Visions Seminar

7 March 1934 Visions Seminar LECTURE VII

We have a question here by Dr. Escher, in which he draws a parallel between the Pyramid and the crystal as symbols of the Self.

He says that the crystal would be a symbol of the Self because of its particular qualities, namely, that it is a definite state of ordered forces of matter.

There are certain systems or laws according to which the molecules of the crystal are arranged, and the arrangement is absolutely static as long as that special chemical body lasts.

Then Dr. Escher says: “It seems to me that the Egyptian pyramids with their smooth and polished surface could be compared perhaps to the king of crystals, the diamond, which is crystallized in the regular mineralogic system, the principal form being the octahedron, I believe.”

Yes, the perfect crystal from the point of view of duration is the diamond; that is the hardest material.

You know diamonds consist of the native carbon, the essential element of coal, crystallized in the isometric system; and that they are often in the form of octahedrons helps the argument considerably, because the pyramid is just one half of that form.

And then Dr. Escher asks: “Is it too fantastic to say that one of the meanings of being buried in a pyramid would be existence for eternity in the center of a crystal of the highest order?”

Sure enough, that is the vajra.

(The Sanskrit word for the diamond body, and it also means a thunderbolt.)

The hardness and finished state of the crystal would symbolize the eternally lasting condition of the Self, which is a body, or an essence, or a being, which is supposed to be beyond time, beyond all categories of spatial or temporal existence.

The quality of eternity is of course inevitable in a nonspatial and nontemporal condition because things change and vanish only in time; the idea of a beginning and an end is necessarily derived from the idea of time; if there is no time nothing can begin nor can anything end.

In Taoism-as you have read in The Secret of the Golden Flower-the everlasting body of

the Self is called the diamond body and is represented as a crystal.

That is the lapis philosophorum, the elixir vitae, the quinta-essentia, the tinctura magna of alchemy.

And patients in analysis, not knowing of these ideas, naively represent such a crystal in their unconscious drawings.

Dr. Escher has also brought us a very interesting Chinese Buddhistic painting.

I cannot tell you much about it because I am not a specialist in these matters.

I can only say that in this assembly of gods there is the so-called Red Teacher and the Yellow Teacher, which are designations coming from Lamaistic Buddhism.

Mahayana Buddhism, the great school that spread to China, was largely affiliated or identical with Lamaistic Buddhism, so the Dalai Lama or the Teshu Lama of Tibet would be the ruler of that Chinese branch.

We see here also the typical hell of Mahayana Buddhism, with the scales where the merits and demerits of the soul are weighed; and here are the souls being tortured by demons in every conceivable horrible way, blood is pouring out like wine.

Now up in this sphere of serenity in the clouds, the heavenly abode, the Yellow Teacher would be the original teacher of Mahayana Buddhism, and the Red Teacher would stand for a Sort of reformation, and you see, quite unlike our religious mentality, the two are peacefully together here.

Of course we would make a great difference between the Catholic and the Protestant.

Very much the same situation existed there, only the first Buddhist teaching in China was by Buddhist emissaries whose religion had already undergone a certain transformation in the sense of the Mahayana, due to the fact that the original condition was no longer prevailing or no longer important.

Buddha was himself a great reformer: he preached against the background of a pantheon of about two million gods, the deities of the Hindu systems, and as everybody was already convinced of the existence of gods and their tremendous importance, Buddha stressed the importance of man.

In the first texts of the Hinayana school, the pure Buddhist school, Buddha ranked amongst the gods, and the gods came to his birth and watched his death.

But the teaching was that even the gods had to be born as men in order to be redeemed as gods.

To be born as a god was no particular advantage, anybody could be born as a god, the only difference being that the gods lived very much longer and could do very much more.

But one would be in an equally miserable and unredeemed condition, whether ruling over the whole world as a god, or ruling as the father of a little household in which one lived for fifty or sixty years, having no competence and no power whatever.

The human condition had a better chance of changing into a different state, because unless a god was reborn as a human being, he had to be a very authorative person with no possibility for a whole eon of changing into a higher condition on his way to nirvana.

Now that original state of things disappeared when Buddhism began to spread in India; the gods then became unimportant, people forgot about them, just as in a very Protestant country you no longer think about what it means to protest.

For you are raising a protest against what?

So when Protestantism is not in opposition to Catholicism it becomes terribly empty and objectless, only when up against the background of Catholicism-the many saints and images, and confession and absolution and the means of grace-does Protestantism make sense.

In the same way, early Buddhism soon wiped out the importance of the gods until the time came when there were none.

Then man again realized his need of gods and began to have revelations.

And then came the Mahayana teachers in about the eighth century, prophets arose to whom the gods were revealed, and the idea of the Bodhisattvas and masculine and feminine gods came into existence as the special divinities of Mahayana Buddhism.

Naturally they took those gods partly from the Hinduistic sphere and partly from the Bon religion, a very primitive religion of Tibet; so a particular brand of Mahayana

Buddhism developed in Tibet which included those primitive elements.

That the Yellow Teacher is bright and fair in color, and the Red Teacher very dark, obviously meant the difference between two principles, light and dark, white and black, etc.

The dark red principle represents the chthonic primitive element of the local religion, it is typically Bon, while the celestial principle would be yellow, the color of the heavenly sun.

Therefore it is the color of the Chinese Emperor who is the son of heaven.

So the yellow would indicate a sort of Yang teaching, and the dark red a Yin teaching.

The Red Teacher in this painting is holding something which looks like a jade weapon, and the only jade weapon I know of is the famous magic dagger that is occasionally made of jade, which is considered in China to be the ne plus ultra of precious substances; those little jade figures were thought to be far more wonderful than emeralds, for instance.

And the magic dagger is sometimes the equivalent of the thunderbolt, the Vajra, the diamond wedge.

But this instrument is not a symbol of the Self, it is rather a symbol of magic effect; it would be what the north Californian Indians call the icicle of the medicine man.

The medicine man always has a pouch, in which he is supposed to carry a number of icicles, cold, pointed objects like hard crystal, like the vaJra, which he can send out as arrows.

He directs it, he aims at a man and shoots the icicle into his back, for instance, causing

illness or death. We would call it the witch’s shot.

The Indians are terribly afraid of the medicine man because they know he carries those

weapons.

This magic dagger is such an instrument that can be sent out by the one who knows the magic incantation, the right ritual to produce far-reaching effects.

That sort of thing curiously enough happens empirically to people who deny the Self, who don’t want to individuate, who reverse the natural process of individuation.

In Christianity it would be those who deny the Lord, who reverse the sacred mysteries and put the cross upside down in the ground, who stick a knife into the bread of the communion, which means murdering Christ since the bread is the body of Christ.

They perform mock masses, denying the truth with every word; instead of a blessing they utter a curse; and they reverse the Paternoster in a peculiar way, exactly like the elves who say: “Our Father, that art not in heaven”-just that peculiar twist.

Now those people who deny their own individuation-which means denying their own existence for the sake of an evil effect, giving in to hatred to such an extent that they curse themselves, surrendering their own lives to their own hatred-those people have a magic effect, they can do peculiar things; it is just as if icicles were darting out of their magic pouch and wounding other people.

How that is done I don’t know, but it is a known fact; exceedingly strange things happen then, which you can never prove to be rationally or causally connected; you can never convince anybody of their existence, yet they do exist in an uncanny way.

So this dagger would mean the infernal denial of the Self.

For when the Self is denied, when individuation is given up for the sake of evil effect, then the vajra substance, the diamond substance of the Self, becomes the icicle, a thunderbolt which has an equally destructive effect upon the Self of other people; it alienates people instead of attracting them.

You see, there is a magic effect of the good things which lead one on and suggest the right way, and that of evil things which suggest the wrong way; the one is called white magic and the other is black magic.

The Yellow Teacher would be the white magician, and the red one with the thunderbolt the black magician.

The Yellow Teacher has nothing in his hands, there is no vajra because he himself is the vajra; the diamond body is in his bosom, in his heart.

Of course in the East things are not valued as we value them; we use our judgment and qualify things according to our moral values; we would say that this exceedingly benevolent and jovial being was the good man, and that the other one was bad, he looks like a devil indeed.

But in the East that is not so; you see they are sitting at the same table, they get along together and probably converse with one another.

There is nothing like our moral discrimination, it is the darkness and the light, the day and the night, and day and night go along together as in nature, the Yin and Yang always cooperate in a very friendly way; instead of being infernal opposites, which makes them most unwieldy, the two are together.

Therefore the oriental would never suppose that because you were a saint you would necessarily be moral; a saint can be a most immoral creature and do the most immoral things, but he is nevertheless a saint, and he is a somewhat dangerous being, you have to be very careful-he is the summum bonum, almost the god himself.

In the stories of Madame David-Neel about her travels in India and Tibet, there are very interesting accounts of the saints.

Their very peculiar morality is expressed in the fact that these two fellows are sitting quietly together, and the Red Teacher is assisted by hellish demons, and the Yellow

Teacher by a very friendly person, presumably his acolyte or a pupil or disciple.

Now we will return to our text.

I assume that you may not have understood the pyramid completely, and as it is exceedingly typical, you must tolerate more discussion of the subject.

The situation is that our patient has left her animus and the figure of the Self behind, and is going down, down, from a sort of immaterial world of visions, to the earth, her tangible reality in New York.

That the way she is coming down is very long means that it is by no means simple; there are many traps and difficulties on that way of readjustment after analysis.

You see, the readjustment can be a relatively simple affair, or it can be extremely complicated.

Naturally if you are able to do it unconsciously, you think it is simple, you might be a bit nervous but you would not realize any particular difficulty; you just do it, it happens; it is always in a way compensatory.

But if you look into the psychology of the situation, you see that it is exceedingly

complicated; to do a thing quite consciously, with effort and a complete realization of what you are doing, is not easy.

If it were a conscious readjustment she would probably experience many difficulties, she would realize fear and nervousness and all sorts of hindrances.

But here it is a matter of unconscious readjustment, so there is the danger of losing all the values she has gained, for only the conscious retains the values; nature has no values.

You may find a marvellous diamond, for instance; yes, provided you value it and have it polished, it will be of great value and beauty.

But if you think it is a stone like any other stone, nature will never prevent you from throwing away a diamond, nor will nature ever produce a particular golden setting round it; if you throw it into the river, it will be carried away and ground to dust in the course of time.

Or perhaps somebody else will find it and if that person values it, it will be preserved; but nature never preserves.

If you leave a thing to the unconscious, its values will disappear, they cannot be held by the unconscious.

That is why consciousness was produced; it is as if nature herself realized that it had apparently become necessary for somebody to realize what was going on, damn it.

It is not unlike the present state of things in Germany.

I don’t want to talk politics, but I can tell you one very interesting psychological item:

when I was in Germany I was consulted by some leading Nazis who wanted to keep me there, one of them actually said he should arrest me so that I would be forced to remain. But why? I said, “I am no politician, I am a psychologist, what have I to do

with your enterprise?” And he replied: “Exactly, you are a psychologist, you are outside of the whole thing, so you are the man who could tell us what we are doing.”

You see they don’t know.

I marveled at that fellow, I think that is fine, it could almost convince one that there is something in it.

To say: We don’t know what we are doing, is remarkable; if they say they know, well, who knows?

Nobody knows. That man did exactly what the creator has done.

The creator must be a very great person, I suppose, so he created animals with enormous necks and snouts and horns and teeth and claws, he tried every possible stunt under the sun, small animals, big animals, giants, the most horrible grotesque objects you could imagine, most terrible beasts.

Then once he really asked himself: “Now what is that?” And then he came to consciousness in order to know what it all meant, and man had to invent some tale about it.

Man was just like myself, a perfectly innocent psychologist who knows nothing of the job of the creator but is able to say: “You have created this animal.”

So man named every animal to the Lord, he introduced the whole of God’s creation to the Creator, who did not know he had created horses and donkeys and monkeys and human beings till man named them to him: “This is a poplar tree which you have created, and this is a donkey, and this is a snake, and that is a camel.”

And the Lord said: “Now that is wonderful! I did not know that I had made snakes.”

It is like the bourgeois gentilhomme who was being educated and his teacher told him that he spoke prose and the poets spoke poesy.

He was astonished and went home and asked his wife if she knew what he was speaking. “Well, French, I suppose.” “Not at all, I am speaking prose.”

That is the great discovery which is the beginning of consciousness; with a bit of consciousness you begin to name things and then they are objectified.

So man was necessary.

And what that fellow in Germany wanted was that I should name things; you thereby

have it in the hollow of your hand apparently.

In antiquity also it was considered very important to know the names of things; and it is a great part of our scientific education that students are told what things are called; then they think they know something, but they only know the names of things.

Well, this going back to New York, the unconscious readjustment, is as a matter of fact tremendously complicated, because all the things one has already named, that one has grasped and lifted out of the chaos, drop back; they lose their names and seem to melt away, they transform into that seething mass and disappear and are regenerated again in a different form.

That is the unconscious adaptation.

The patient herself undergoes a peculiar transformation and adapts as a different being.

What she had become is lost, the diamond disappears, it remains perhaps a pale memory but she is changed.

That is illustrated by the unconscious way in which primitives adapt, they are simply melted, transformed into something else; therefore they can become anything quite easily, they only need to put on a ghost mask and a ghost dress and dance the ghost dance and they are ghosts, the ancestors of the Alcheringa times; they lose their identity by an unconscious process of readjustment.

Here we see this process.

The center and the goal of her development have been the intuition of the Self, and that now vanishes because she ought to readjust to her earth. Instead of holding onto the

Self consciously, she loses the Self, she gets into the melting pot, and both she and the image of the Self become transformed, everything becomes transformed because the situation is different.

You can observe this in your own life.

In a certain place, in a certain gathering, you are a certain person; you leave that place and get into different circumstances and you are an entirely different person, you lose all your former convictions and create new convictions and values in your new environment, and it is all a matter of unconscious readjustment.

That happens even when a thing has been very positively in existence before.

For instance, the image of the Self has a positive existence in the form of a living woman, and now it transforms into her own burial mound, the pyramid being in a way the same symbol, but it is now materialized in stone. It is not the living king, it is his divine or royal tomb that flashes like a diamond; yet that is the state of duration, the state of the long life.

Arabs still have that conviction about their tombs.

I was looking at the tombs of the caliphs of old Cairo-they are really sort of like funeral chapels-with a fairly well-educated Arab, and I admired very much their Gothic style.

He saw that I appreciated it and asked: “What do you think about these houses?” I said: “I marvel at their beauty, and the extraordinary art and skill and the great emotion put into these buildings.”

Then he said: “Europeans usually think only of dollars, automobiles, hotels, railways; but do you build a house in a place which you know you will soon leave? Or in a place where you know that you will remain the longest time?” “Yes,” I said, “you are wise, and we are most certainly fools.”

But evidently fools are wanted in the world too.

You see, that is the way the East still thinks, and the way old Egypt thought, they built their houses for the longest time.

There are no worldly buildings left in Egypt because they were all of dried mud; the foundations of the palace of Amenhotep are still there but otherwise nothing, everything is gone.

But the tombs and the temples were made more permanent, in recognition of the fact that they were then representing the vajra sphere, the sphere of the everlasting things.

Mrs. Fierz has just called my attention to the fact that the symbolism of the Great Pyramid has always been an object of much speculation, as I suppose you know, and books in all languages have been written about it.

It is supposed to contain all the mysteries of the world, the sum total of the secret knowledge of old Egypt.

For instance, halfway up the side of the pyramid is an entrance to a shaft which points towards the position of the polar star in the years when the pyramid was built, about 2900-2700 B.C.

Then there is a sarcophagus in which the old pharaoh was probably buried.

That is uncertain, however, because thieves broke in long ago and robbed it, and now they say that this sarcophagus was the original measure for the grain in Egypt, even containing the measures which are still valid in our days, the English gallon, for instance.

Then the measurements of every space and every angle are all based on symbolic numbers. The Greek number 1T = 3.141592 (it is used in mathematics for various different purposes, all having something to do with the circumference of the circle) and that was used in their measurements also.

Another peculiar fact is that the pyramid stands upon that degree of longitude which covers the most of land and the least of sea; all other degrees of longitude cover more sea than land.

Human fantasy has always played over it, and I quite understand that, it is oppressively

mysterious.

The impression of those dark chambers inside the pyramid, with the knowledge that there are millions of tons of weight on top of you, stimulates fantasy like anything.

But the point is that the pyramid is still an object of speculation-valid or not is another question-it is still filled with mystery, and from that one can conclude as to its mana character.

It is a symbol, as it has always been and will always remain, for a real symbol cannot be exhausted.

So much for the objective symbolic character of the pyramid.

Now in connection with our text, I said that the pyramid represents the Self in its transformation, as the real pyramid represents the king in his transformation; when he has left the world of the living and transcended the horizon, when he has entered the barge of the sun and gone traveling on in the land of the hereafter, he is then the pyramid.

It is as if that were his equivalent in the land of the living.

So when the Self disappears, and the individual, our patient, leaves that world of the left hand and approaches the world of the right hand, the first thing she meets is the pyramid, the tomb of the Self.

New York seems to be that tomb.

As a matter of fact there is something in this idea; that the skyscrapers were invented in America is by no means mere chance, they belong somehow to that country.

For example, the Indians of the southwest of America attained such a high degree of civilization that they built towns, and the pyramidal skyline of those Pueblos-scattered low houses in the periphery, sloping up toward the center where they are heaped up six

stories high-is like the skyline of a modern American city.

The outline of all the big American cities-New York, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis-is just an exaggeration of that, they are all heaped up in the center.

Another peculiar thing that a European notices in America is the fire escapes, iron ladders going down the outsides of the houses, and that too is like the Pueblos, where they have no stairs, only ladders outside leading from terrace to terrace; they climb up the outside of the houses.

The old Aztec and Mayan temples are also on the pyramidal principle, sort of mounds, with very steep steps outside leading up to the top, and on the roof is the temple itself, with the sacred altars and so on; they are like the Step Pyramid of Saqqara.

Those temples were also the burial mounds of the gods; and the living gods were supposed to be imprisoned in the temples.

This was literally true; in antiquity they used to chain the image of Melkarth or Jupiter

Ammon with heavy chains in order to prevent him from escaping and depriving them of his assistance; they actually fettered the images of the gods in a panic of fear lest they might leave them.

Then there was the idea that one should not make an image of the god, because one thus had power over him; one might depreciate him, kill him, he might even become an object of laughter; if the painter were not very skillful he would make a ridiculous picture of him.

So any objects which designate the god or which are said to be the habitations of the divine presence threaten the gods with destruction.

If the old Germans had had a god without abode or form, the Christian missionaries would have had a hell of a time to destroy him; but they could reach him in his sacred stones and doles and signs, so they could overthrow the idea.

If the god is a spirit, invisible, intangible, absolutely shapeless, nothing can be done

against him.

I often questioned my Swahili friends, hoping that they had primitive ideas about the shape of Allah, but they were very positive that he was shapeless.

That was also true of the nocturnal evil principle; they said the nocturnal god was brown and dwelt in the earth, but they were quite positive that he had no shape; the most they would say about him was that he was like the wind, a puff of cold air.

So a temple, particularly in a religion where there are images, icons, etc., is always a sort of burial place for the gods because the gods are then stone, which becomes an argument against them.

The Christian missionaries could always argue that the heathen god was helpless; he was simply a piece of stone or wood, man-made, they could knock him off his pedestal and nothing would happen; he had no power whatever and could not defend himself.

It is great wisdom therefore when a religion prescribes that the god shall be an ineffable mystery with no shape at all.

The pyramid is most certainly a heap of stones, yet it is exceedingly imposing, so one can assume that it contains all sorts of mysteries if you are inclined to believe in mysteries.

But many people are not, and they think the pyramid is just a heavy heap of stones and very old stones at that, the only miracle being that it has lasted so long.

And so New York might be the abode of demons and gods; you could imagine all sorts of mysteries about New York, but you would not because you would be so impressed with the technique of the whole thing.

You cannot help thinking of the number of tons of concrete and steel, and what it would cost to live in the thirtieth story, and how long it would take to come down by the stairs to the ground floor if the lift didn’t work-such things.

There the aspect of the most precious substance, the vajra body, changes into something made by man which is not everlasting-not even the pyramids will last forever-but relatively old, and made of very hard and good material which will stand many centuries.

But it has become matter.

Thus, when the most precious thing inside vanishes, it turns into the most imposing thing outside, the most imposing monuments of human achievement, enormous cities, tremendous palaces and towers.

The great Self of the Babylonian Lord expressed itself in the city of Babylon, with the great tower of Nimrud and the temple of Baal, with its thick walls and its hundred gates of enormous dimensions.

That is the material expression of the greatest thing.

We see the same phenomenon in the Catholic church; the grandeur of St. Peter’s and the splendor of the Pope is the exterior representation of the most precious thing within.

But the most precious thing is buried in it; when it has reached such a collective expression, it is then just the collective expression, and all the magic or divine power in the vajra has gone over into the power of the collective.

And that is just what I mean by the unconscious readjustment.

Our patient loses the precious substance, and then the precious substance is New York, the great tomb; instead of the living king, it is the pyramid, his tomb.

This means a sort of murder, a sacrificial killing, and the next sentence in her text is:

I saw a knife from which dripped blood. On another side was carved the split face of a man, on the third side a man was lying face downward on the ground beating off the green things that grew all about him. I returned to the knife.

Blood still dripped from it and the stream of blood covered my feet.

This sacrificial killing is the slaughter of the things within.

Mr. Baumann: Does the pyramid appear instead of all the things she has experienced in analysis becoming real? All those forms full of life and blood and fruit? Is it that in going back to reality she has to make a kind of abstract concentrated symbol for it, which includes everything?

Dr. Jung: If it does!

Mr. Baumann: It doesn’t really in a living concrete way, only in an abstract, mathematical form, I should say. Instead of living beings, it turned out to be a pyramid where very external things are condensed into a geometrical form.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and that is in a way a perfectly inevitable process.

When somebody has had an intense inner experience, he will quite instinctively try to make a record of it, to put it into expression, a sort of formula that in an abbreviated way will remind him of the original experience; he will put a stone upon the ground at least to remind him that here such and such a thing happened.

You see, if such things went on happening all the time, one would not need records, but they are very rare.

And it often happens that the original meaning of such a memorial is lost and only a sort of superstition remains, one does not know what it meant.

The Eastern mandalas are now looked upon with superstitious wonder, they have become ritual instruments for certain effects; yet they were most certainly mere confessions, mere records originally.

As in the Middle Ages, mandalas were produced without any particular tradition; mandalas were made quite naturally because people wanted to represent a most baffling inner experience, the experience of God.

Numbers of examples have survived.

When St. Augustine was seeking the most suitable formula to express the essence of God’s being, he said that God was a great circle whose circumference was nowhere and whose center was everywhere.

Out of such natural formulas, the mandala has arisen.

Those people in the Middle Ages had a tendency to keep such records of their experiences.

Hildegard von Bingen made a number in her book about the divine mysteries; and Jakob Boehme made a mandala.

And in the time of the Theologia Deutsch, in the early fifteenth century, the mystics,

influenced by the teaching of Master Eckhart and the tradition of the mysteries of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, also made mandalas.

When they were new, they were confessions of one person’s conviction, attempts at formulating an immediate experience.

Later on they became magic formulas, and people thought it might perhaps be helpful

to make such drawings; so they imitated them, assuming that whatever happened to the saint might happen to them.

And so an old Rishi living as a hermit somewhere in the Himalayas was also much concerned with these most baffling experiences that occurred inside and drew those

forms upon rocks or wood, and then he put paint onto them, and his disciples said: “Now look at what the old man is doing, that is his secret, he is trying to make records of things he should not forget,” when he was really only trying to clarify his mind.

Then when he died they copied his work in their notebooks, and thought they had the secret when they made circles too.

So mandalas were just the attempts of old speculative philosophers to express their own dark experiences.

You see it is almost inevitable that certain experiences should become solidified, materialized.

Therefore in all times when a religion is at its best, there is a great art; a new style of art always needs a great religious experience in order to be really beautiful.

And when a religion is declining, the art undergoes a very marked degeneration.

The worldly art of the late centuries of imperial Rome visibly declined. Study the proportions of a building of the third or fourth century A.D., the famous Roman gateway in Verona, for example, the Porto Gallieni; there you see the lack of proportion right away, the beauty has gone.

They first lost the abstract beauty and became more specific.

Therefore the most conspicuous Roman art, besides their buildings, are the portrait busts in sculpture, which are very specific, very material.

You can see them by the hundreds in the museums still, and you can read the character of those Philistines very clearly.

Abstract art went by the board completely, and you only find bad imitations, copies of old masters.

But at the same time, mind you, that this degeneration of the pagan culture was taking place, a new style was coming up with its own particular beauty and proportion, the art of the early Christians, the Byzantine art of Ravenna.

That was a new expression, and the more it developed, the more the spirit became embodied in beauty, in the beauty of painting and architecture and sculpture.

And then in the Reformation all that was denied; they burned up the monasteries and

they destroyed the most wonderful and precious art, the most beautiful stained glass, in a violent attempt to assert life against the caput mortuum it had heaped up around itself.

If I should be cursed by living to be two hundred, I am quite certain I should burn up everything I possessed and kill everybody around me; what one heaps up is so horrible.

I can imagine myself being perfectly comfortable as a caveman, but in time I would have lived beyond all the stuff I had accumulated, the bones of all the animals I had eaten, the piles of shells if I lived by the sea.

I would be sitting at the bottom of a huge conglomeration that had heaped up round me, and almost unable to live because of the insupportable stench, I would be buried under it.

I suppose that is the reason why places have been suddenly depopulated.

The inhabitants are simply buried in their own refuse; they probably built places over the water just in order that the water might carry it away.

Primitive villages are suffocated in dirt, you read of it in descriptions of Eskimo huts-unheard of, like the lair of a hyena.

We would clear out in no time.

And so we accumulate all sorts of psychological refuse, our best ideas become mechanical, they take on shape and become tangible and dangerous.

You read them in books and find them everywhere, wherever you go you find your ideas until you get sick of them, until you change your name.

That is the reason why, if l lived to be so old, I would kill everybody and burn up all my books and everything.

People from time to time get into a sort of fever just because they are buried completely.

Think how horrible it would be if we should discover the perfect religion.

We would have marvellous temples of enormous size and beauty, and they would be just so forever, there would be no hope for mankind to escape out of those courts and colonnades, and we could never invent anything more beautiful than our old conceptions.

Or think of the heights of wisdom that would not allow the ghost of a chance at anything further.

That would be catastrophic, it would lead to the suicide of humanity.

Mrs. Baumann: When you read that vision before, you spoke of the blood dropping from the knife as being sentimentality, as if she were sorry for herself. Would it be because she had to make a sacrifice? Or how does that fit in?

Dr. Jung: It happens that it really is a sacrifice here.

The pyramid, being the tomb of the Self, means the sacrifice of the Self.

But here it is the sacrifice of the animus.

In that sentimentality something new begins; we shall soon see that something will come up instead of the animus.

Instead of the Self, you can say the whole stone and steel mound of New York appears. And what is the most apt equivalent for the animus?

Miss Wolff: If it is in the same line of concretization, it would be a real man.

Dr. Jung: Exactly. When the animus is buried his tomb is a living man, he walks about with a living man.

That is what one feels.

When somebody has an animus projection upon me, I feel as if I were a tomb with a

corpse inside, a peculiar dead weight; I am like one of those tombs Jesus speaks of, with all sorts of vermin inside.

And moreover decidedly a corpse myself, one doesn’t feel one’s own life.

A real animus projection is murderous, because one becomes the place where the animus is buried; he is buried like the eggs of a wasp in the body of a caterpillar, and when the young hatch out, they eat the caterpillar from within, which is very obnoxious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1337-1350