To Walter Lewino

Dear Sir, 21 April 1948

I’m sorry to be so late in answering your letter.

I’ve been overburdened with work lately and I very often cannot attend to my correspondence personally for a long time.

No doubt the anima has a very important aspect as a giver of Wisdom.

She is the femme inspiratrice par excellence.

She derives her wisdom from her “father”-in dogma [they are] represented by Mary [ = anima] and God [the] Father,! viz., Holy Ghost.

“In the womb of the Mother Dwells the wisdom of the father.”

Thus the anima is always associated with the source of wisdom and enlightenment, whose symbol is the Old Wise Man.

As long as you are under the influence of the anima you are unconscious of that archetype, i.e., you are identical with it and that explains your preoccupation with Indian philosophy.

You are then forced to play the role of the Old Wise Man.

The archetype fulfils itself through you.

Only when you discriminate between yourself and this wisdom do you become aware of the male archetype of the spirit.

The anima is the road that leads to it and appears to be also the source of it, but it is an appearance only.

She herself is the archetype of mere life that leads into experiences and awareness.

Indian thought (f.i., Ramakrishna and many others) is based upon a mentality still “contained in the mother,” because the general mood of India is matriarchal.

Our Western consciousness has undergone a differentiation of the parental images: we have father and mother.

We even dispossessed the mother, making her less divine than the father.

Lately, however, the archetype of the mother is decidedly developing inside the Catholic Church, aided by remarkable miracles (Assisi and Fatima), also the
attempts at bringing about the official recognition of the conclusion that Mary has been taken up to heaven together with her body.

It is most difficult to compare the Indian mentality with ours.

It could be compared, however, with the mood of Scholastic philosophy, but that is for us about 6oo years ago.

Thank you for the pictures you’ve sent me.

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 498-499.

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