who had the gift of realizing the natural mind.

About twenty years ago in the course of an excavation in Upper Egypt-I think it was in Aswan-an inscription was discovered which gave the list of the members of the household of a high Roman officer.

All the different offices were mentioned, and among the members of the staff was a slave whose name was unusual in that country, Walburga Sibylla.

Walburga is a typical German name, and the Sibylla was the prophetic woman of a household.

So she was probably a German woman who had been sold to a powerful man in Egypt for the guidance of his life, a woman analyst for his personal use.

It is tremendously interesting and the only case I ever heard of.

It seems that the Sibylla was a sort of profession, and this Walburga no doubt provided the household with her prophetic opinions and was consulted in all difficult situations.

Now we must assume that our patient has a particular capacity for realizing the so-called natural mind.

This figure of Osiris, or Pan, expresses that natural mind, and he shows her in the mirror that her face is black, she looks like a Negro. What about that?

Mrs. Fierz: Is it not an allusion to the Negro figure?

Dr.Jung: Yes, that Negro who twice said to her, now you are wedded to me.

That was an assertion of a very close union, which means that the blackness has gone into her, she has become a colored woman, one might say.

And if you take the color as symbolical, to what would it point?

Mrs. Fierz: Is it not a Yin color?

Dr. Jung: Yes, but particularly it is the color of the Earth; the races which are closest to the earth are not white-skinned, they are colored.

It indicates that she is quite emphatically on the Yin side. Yet she has a white halo. What does that mean?

Dr. Reichstein: That the light comes out of the darkness.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but under certain conditions.

Otherwise that would mean that night really produces the light.

It is true that out of the night comes the day, but it is not so certain that the absence of light produces light. It is again a paradox.

We must assume that the black and the white exist simultaneously.

Then what is the meaning of the halo under these conditions?

Miss Hannah: Has it something to do with the black Messiah?

Remark: It means a saint.

Dr. Jung: Exactly, she is a saint, but a black saint; she is saintly in her blackness.

There is a legend that a young knight once came to St. Ambrose, the patron saint of Milan, and asked to be baptized.

But when St. Ambrose looked at him, he said: “My son, thy face is black, go and wash thyself first.”

So the blackness of this woman’s face means sinfulness from the Christian standpoint, because it is the color of the Yin, of the black soil, and that was understood to be of the devil.

Good always means the light, and the darkness, the earth, is the negation of light, it is evil.

Therefore it was a characteristic of the Christian mentality to despise nature, to call the admiration of nature sinful; and since they were not allowed to appreciate anything natural, the true saints later on in the Middle Ages behaved in a most unnatural way.

For a long time Christianity was exclusively a religion of the light; in other words, the Yang, the bright quality, the male substance.

And everything that was Yin, or female, was necessarily sinful.

This explains the negative attitude of medieval Christianity towards women; they doubted very much whether woman had a soul.

Women were usually suspected, particularly when they were at all pretty, of being servants of the devil; it was a woman who listened to the serpent in Paradise and thus brought sin into the world.

So now that the Christian point of view is no longer indubitably valid, we see that woman  increases in importance and in psychological dignity.

It is the prerogative of our times to discover that woman has a psychology, and that there is another viewpoint outside the masculine world.

The whole domain of psychology has hitherto been masculine, it was an entirely new discovery that the world could be looked at from quite a different angle, from the Yin angle.

Mr. Baumann: There are a number of statues of Mary which are black; at Einsiedeln, for instance, there is a black Virgin.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and there are also much older ones of black basalt which date from very early times.

The Egyptians made statues of Isis in black basalt, meaning that Isis was the fertile earth, the black soil of Egypt.

And on account of the likeness of lsis and Horus to Mary and Jesus, they were understood to be an anticipation of Mary and Jesus; the Catholic church still looks at it in that light.

So the early church simply took over many statues of Isis and Horus and called them Mary and Jesus; there is one in the Lateran Museum.

Mary has often been compared with the fertile soil; St. Augustine said in one of his sermons that the Virgin Mary was the earth which had not yet been fertilized by the spring rains.

Jesus was therefore born from the earth, he was the son of the earth.

That was very important to the primitive church, for there were other sons of the earth, Iacchus, for instance, who was an ear of wheat born in a winnowing fan.

And so Jesus is also the wheat; his body, the Host, can only be made of the pure flour of wheat.

As Mondamin is the corn in the Indian myth, so Jesus, as the son of the earth, is the wheat.

You see, to the early Christians the likeness to heathen mythology was important, because it formed the bridge by which all those early beliefs were canalized into Christianity.

Mr. Baumann: But why did they make black madonnas in the baroque times?

Dr. Jung: I don’t know, I never found any good historical explanation for it, though I assume there would be a psychological reason.

There would be an excellent reason for it just at that time in the fact that in the Renaissance the antique point of view came up again; we have evidence of the attempts of the church to revert to antiquity.

The popes were then very near to the Roman Caesars, and the claim of the church to continue

the Holy Roman Empire has never been given up.

The pope’s title, pontifex maximus, belonged to the Roman emperors; Alexander VI, in particular,

was just the Roman Caesar.

Then that attempt at a regression was checked by the Reformation.

I think the most psychological aspect of the Reformation is that it was the reaction to the regression of Rome, which was quite serious in every respect, in morals, in art, even in the language; the humanists, for instance, began to write a curious mixture of Latin and Italian.

The Renaissance was really a reversion to antiquity, so I don’t wonder that black madonnas came back at that time.

I am quite aware, however, that no historian would accept such an explanation.

Now our patient’s attitude, as we said, is very much on the Yin side, it is extremely feminine; her face is black because she is nothing but earth.

But when one is at the one pole, the other pole is naturally constellated.

In that sense one could say that the night always produces the day.

So out of that extreme Yin position comes the white light, the halo, which gives an appearance of saintliness to this Yin attitude.

Mrs. Heymann: The black face and the white halo show the idea of the pairs of opposites within herself.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but she would not have those opposites if she had not become absolutely black; she went to one extreme and from that the other extreme became constellated.

Mrs. Heymann: That is necessary, is it not?

Dr. Jung: Yes, otherwise the white would not have appeared, she would have remained gray.

It is true that if one is not capable of going to one extreme, one can never constellate, or produce, the other extreme.

Therefore [it is said in the Book of Revelations 3:16], “Woe unto those who are neither hot nor cold, for the Lord will spit the lukewarm ones out of his mouth.”

Those lukewarm people never constellate the opposites.

If they can be quite cold they can produce the heat, and vice versa, but if they are lukewarm they produce nothing at all, so the Lord, who has always been a great opposer of a standstill, will spit them out of his mouth.

Just in that blackness there is something saintly about this woman; that she is able to do something to the exclusion of all else produces the white light.

This is characteristic of the attitude of the natural mind; she could not have a natural mind if she had not the faculty of one-sidedness or exclusiveness.

Then she says, seeing her reflection in the mirror: “This the sphinx has told me, the way is twofold,”

and these are the two things, the pair of opposites.

She continues:

And then the creature (meaning that strange spirit that rose from

the mummy case) dashed the bowl to the ground and disappeared.

I looked for the snake to lead me away, but instead a goat led me up

again.

What about this goat?

Mrs. Sawyer: In one of the early visions two goats appeared.

She was going through the medieval city and wanted to stop to worship.

There was a mother and child; the mother threw the child at the animus, and the child then changed into two goats.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. That was about the time when she first became acquainted with an antique cult. I showed you then a picture of the Villa dei Misteri (see p. 150), where the woman who was to be initiated was also accompanied by two goats.

This goat has the same meaning: it is the instincts.

Formerly, when she didn’t know what to do, she followed the animus, the animus went ahead.

And in contradistinction to that, she now follows her instincts. Why is that?

Mrs. Crowley: The black face.

Dr. Jung: Yes, she now has the mind which is identical with the mind of nature and which is operative anywhere-in man, in plants, in animals, throughout the universe, one might say.

So the goat gives her a better lead than the animus, who already expresses a sort of sophistication; in other words, that universal mind can function through a goat.

I have told you before what my Mohammedan head man in Africa told me about the god of the Sufi. He said that he might appear in the form of a man-any man-or as a pure white light, or as a blade of grass; he might appear anywhere, even in the most inconspicuous thing.

Or it might just as well be a snake.

Mr. Baumann: What is the difference between a goat and a snake? The snake could also lead her.

Dr. Jung: I was just going to ask you that.

Airs. Crowley: The snake has a very different movement; the goat climbs up to very high steep places, whilst the snake goes gliding along very low.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the snake has a close relation to the movement of water.

Following the serpent means descent, going down into the cave; but going up she would follow a goat, because the goat is always supposed to mount very high.

The first sign of the new year is Capricorn, the goat, anticipating the whole year, because at the time of the winter solstice and in the first days of the year, the sun begins to climb higher.

Capricorn is a monster, you know; one half is a goat and the other half is a fish.

The sun starts from the greatest depth like a fish in the sea and rises to the highest summit like the Capricorn.

So one might say that the goat and the snake were really the same spirit, but it is the serpent when going down and the goat when coming up.

She then comes to the surface again, and she says:

I lay in the desert while the sun beat upon me and I felt growing within me he who lies beneath the sphinx itself.

You remember when the strange Pan figure first appeared, she asked him who he was, and he replied. “I am he who dwells beneath the sphinx itself.”

We can now see why he disappeared; it is as if he had become part of herself, as if that rebirth had taken place within herself.

He is no longer outside her, he is reborn within her.

But what does it mean that the natural mind, or the god-man, was first outside as he had always been, but is now within?

That he had to be born outside in order to become the thing inside, part of herself, would explain the necessity of the rebirth ritual.

What would it mean psychologically?

Mr. Allemann: That it is now a part of herself.

Dr. Jung: It is now a part of her mental constitution, but in what condition was it before?

Mrs. Crowley: It was an animus before, but now it is assimilated.

Mrs. Schlegel: It was a projection.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and now it is no longer projected.

It is the animus that has always been outside of herself.

That has been the ordinary state of things since the beginning of the world.

Then comes the great moment of rebirth when she assimilates the animus and begins to understand that it is a psychological function within herself.

For the first time in history the animus appears as a human function.

All these animas and animi have never been part of human psychology, they have always been projected.

Therefore I once said that it looked to me as if the human mind had grown out of external objects all over the world, as if our consciousness really started with the stars and not in the brain, and as if we were beginning to assimilate these psychological facts only in our time.

In the Middle Ages, when a man discovered an anima, he got the thing arrested, and the judge had her burned up as a witch.

Or perhaps a woman discovered an animus, and that man was doomed to become a saint or a savior or a great medicine man.

A medicine man is always made by projection.

Many are leaders quite against their own intention-they are simply forced into it because the leader is projected onto them.

Then some poor fellow becomes the victim of their expectations.

So only now, by the analytical process, do the anima and the animus, that were always outside, begin to transform into psychological functions.

Here, then, we see the transformation of that particular function which we call the natural mind into a psychological function.

But it is very difficult to see the natural mind as one’s own function, as an integral part of one’s own psyche.

You see, the more we assimilate such functions, the more we grow doubtful of the existence of a human mind or psyche.

We have to assimilate so many things that I am afraid it may extend the frame of our mental capacity so far, that after a while we shall ask ourselves: “But who the devil are we after all?”

We are eating the gods, and there is danger of getting too full and exploding.

People used to say that Mars had made them angry, or Eros had pierced their heart.

But now the god of wrath is simply my own emotion.

If I should announce that Mars had instigated a terrible anger in me, everybody would say: “Don’t be so stupid, you just lost your head, why accuse the god Mars?”

Or if I should claim that the arrow of Eros had pierced my heart, they would say: “You think you are a poet, but you just fell in love, don’t make such a fuss about it.”

Nobody would ever believe that Eros had pierced my heart.

The inhabitants of Olympus are now all integrated into my poor psyche.

That accounts for our inflation nowadays; our size has increased enormously because we are now housing the upper and lower gods.

Human consciousness becomes almost divine, people believe that we are really on top of the world.

Instead of doubting more and more about our own identity, we really think that we are Venus and Mars and the whole astrological heavens.

We should disidentify, we should not identify with those grand powers which were once great gods worshipped in temples.

In the past, a man who was possessed by an uncontrollable emotion was always thought of as being possessed, and nobody was mistaken enough to think otherwise, he was just one poor sad victim.

But now if a man is angry, we make him responsible.

The primitives would be afraid to do that, they would wait until the spirit had left him.

And on a higher level the analyst must do the same thing; when a patient gets out of control one must say: “Now just wait, you are possessed by an evil spirit, a thought that is blinding you; we will wait until the storm has blown over.”

I don’t make him identify with that thing, because he has to learn that he is not necessarily identical with his emotions.

Not one of us would make anyone else responsible for a thunderstorm, and it is equally mistaken to make him responsible for the psyche.

Only when we learn that the soul or psyche is really a world with its own laws, like the world in which we live and move, can we reduce to our natural proportions.

As long as we identify with our psyche, we are just megalomaniacs, and things will go very badly with us.

We shall get all sorts of blows until we become modest and recognize the fact that what we call our emotion is a great power which we cannot control. I

f anybody claims to be his psyche, I make him responsible, I tell him to control his fear-if that is the form it takes.

People want to be hypnotized, to be given the suggestion that they no longer suffer.

If I were able to do that, their hypothesis would be proved, and they would be convinced that their psyche was controlled by themselves.

Take the case of a most reasonable man, who nevertheless harbors a phobia, perhaps the fear of carcinoma.

I say to him: “If you are identical with your phobia, will you just stop that nonsense.”

But that is exactly what he cannot do, he is not master in his own house, there is something on top of him, and that is simply because he does not recognize the fact that he is not identical with his psyche.

Now we will go on to the next vision.

Our patient says:

I beheld a Gothic cathedral with high spires. A great religious procession was entering the church chanting a Te Deum. A small grotesque animal like a gargoyle kept clutching at the gold robe of the priest. The priest tried to kick it away but could not. I entered the cathedral with the procession. The priest ascended the steps to the altar and lifted on high the sacred chalice. As he did so small animals and frogs leapt forth from the chalice.

Here is a new situation.

We have moved before in an antique and heathen atmosphere, and now suddenly comes the Christian motif.

That is most natural.

When one has been deeply immersed in heathendom, by the law of contrast the opposite naturally becomes constellated.

What has probably provided the strongest stimulus-as indicated in the former series-for the sudden apparition of a Gothic cathedral?

Dr. Reichstein: The appearance of the white halo on the black head.

Dr. Jung: That would be the beginning, but the blackness of her face indicating the dirt of the earth would be the definite cause of it; she is a clod of earth, nothing but earth, and that naturally arouses in her a Christian reaction.

As a Christian being, she would resent it deeply.

Mr. Baumann: It is an important point that the gargoyle is clutching at the priest. Perhaps the Christian cathedral appears here only to show that it is not quite right for her, for the gargoyle enters at the same moment.

Dr. Jung: Well, we needn’t be afraid that Christianity will overtake her completely.

The gargoyle shows that someone plays the role of the devil in the game, of course, but the Christian setting is constellated by the blackness of her face, by her identity with an antique point of view, the unconditioned acceptance of a chthonic point of view.

Therefore up comes the historical reaction.

The great religious procession and the singing symbolize the Catholic church, which is the real essence of Christianity as we know it.

And what would the Te Deum emphasize? When does one sing the Te Deum?

Miss Taylor: To express thankfulness.

Princess v. Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen: When the bishop enters the church, he is generally singing the Te Deum.

Dr. Jung: It is usually part of a rite to celebrate a particular accomplishment, a victory, for instance, so it is a sort of thanksgiving-Te Deum laudamus.

Or it is part of any moment that celebrates the triumph of the church; or a most solemn entrance of the pope or the cardinal.

It always signifies a culmination of some kind; it may be the culmination of the rite itself.

Here it means the triumph of the Christian church.

And in this moment, which is the extreme opposite of the blackness of the face, the grotesque little animal like a gargoyle appears.

You have seen those figures on Gothic churches.

They often form the waterspouts, and they are carved on the wooden seats of the choir.

Those Gothic oak seats are often beautifully decorated with these little creatures, gnomes and dwarfs and frogs and lizards, all sorts of funny things.

Such grotesque animals invariably represent the chthonic roots and are therefore supposed to live in caves or amongst the roots of trees; they are animals of the darkness, of the depths of the earth, and are always a bit comical or grotesque, and in vivid contrast to the world of light.

Where does that idea come from?

Princess v. Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen: They are projections of the mind.

Dr. Jung: Yes, but why grotesque?

Mrs. Dick: They interrupt the Gothic line up to the clouds.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the general Gothic line; that wonderful elevation, that uplifting effect, is naturally interrupted by these mocking spirits.

In a marvellous cathedral, which really plays upon one’s highest emotions, one suddenly comes across these funny creatures.

One also finds them in poetry: in the second part of Faust grotesque beings appear, the                       Lemuri.

In that case they are the evil ghosts of the dead, whom the devil calls to dig the grave of Faust, and they are described as “half-natures made of tissues, tendons, and bones.”

Such figures are also to be seen in Egypt; the chthonic god Bes is really an archetypal figure.

He is an exceedingly grotesque little dwarf, but on the other side he is the teacher of Horus, as Mimir is the teacher of Siegfried.

So the most grotesque appearance is associated with wisdom.

It has been pointed out many times that the bust of Socrates looks like a faun or like Silenus; even to  the people of antiquity he was of a grotesque ugliness, yet he was the father of wisdom.

Mrs. Crowley: One finds the same idea among primitive people. The North American Indians, after very serious rituals, wear grotesque masks.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is true of many primitive peoples, not only the Indians.

The Koshari are a special group within an Indian tribe, whose particular task is to ridicule the gods; they are the clowns of the gods, and they are called the “Delight-makers. ”

In the Catholic church, as late as the thirteenth century, a mock mass was celebrated, in which vulgar and obscene songs were sung as the responses, in order to interrupt once a year the solemn hierarchic structure of the church.

Also, on the day of the carnival, the youngest lay brother represented the abbot, and the abbot and the monks had to serve the lay brothers at table; then they got drunk and rolled out of the monasteries into the streets and continued the carnival there.

But they went too far, the pope interfered, and the custom was abolished.

Mr. Baumann: A king always used to have a jester who was deformed in some way.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and he was often a very important personage, as well as the source of the greatest wisdom the king was ever likely to hear.

Another case is the dwarf in Rider Haggard’s book.

He was the medicine man in a Zulu tribe, and was called “The thing that never should have been born.”

I don’t know whether he is a historical figure.

Then the Masai, a very warlike tribe in East Africa, have a famous medicine mana short man with a peculiarly big head-who made a lot of trouble for the English administration.

It is told as a fact that he prophesied that there would be war in the country before the Great War broke out, and

because there was always unrest among the Masai, the English took it rather seriously, for they assumed that he was pointing to a sort of revolution.

But he said, no, it would be among the white people.

They did not believe him, but since he had very great influence over the tribe, the British Government of Kenya promised to pay him four thousand pounds if there should be a war among the white people, and if nothing of the kind occurred, they would shoot him on account of his particular activities.

Then came the Great War, and they paid him the four thousand pounds.

That fellow was still in existence when I was in Africa.

All those examples show that chthonic wisdom has always been associated with grotesque form.

And it is not only legend, it is true that the medicine man or the dwarf is especially wise.

That comes from the fact that a dwarf, or a person otherwise mutilated, usually develops great ambition-a compensatory overdevelopment on another side: like the blacksmith Wieland, whose tendons were severed, and Vulcanus, the god of the blacksmiths, who had lame feet.

And the seer is often blind: Melampus, for instance, the famous seer of antiquity.

Probably the first intellectuals, in a time when men were chiefly warriors, were those who had to stay at home on account of being crippled, either crippled from birth, or incapacitated through disease.

Moreover, dwarfish or mutilated persons always cast a spell, because they have something strange in their eye.

One often recognizes them from a peculiar expression of face even if one doesn’t know that they are mutilated.

And you know how children react with such people: they are afraid of them.

That they have the evil eye is usually due to the resentment maimed people feel against normal people.

Primitives are particularly afraid of people who are maimed; they think they might bring them bad luck, so they shun them, they run away.

One is still apt to have a negative feeling about people who are unlucky, one just doesn’t like them.

They are not liked in society, for instance, and that is a survival of the old fear of the unlucky, or the one who is persecuted by evil spirits.  ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 523-535