METAPHYSICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
… our labours are witnesses for the living mystery.
—C. G. JUNG1
Metaphysics is a word which psychologists generally eschew. It tends to connote arbitrary assertions on faith about the nature of ultimate reality. It calls to mind dogmatic attitudes which are repugnant to the empirical temperament. To the scientist, metaphysical dogmatism is a demonstration of the fact that one is “most ignorant of what he’s most assured.” Jung also avoided the term. For instance he wrote, “I approach psychological matters from a scientific and not from a philosophical standpoint … I restrict myself to the observation of phenomena and I eschew any metaphysical or philosophical considerations.”2 In another place he says, “Psychology as the science of the soul has to confine itself to its subject and guard against overstepping its proper boundaries by metaphysical assertions or other professions of faith … The religious-minded man is free to accept whatever metaphysical explanations he pleases about the origin of these images [the archetypes] … The scientist is a scrupulous worker; he cannot take heaven by storm. Should he allow himself to be seduced into such an extravagance he would be sawing off the branch on which he sits.”3
These caveats are certainly in order; however, I would suggest that metaphysics as a subject can be separated from the personal attitude which individuals may take about it. One may take a dogmatic, unempirical attitude toward physics as well as toward metaphysics. Witness, for instance, the refusal to look into Galileo’s telescope because it was “known” that Jupiter could not have moons. Metaphysics has been an honored subject of human concern since the beginning of recorded history. Just as man’s efforts to adapt to other aspects of reality began with naïve, arbitrary, and concretely mythological viewpoints, so it has been in his relation to metaphysical reality. But this need not discredit the subject itself.
Paul Tillich has made an astute observation concerning the relation between Jung’s discoveries and metaphysics. He speaks about “Jung’s anxiety about what he calls metaphysics,” and continues:
This, it seems to me, does not agree with his actual discoveries, which on many points reach deeply into the dimension of a doctrine of being, that is, an ontology. This fear of metaphysics, which he shares with Freud and other nineteenth-century conquerors of the spirit, is a heritage of this century … In taking the biological and, by necessary implication, the physical realm into the genesis of archetypes, he has actually reached the ontological dimension “imprinted upon the biological continuum.” And this was unavoidable, given the revelatory power he attributes to the symbols in which the archetypes express themselves. For to be revelatory one must express what needs revelation, namely, the mystery of being.4
We know, of course, that Jung was not afraid of metaphysics. He explored that realm with great courage. He was not afraid of metaphysics but of metaphysicians. Although figures don’t lie, liars can figure. Likewise, although metaphysical reality can be demonstrated to some extent by the methods of psychological empiricism, those with no understanding of these methods can misuse the findings which are reported. Although Tillich is wrong about the nature of Jung’s anxiety, he does make an important point, i.e., that the symbolic images of the unconscious, if they are to be revelatory, “must express what needs revelation, namely, the mystery of being.” In Aion, Jung says something similar but he uses the word “metaphysical” rather gingerly. He writes, “It is possible … to relate so-called metaphysical concepts, which have lost their root connection with natural experience, to living, universal psychic processes, so that they can recover their true and original meaning. In this way the connection is re-established between the ego and projected contents now formulated as ’metaphysical’ ideas.”5 This is a carefully worded psychological statement. It might be added that a projected metaphysical content, when withdrawn from projection, may still retain its metaphysical quality.
All Jungian analysts know that occasionally dreams do reveal, to some extent, the “mystery of being.” Hence these messages can properly be called metaphysical, i.e., beyond the physical or ordinary conceptions of life. Furthermore, these dreams of individuals, although they use unique imagery and convey an individual revelation to the dreamer, tend also to express a general or common viewpoint, a kind of perennial philosophy of the unconscious which seems to have a more or less universal validity. Such observations lead one to hope that an empirical metaphysics will eventually be possible. This paper is an initial effort to introduce that idea. Its main content is a series of actual dreams, the empirical data, which, I suggest, contain a metaphysical message relevant not only to the dreamer but also in general.
* * *
Several years ago I had the opportunity to observe the dreams of a man who was standing close to death. He had death on both sides of him, so to speak. Just before the dream series began he had made a sudden, impulsive, unpremeditated suicide attempt by swallowing a bottleful of sleeping pills. He was comatose for thirty-six hours and on the verge of death. Two and a half years later he did die, in his late fifties, of a cerebral vascular accident.
Over a period of about two years, intermittently, this man came to see me once a week and discussed his dreams. Our sessions could hardly be called analysis. The patient lacked the objective and self-critical capacity to assimilate any interpretation that would lead to an awareness of the shadow. What did happen was that we observed the dreams together and tried to discover the ideas they were trying to express. Repeatedly I had the impression that the unconscious was trying to give the patient lessons in metaphysics—either to help him assimilate the meaning of his very close brush with death or to prepare him to meet death in the near future. I must emphasize that this man had in no way gone through an individuation process as we use the term. Nevertheless, many of the images associated with the goal of that process were presented to him in the final dreams of his life.
Over a two-year period the patient recorded approximately 180 dreams, of which about one third had definite metaphysical or transcendental allusions. Some of the dreams seemed to be presented from the standpoint of the ego, in which case there was an atmosphere of doom and tragedy. On awakening from these dreams, the dreamer was left in a mood of profound depression. Other dreams seemed to be an expression of a transpersonal standpoint and these brought with them a sense of peace, joy, and security. As a single example of the first category, I shall quote the following dream which he had six months before his death.
I am at home, but it’s nowhere I’ve been before. I go into the pantry to get some food. The shelves are stacked with seasonings and spices, all the same brand, but there is nothing to eat. I feel I am not alone in the house. It is just turning dawn, or is it the brilliant moonlight? I turn on the light, but it comes from another room. Something creaks. I am not alone. I wonder where my dog is. I need more light. I need more light and more courage. I am afraid.
This dream probably expresses the fear of the ego in anticipation of meeting the intruder, Death. Light is no longer with the ego but in the other room. We are reminded of Goethe’s last words, “More light.”
There were only a few of this type of dream. Much more frequent were those in the second category, which contained definite transpersonal imagery and which, as I felt, attempted to give him lessons in metaphysics. From this group I have selected thirteen dreams to present and discuss. I give them in chronological order.
Dream I
I am to learn how to do the exercises of a Japanese Nō play. It was my intention that at the end of the exercises my body would arrive at a physical position which would be the equivalent of a Zen koan.
The Nō drama of Japan is a classical, highly formalized art form. The actors wear masks and in other respects, too, there are similarities to ancient Greek drama. The Nō play expresses universal or archetypal realities, all emphasis is on the transpersonal. Nancy Wilson Ross describes it as follows:
Anyone lending himself to the timeless experience of the Nō never forgets it, though he may be quite incapable of conveying to others an exact sense of its peculiar enchantment. The Nō explores time and space in ways unfamiliar to our Western aesthetic … The eerie use of the human voice, in which normal breathing has been artfully suppressed; the occasional long-drawn, sad and solitary notes of a flute; the periodic sharp cries and catlike yowls from the chorus; the abrupt clack of sticks and the varied tonality of three kinds of drum; the gliding ghostly dancers … the sudden summoning stomp on the bare resonant stage where every ’property’ has been abstracted to a mere symbol; the extravagant and lavish costumes; the unreal reality of the wooden masks worn by the participants; above all, the artful use of emptiness and silence … —these are a few of the traditional elements that help to create the special magic of Nō.6
The dream says therefore that the patient must practice relating to archetypal realities. He must put aside personal considerations and begin to live “under the aspect of eternity.” The consequence of these exercises will be that his body becomes a Zen koan. A koan is a paradoxical anecdote or statement used by the Zen master in the hope that it will help the pupil break through to a new level of consciousness (illumination, satori). Suzuki gives the following example. A pupil asks the master, What is Zen? He replies, “When your mind is not dwelling on the dualism of good and evil, what is your original face before you were born?”7
Such questions are meant to break through the ego-bound state and give one a glimpse of transpersonal reality, in Jungian terms, the self. One Buddhist scholar, after experiencing satori, burned his previously treasured commentaries on the Diamond Sutra and exclaimed,
However deep one’s knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair flying in the vastness of space; however important one’s experience in things worldly, it is like a drop of water thrown into an unfathomable abyss."8
I think we can assume that the dream is trying to convey some such attitude as this—urging the dreamer to relinquish his personal and ego-centered attitude in preparation for quitting this world.
Dream II
I was with several companions in a Dali-esque landscape where things seemed either imprisoned or out of control. There were fires all about, coming out of the ground and about to engulf the place. By a group effort we managed to control the fires and restrict them to their proper place. In the same landscape we found a woman lying on her back on a rock. The front side of her body was flesh, but the back of her head and body was part of the living rock on which she lay. She had a dazzling smile, almost beatific, that seemed to accept her terrible plight. The controlling of the fires seemed to have caused a metamorphosis of some kind. There began a loosening of the rock at her back, so that we were finally able to lift her off of it. Although she was still partly stone, she did not seem too heavy and the change was continuing. We knew she would be whole again.
The patient had a specific association to this dream. The fires reminded him of the fire that was said to accompany Hades when he broke out of the earth to capture Persephone. The dreamer had once visited Eleusis and was shown the spot where Hades was supposed to have emerged.
A figure coming out of rock reminds us of the birth of Mithra from the petra genetrix. The dream also has another analogy with the Mithra myth. One of Mithra’s first tasks was to tame a wild bull. Similarly, in the dream, controlling of the fires was somehow connected with the emergence of the woman from the rock. By limiting the fires a living woman is being extracted from stone. This corresponds to the disengagement of Sophia from the embrace of Physis, which is accomplished by the quenching of the fires of desirousness. In a later dream the feminine personification of Wisdom or Logos is again encountered. The image also suggests the separation of the soul from matter or the body, which is associated with death.
There is a similar image in the ancient Greek alchemical text of Zosimos:
Go to the waters of the Nile and there you will find a stone that has a spirit [πνεῦμα]. Take this, divide it, thrust in your hand and draw out its heart: for its soul [ψυχή] is in its heart.9
A note in the text states that this refers to the expulsion of the quicksilver. It is the alchemical idea of extracting the soul or spirit which is imprisoned in matter, and would correspond to the psychological process of extracting the meaning from a concrete experience (i.e., to stumble over a stone [λίθος προσκόμματος], 1 Peter 2: 8). In the context of the dreamer’s situation, perhaps what was being extracted was the meaning of his earthly life.
We must also consider the dreamer’s association to Hades, Persephone, and the presumed site of the latter’s abduction at Eleusis. This association allows us to consider the dream as a modern individual version of the Eleusinian mysteries. In ancient Greece, initiation into the mysteries was considered most important in determining one’s fate in the afterlife. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter reads:
Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries; but he who is uninitiate and who has no part in them, never has lot of like good things once he is dead, down in the darkness and gloom.10
Plato makes the same point:
… those men who established the mysteries were not unenlightened, but in reality had a hidden meaning when they said long ago that whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods.11
Although little is known about the content of the Eleusinian mysteries, they must have included a death and resurrection ritual since the Demeter-Kore myth is concerned with this theme. The descent of Persephone to the underworld, and the later arrangement whereby she spends part of the year above ground and part of the year in the underworld, is a definite reference to the green vegetation spirit which dies and is reborn each year. Thus the dream alludes to resurrection. The woman becoming disengaged from the rock will correspond to Persephone returning from the underworld. This line of interpretation is verified by a later dream in the series in which the green vegetation numen symbolizing resurrection is specifically portrayed.
Dream III
It was a strange scene. I seemed to be in Africa, standing at the edge of an endless veld stretching as far as I could see. The heads of animals were emerging from the ground, or had emerged. It was very dusty. As I watched, some of the animals emerged completely. Some were quite tame, others quite wild. A rhinoceros and a zebra charged around, kicking up a lot of dust. I wondered if this was the Garden of Eden.
This dream has some similarity to the preceding one. Again, living creatures are coming out of solid earth. The dreamer commented that he felt he was being permitted to look in on the original creation. It is reminiscent of the remark of an alchemist, “Neither be anxious to ask whether I actually possess this precious treasure [the philosophers’ stone]. Ask rather whether I have seen how the world was created; whether I am acquainted with the nature of the Egyptian darkness; … what will be the appearance of the glorified bodies at the general resurrection.”12 This author is demonstrating that he knew that the alchemical secret was not a substance but a state of consciousness, a perception of the archetypal level of reality.
At the end of his personal life the dreamer is being shown the universal beginning of life. Living forms are emerging from the amorphous, inorganic earth. The emphasis on dust reminds us of the use of this image in Genesis: “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground.” (Genesis 2: 7 RSV) “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3: 19 RSV) Dust is powdery, pulverized, dried-out earth. It is similar to ashes and the Hebrew word aphar, here translated as dust, also means ashes. Ashes are the result of the alchemical calcinatio, which was alluded to in the fire of the second dream. But, according to the third dream, out of the dusty ashes of burnt-out life, new life emerges.
Shortly later there was another veld dream.
Dream IV
Again the landscape of the veld. Several acres of empty ground. Scattered about were loaves of bread of various shapes. They looked sedate and permanent, like stones.
have again the symbol of the stone that came up first in Dream II. There it was a stone that was not a stone but a woman. In the present dream it is a stone that is not a stone but a loaf of bread. This motif of the stone that is not a stone is well known in alchemy: λίθος ου λίθος.13 It is a reference to the philosophers’ stone which, according to Ruland, “is a substance which is Petrine as regards its efficacy and virtue but not as regards its substance."14 This statement would be an allusion to the reality of the psyche.
In the fourth chapter of Matthew, the images of bread and stone are connected. During Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness the devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. But he answered, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ ” (Matthew 4: 3–4 RSV) Again in Matthew 7: 9 stone and bread are linked: “Or what man of you, if his son asks him for a loaf, will give him a stone?” These passages establish that bread is a human requirement, that stone does not satisfy human needs, and that willingness to turn stone to bread (i.e., to unite these opposites) is a prerogative of deity. Thus this dream is providing a glimpse behind the metaphysical barrier or, as Jung calls it, the epistemological curtain, the figures behind which are “impossible unions of opposites, transcendental beings which can only be apperceived by contrasts.”15
Dream V
I was invited to a party for Adam and Eve. They had never died. They were the beginning and the end. I realized this and accepted their permanent existence. Both of them were enormous, overscale, like Maillol’s sculptures. They had a sculptural and not a human look. Adam’s face was veiled or covered, and I longed to know what he looked like. I dared to try to uncover his face and I did. The covering was a very heavy layer of peat-mosses, or some sort of vegetable growth. I pulled it away just a little and peeped behind. His face was kind but frightening—it was like a gorilla or giant ape of some sort.
The location of this party is obviously the eternal, archetypal realm. The figures never die, but live in an eternal present. The “kingdom of heaven” is the place where one meets the ancient worthies. Matthew (8: 11 RSV) says, “I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”
The dream figures were said to be both beginning and end. Traditionally, the characteristic of being both beginning and end has never been applied to Adam. However, it is applied to Christ, who was called the second Adam. As the Logos, He existed from the beginning and was the agent of Creation. (John 1: 1–3). The apostle Paul’s whole passage on the resurrection, which mentions the second man [ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος] is relevant to this dream.
The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit … The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven … Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven … Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. (I Corinthians 15: 45–53 RSV).
Adam as the first man is an image of the Anthropos, the primal man of Gnostic speculation. According to the Gnostic Hermetic treatise, Poimandres, the eternal Mind gave birth to the Anthropos, which then fell into the world of spatio-temporal existence because Nature loved him. “And Nature took the object of her love and wound herself completely round him, and they were intermingled, for they were lovers. And this is why beyond all creatures on the earth man is twofold; mortal because of body, but because of the essential Man immortal.”16 The Anthropos is the pre-existent form of man, the eternal Platonic idea, the divine thought which became incarnated by the embrace of Physis. Thus for the dreamer to be introduced to Adam suggests that he is being shown his “original face” prior to the birth of the ego and implies that a process of disincarnation is coming.
Dream VI
I am in a garden, a handsome sunken terrace. The place is called “The Thoughts of God.” Here it is believed that the twelve words of God are to conquer the world. Its walls are lined like a nest with ivy and something as soft as down or fur. I, together with others, am walking inside the enclosure. The force of the words comes with the force of an explosion or earthquake that knocks us to the ground. The cushioned walls prevent one from being hurt. It is the custom in this enclosure to walk next to the walls around the walk. The point is to complete the circle either clockwise or anti-clockwise. As we walk the area grows smaller and more intimate, more padded and more like a nest. The walking itself seems to have something to do with the process of learning.
This dream further elaborates themes to which previous dreams have alluded. Again the dreamer is taken to the pre-existent beginning, the source of the Logos. I know of no reference to the twelve words of God; however, in the Kabbalah, the divine name is sometimes said to consist of twelve letters.17 More commonly, of course, it is thought of as having four letters, the tetragrammaton Yod, He, Van, He. According to Mathers, the tetragrammaton “is capable of twelve transpositions, which all convey the meaning of ‘to be’; it is the only word that will bear so many transpositions without its meaning being altered. They are called the ‘twelve banners of the mighty name’; and are said by some to rule the twelve signs of the Zodiac.”18
The dream makes it clear that the garden of the thoughts of God is a circle with twelve words emanating from it. It would thus be analogous to the signs of the Zodiac, which are a twelve-fold differentiation of the circle of the year. Other parallels would be the twelve sons of Jacob and the twelve disciples of Christ. The pantheons of many peoples were made up of twelve gods. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians were the first to name the twelve gods.19
An unusual feature is that the twelve words of God are said to conquer the world. The typical function of the Logos is to create the world, not conquer it. Perhaps this is an allusion to the fact that shortly the conscious ego (world = ego) is to be extinguished in death. The same idea is implied by the fact that the circular nest grows smaller as it is circumambulated, becoming more and more of a padded womb. The nest symbol emphasizes the maternal, protective, containing aspect of returning to the metaphysical source, and would surely be reassuring to the ego anxious about death. The nest where eggs are laid and hatched also has rebirth implications. For instance, we are told that in Egypt the New Year’s festival was called the “day of the child in the nest.”20
The nest was lined with ivy. According to Fraser, ivy was sacred to both Attis and Osiris. The priests of Attis were tattooed with a pattern of ivy leaves. Because it is evergreen and nondeciduous, Fraser’s remarks about the pine may equally apply to ivy; it may have represented “the seat of a diviner life, of something exempt from the sad vicissitudes of the seasons, constant and eternal as the sky …”21 The evergreen ivy is even more explicitly connected with Osiris as the immortal vegetation spirit. This image is given fuller expression in Dream IX.
Dream VII
Two prize fighters are involved in a ritual fight. Their fight is beautiful. They are not so much antagonists as they are collaborators, working out an elaborate, planned design. They are calm, unruffled, and concentrated. At the end of each round they retire to a dressing room. In the dressing room they apply “make-up.” I watch one of them dip his finger in some blood and smear it on the face of his opponent and himself. They return to the ring and resume their fast, furious, but highly controlled performance.
This dream gives one the eerie feeling that it is a glimpse of how human life appears from beyond the veil of Maya. The strife between the opposites is reconciled by being seen as part of a larger design. There is a fight but no one gets hurt, it is only a beautiful dramatic spectacle. There is blood but it is only “make-up,” belonging to the world of appearance and illusion. The lesson of the dream seems to be very similar to that given by Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita, where also there is the image of the fight, the war which Arjuna is reluctant to engage in.
O mighty among men, he is fit to attain immortality who is serene and not afflicted by these sensations, but is the same in pleasure and pain. There is no existence for the unreal and the real can never be nonexistent. The Seers of Truth know the nature and final ends of both. Know That to be indestructible by which all this is pervaded. No one is ever able to destroy that Immutable. These bodies are perishable; but the dwellers in these bodies are eternal, indestructible and impenetrable. Therefore fight, O descendant of Bharata! He who considers this (Self) as a slayer or he who thinks that this (Self) is slain, neither of these knows the Truth. For It does not slay, nor is It slain. This (Self) is never born, nor does It die, nor after once having been, does it go into non-being. This (Self) is unborn, eternal, changeless, ancient.22
Dream VIII
There are three squares, heating units made of metal coil or neon tubing. They represent my sexual problems. Now they have been disconnected and are being cleaned. There is a new world concept of God, a widening of awareness of the vastness of the universe. Against the background of eternity a thing as temporal as a sexual problem is inconsequential. The washing is in a sense a ritual washing, a cleansing of the three squares to let them fall into their natural place in the vast over-all.
In the dream, my mind played with the visual image of the three squares. It was only natural to draw a circle first inside each, then outside each.
In the dream, the reference to the eternal, divine realm as contrasted with the temporal, personal realm is made explicit. The three squares apparently represent the dreamer’s personal, particularized existence in space and time. They are associated with sexuality, the source of heat or energy. The fact that there are three squares brings up the symbolic meaning of the triad, which I have discussed in my paper, “Trinity and Quaternity.”23 Threeness refers to dynamic existence in historical reality. It expresses the painful dialectic of the developmental process which proceeds according to the Hegelian formula of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
The square, on the other hand, is a fourfold image which expresses totality with emphasis on the static, structural, containing aspects. In Eastern symbolism the square represents the earth in contrast to heaven. According to the old Pythagorean idea, the human soul is a square.24 The circle, in contrast, is a common symbol for God and eternity. Thus when the dreamer draws a circle within the square and another one surrounding the square, he is combining the individual and personal with the eternal and transpersonal. The dream expresses the same idea in its statement that the squares “fall into their natural place in the vast over-all.”25
The image of a square containing a circle and surrounded by a circle has parallels in alchemy. The inner circle would correspond to the prima materia, the original boundless chaos. The square would represent the separation of the prima materia into the four elements, that is, the discrimination that the conscious ego brings out of the original undifferentiated whole. But, as Jung states, the square is an imperfect form because “in the square the elements are still separate and hostile to one another.”25 They thus need to be reunited in a higher unity, the quintessence which would correspond to the outer circle. According to the dream, this reunification of the square is a process of finding its “natural place in the vast over-all.”
Dream IX
I am alone in a great formal garden such as one finds in Europe. The grass is an unusual kind of turf, centuries old. There are great hedges of boxwood, and everything is completely ordered. At the end of the garden I see a movement. At first it seems to be an enormous frog made of grass. As I get closer I see it is actually a green man, herbal, made of grass. He is doing a dance. It is very beautiful and I think of Hudson’s novel, Green Mansions. It gave me a sense of peace, although I could not really understand what I was beholding.
In this dream we have a remarkably explicit representation of the vegetation-spirit which played such an important part in ancient mythology and which has received a comprehensive discussion in Fraser’s The Golden Bough. The most fully developed image in this category is Osiris as corn-spirit, tree-spirit, and god of fertility. The death and rebirth of vegetation were episodes in his drama: “The ivy was sacred to him, and was called his plant because it is always green.”26 On the symbolism of greenness, Jung says, “In the sphere of Christian psychology, green has a spermatic, procreative quality, and for this reason it is the colour attributed to the Holy Ghost as the creative principle.”27 And again, “Green is the colour of the Holy Ghost, of life, procreation and resurrection.”28 An example of the greenness of the Holy Ghost is found in Hildegard of Bingen’s Hymn to the Holy Ghost, “From you the clouds rain down, the heavens move, the stones have their moisture, the waters give forth streams, and the earth sweats out greenness.”29 This passage has a close parallel in an ancient Egyptian hymn to Osiris which says that ”the world waxes green … through him.”30 Another connection between greenness and resurgent life is found in an Egyptian Pyramid text. This passage evokes Kheprer (Khoprer, Khopri, “the Becoming One”31), the scarab god who is the rising sun, “Hail, thou god … who revolvest, Kheprer … Hail, Green One. …”32
Greenness is an important image in alchemy. Some texts refer to it as the benedicta viriditas, blessed greenness. According to Mylius, the Soul of the World, or anima mundi, is green: “God breathed into created things … a certain germination or greenness, by which all things should multiply. … They called all things green, for to be green means to grow … Therefore this virtue of generation and the preservation of things might be called the Soul of the World.”33
In another alchemical text, the feminine personification of the black and rejected prima materia says: “I am alone among the hidden; nevertheless I rejoice in my heart, because I can live privily, and refresh myself in myself … Under my blackness I have hidden the fairest green.” Jung interprets this passage as follows: “The state of imperfect transformation, merely hoped for and waited for, does not seem to be one of torment only, but of positive, if hidden, happiness. It is the state of someone who, in his wanderings among the mazes of his psychic transformation, comes upon a secret happiness which reconciles him to his apparent loneliness. In communing with himself he finds not deadly boredom and melancholy but an inner partner; more than that, a relationship that seems like the happiness of a secret love, or like a hidden springtime, when the green seed sprouts from the barren earth, holding out the promise of future harvest. It is the alchemical benedicta viriditas, the blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the ‘leprosy of the metals’ (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things.”34
What Jung refers to as the secret happiness accompanying the discovery of the green one would correspond, perhaps, to the sense of peace which the dreamer describes. For this man who is shortly to die, the unconscious is presenting a vivid and beautiful image of the eternal nature of life, whose particular manifestations are continually passing away, but which is being continually reborn in new forms. The dream expresses the same idea as the words of Paul in his resurrection passage, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15: 54–55 AV)
Dream X
As in Ginsberg’s Legends of the Jews, where God was in personal communication with various individuals, He seemed to have assigned me a test, distasteful in every way, for which I was in no way fitted, technically or emotionally. First I was to search for and find a man who was expecting me, and together we were to follow exactly the instructions. The end result was to become an abstract symbol beyond our com-prehension, with religious, or sacred, or tabu connotations. The task involved removing the man’s hands at the wrists, trimming them, and uniting them to make a hexagonal shape. Two rectangles, one from each hand, were to be removed, leaving windows of a sort. The rectangles themselves were also symbols of great value. The results were to be mummified, dried up, and black. All of it took a long time, was extremely delicate and difficult. He bore it stoically, as it was his destiny as well as mine; and the end result, we believed, was what was demanded. When we looked at the symbol that had resulted from our labors, it had an impenetrable aura of mystery about it. We were both exhausted by the ordeal.
The dreamer had browsed in Ginsberg’s Legends of the Jews at the house of a friend, but had done no extensive reading in this book. Also, his knowledge of the Old Testament was minimal. The dream is reminiscent of tasks imposed on individuals by Yahweh, e.g., Jonah, Hosea, etc. If one’s life is governed by the sense of a divine task, this means psychologically that the ego is subordinated to the self and has been freed of ego-centered preoccupations. Something of this idea is indicated by the nature of the task imposed in the dream. A man’s hands are to be amputated. This rather grisly, primitive image expresses a psychological process. The same image occurs in alchemy as the lion with his paws cut off,35 and in a more extreme form as the dismembered man in the Splendor Solis treatise.36 The hands are the agency of the conscious will. Hence to have them cut off would correspond to the experience of the impotence of the ego. In Jung’s words, “The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.37
The next step in the dream task is to unite the amputated hands into a hexagon. Here we have a reference to the union of opposites, right and left, conscious and unconscious, good and evil. The product of the union is a sixfold figure. A well-known sixfold symbol which also is made by the union of two similar but contrasting elements is the so-called Solomon’s seal. It consists of two triangles, one pointing upward and one downward. For the alchemists it represented the union of fire and water. For others it has signified the interpenetration of the trinity of spirit (upward pointing) with the chthonic trinity of matter (downward pointing) and hence symbolized the process of interrelation between the two.
The number six is associated with the completion or fulfillment of a creative task. In Genesis the world was created in six days with the final act, the creation of Adam, on the sixth day. Jesus was crucified on the sixth day of the week. According to Joannes Lydus, quoted by Jung, “The number 6 is most skilled in begetting, for it is even and uneven, partaking both of the active nature on account of the uneven, and of the hylical nature on account of the even, for which reason the ancients also named it marriage and harmony … And they say also that it is both male and female … And another says that the number 6 is soul-producing, because it multiplies itself into the world-sphere, and because in it the opposites are mingled.38
Summing up the meaning of these amplifications, the dream seems to say that a task must be performed whereby the powers of the individual ego, for both good and evil, are separated or extracted from their union with that ego and reunited in an abstract or supra-personal image. When the two rectangular windows are added, a rather eerie effect is created, reminding one of a primitive mask. The net result is a geometrical image which I would venture to suggest is a symbolic representation of the face of God.
Dream XI
There is a darkness, but with a luminosity in it, not describable. A darkness somehow glowing. Standing in it is a beautiful golden woman, with an almost Mona Lisa face. Now I realize that the glow is emanating from a necklace she is wearing. It is of great delicacy: small cabochons of turquoise, each circled in reddish gold. It has a great meaning for me, as if there were a message in the complete image if only I could break through its elusiveness.
The dreamer, who was quite uninformed about philosophy and religion, did not know the opening passage in the Gospel of John concerning the Logos. It is certainly relevant to the dream.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 1-5 RSV)
John’s Logos doctrine applied to Christ the Logos theory of Hellenistic philosophy. Christ became the creative Word or Thought of God who had been with Him from the beginning. In Gnostic circles, the Logos was equated with Sophia, the feminine personification of Wisdom. The same image had already appeared in the Hebrew wisdom literature. For instance, she is mentioned in this prayer to God: “With you is Wisdom, she who knows your works, she who was present when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing in your eyes and what agrees with your commandments.” (Wisdom 9: 9 Jerusalem) M.-L. von Franz, in her Aurora Consurgens, discusses at length the figure of Sophia or Sapientia Dei. She writes,
In patristic literature she was mostly interpreted as Christ, the pre-existent Logos, or as the sum of the rationes aeternae (eternal forms), of the “self-knowing primordial causes,” exemplars, ideas, and prototypes in the mind of God. She was also considered the archetypus mundus, “that archetypal world after whose likeness this sensible world was made,” and through which God becomes conscious of himself. Sapientia Dei is thus the sum of archetypal images in the mind of God.39
Thomas Aquinas expresses the same idea,
Divine wisdom devised the order of the universe residing in the distinction of things, and therefore we must say that in the divine wisdom are the models of all things, which we have called ideas—i.e., exemplary forms existing in the divine mind.40
The golden woman with the Mona Lisa face in the dream is thus Sophia or Divine Wisdom. Her luminous necklace of blue and gold would be a kind of celestial rosary which unites on a single circular string various forms and modes of being as the circle of the year unites the signs of the Zodiac—“the sum of archetypal images in the mind of God.”
Dream XII
I have been set a task nearly too difficult for me. A log of hard and heavy wood lies covered in the forest. I must uncover it, saw or hew from it a circular piece, and then carve through the piece a design. The result is to be preserved at all cost, as representing something no longer recurring and in danger of being lost. At the same time, a tape recording is to be made describing in detail what it is, what it represents, its whole meaning. At the end, the thing itself and the tape are to be given to the public library. Someone says that only the library will know how to prevent the tape from deteriorating within five years.
Again we have the theme of the difficult assigned task analogous to the alchemical opus. The covered log is the hidden original material which first must be uncovered or made manifest and then given a special form which has some uniqueness since it will not recur again. The carved design is a fivefold image. The number five occurs again in the remark that there is danger of deterioration in five years. The symbolism of five comes up in the quintessence of the alchemists. It is the fifth form and ultimate unity of the four elements and hence the final goal of the process. Ruland says the quintessence is “the Medicine itself, and the quality of substances separated by Art from the body.”41 Jung says that the number five suggests the predominance of the physical man.42 This would correspond to the fact that the dream image reminds one of an abstract human figure with five protuberances-four limbs and head. Hence it would suggest the goal and completion of physical existence.
The deposit of the object, and a tape recording of its meaning in the public library, raises some very interesting points. In some respects the object and the tape recording can be considered as synonymous, since the sketch of the object looks much like a reel of recording tape. By this line of associations the task can be seen as the transformation of Wood into Word, i.e., matter into spirit. It is possible that this dream was foreshadowing the fact that I would publish a series of his dreams in the future. The task would then be the recording of his dreams which he deposited with me. However, especially in the context of the other dreams, this simple, personalistic interpretation is completely inadequate to the data. Much more likely is the assumption that the dream task refers to his psychological life task, the results of which are to be deposited as a permanent increment to a collective or transpersonal library, i.e., a word or spirit treasury.
The motif of the treasure-house is found in alchemy as a synonym for the philosophers’ stone.43The fifth parable of Aurora Consurgens is entitled “Of the Treasure-House which Wisdom built upon a Rock.” Alphidius says, “This is the treasure-house in which are treasured up all the sublime things of science or wisdom or the glorious things which cannot be possessed.”44 In Alphidius, the treasure-house is a fourfold structure and thus clearly a symbol of the self.
A similar “treasury” image occurs in Catholic theology concerning the “treasure of merits” accumulated by Christ and the saints.45 In spite of the concretistic misuse of this image by the Church to justify the sale of indulgences, it is an archetypal idea which expresses some aspect of the objective psyche.
In the examples cited, the treasury, when found, will convey benefits to the finder. In our dream, however, the dreamer is not making a withdrawal for his own use, but rather a deposit which will augment the public treasury. We recall the words of Jesus, “Even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve” (Matthew 20: 28 RSV). The dream seems to imply that the psychological accomplishments of the individual leave some permanent spiritual residue that augments the cumulative collective treasury, a sort of positive collective karma. In that case the words of Milton concerning a good book could apply equally to the fruits of the inner psychological task of individuation. A permanent spiritual deposit is left which “is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”46
The dream mentions the need to prevent deterioration. Some preservative or embalming process is required. Dream X brought up the same theme in the mummification of the amputated hands. Perhaps the significance of these references corresponds to the archetypal symbolism that lay behind the elaborate embalming procedures of ancient Egypt. This idea seems provocative, although I cannot pursue it further at present.
Dream XIII
I was looking at a curiously unique and beautiful garden. It was a large square with a floor of stone. At intervals of about two feet were placed brass objects, standing upright, and looking very much like Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” [sic] I stayed a long time. It had a very positive meaning, but what that was, I was unable to grasp.
Brancusi’s Bird in Space is a graceful, slightly curved vertical pole of polished metal thicker in its mid-region and tapering to a point at the top. It brings up the whole question of the symbolism of the pole or pillar. In simplest terms it represents the phallic, striving, vertical thrust toward the upper spirit realm. It may signify the axis mundi, which is the connection between the human world and the transpersonal divine world. On such a cosmic pole the gods descend to manifest themselves, or the primitive shaman ascends to seek his ecstatic vision.47
Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1932–40
Polished brass on limestone base
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
There is an ancient Egyptian religious ritual that gives us some other symbolic implications of a vertical pole or pillar. In the rites which celebrated the death and resurrection of Osiris, the ceremonies culminated when the chief priest set the so-called Djed column upright. R. T. Rundle Clark says about this column, “The idea of the Djed Column is that it stands firmly upright—for to be upright is to be alive, to have overcome the inert forces of death and decay. When the Djed is upright, it implies that life will go on in the world.”48
The dream image which combines a stone square with poles has a parallel in ancient Semitic sanctuaries as described by Fraser. He writes, “We know that at all the old Canaanite sanctuaries, including the sanctuaries of Jehovah down to the reformations of Hezekiah and Josiah, the two regular objects of worship were a sacred stock and a sacred stone, and that these sanctuaries were the seats of profligate rites performed by sacred men (ḳedeshim) and sacred women (ḳedeshoth).”49 Jeremiah refers to the sacred stock and stone when he criticizes the Israelites for “saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth” (Jeremiah 2: 27 AV). Stone and pole are therefore representations of the feminine and masculine deities respectively. In psychological terms the dream is thus presenting a coniunctio of the masculine and feminine principles. Why there should be a multiplicity of masculine poles contained within one stone square, I do not know. Perhaps it has implications similar to the multiplicity of pearls in the necklace of Sophia. However, as an expression of totality and the union of opposites, it is an image of completion. This dream is one of the last I have of this patient. Three months later he died of a cerebral vascular accident.
This dream series demonstrates, I think, that the unconscious under certain circumstances brings up considerations which properly can be called metaphysical. Although the dreamer did not undergo the process of individuation in the usual sense of that term, it can be surmised that the pressure of impending death may have telescoped that process. Certainly these dreams suggest an urgency on the part of the unconscious to convey awareness of a metaphysical reality, as if such an awareness were important to have before one’s physical death.
* * *
The question will be asked, What effect did these dreams have on the dreamer? This is difficult to answer with certainty; practically all of the dreams reported here had an intense emotional impact on the dreamer, but interestingly he experienced this impact only when recounting the dreams in the analytic session, not beforehand. Somehow the presence of the analyst was needed to release the numinosity of the dream images. Taken as a whole, the dreams conveyed a series of small religious experiences which brought about a gradual and definite change in the dreamer’s life attitude. This unreligious, un-philosophical man was given a metaphysical initiation. As a result, he was at least partially released from preoccupation with personal frustrations, and his personality acquired a new level of depth and dignity. After being brought back from near death, he voiced the question several times, “Why was my life prolonged?" Perhaps these dreams contain the answer.
Addendum
Concerning Dream XII: The idea of a cosmic treasury augmented by the efforts of individual men is found in Gnosticism. The Pistis Sophia speaks of a Treasury of Light in which are gathered the particles of light that have been redeemed from their imprisonment in the darkness of matter. This treasury is a kind of intermediate collecting50 station which then transmits the accumulated light to a higher region, the World of Light, by means of a light stream called the Pillar of Glory.51 According to Manichaean doctrine the elect perform this redemptive function for the scattered light. Having been reborn through gnosis, the elect become instruments for the gathering and concentration of light particles dispersed in matter. At the time of death each carries his accumulated bundle of light out of the material world and into the eternal realm of light.
This Gnostic reference is also relevant to Dream XIII. The graceful brass pole plunging skyward might be compared with the Pillar of Glory through which the collected particles of redeemed light stream into the eternal realm. A similar image occurs in the Manichaean eschatology. At the end of time, the last “statue” (or pillar) appears: “All the light that can still be saved is united in the ‘Great Idea … in the form of the ‘last statue,’ which rises up to heaven, while the damned and the demons, matter with its lust and bisexuality, are cast into a pit sealed over with an immense stone.”52 Jung refers to the Manichaean “statue” and relates it to an alchemical text. He writes, “It is clear … that the statue or pillar is either the perfect Primordial Man … or at least his body, both at the beginning of creation and at the end of time.”53
NOTES
This paper was read in August 1968 at the seminar held to celebrate Dr. M. Esther Harding’s eightieth birthday at Brunswick, Maine, and copyrighted in her name. We are indebted to her for permission to print it.
1. C. G. Jung, Letter to John Trinick, 15 October 1957, Published in John Trinick, The Fire-Tried Stone (London: Stuart and Watkins, 1967), p. 11.
2. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, (CW 11), p. 6.
3. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12), p. 14.
4. Carl Gustav Jung, 1875–1961: A Memorial Meeting, New York, December 1, 1961 (New York: The Analytical Club of New York, 1962), p. 31.
5. C. G. Jung. Aion (CW 9.2), p. 34.
6. Nancy Wilson Ross, The World of Zen (New York: Random House, 1960), pp. 167f.
7. D. T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 104.
8. Ibid., p. 94.
9. Marcellin Berthelot, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols. (Paris: Georges Steinheil, 1887–88), vol. 3, VI.5; quoted by Jung in Psychology and Alchemy, p. 284.
10. Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 323, lines 480ff.
11. Plato, Phaedo 69c.
12. The Hermetic Museum, translated by A. E. Waite, 2 vols. (London: John M. Watkins, 1953), vol. 1, p. 8.
13. Berthelot, op. cit., vol. 1, III.1.
14. Martin Ruland, A Lexicon of Alchemy, translated by A. E. Waite (London: John M. Watkins, 1964), p. 189.
15. Jung, Letter to John Trinick, op. cit., p. 10.
16. Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis, translated by G. R. S. Mead, 3 vols. (London: John M. Watkins, 1949), 2: 10.
17. A. E. Waite. The Holy Kabbalah (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1960), p. 617.
18. The Kabbalah Unveiled (Kabbala Denudata) (New York: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1907), p. 31
19. Herodotus, Histories 2.4.
20. Adolf Erman, The Religion of the Egyptians; quoted in Eric Neuman, The Great Mother (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), p. 243.
21. James G. Fraser, “Adonis, Attis, Osiris,” Part IV of The Golden Bough, 2 vols. (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961), 1: 277f.
22. Bhagavad Gita 2.15–20, translated by Swami Paramandenda, in The Wisdom of China and India, edited by Lin Yutang (New York: Random House, 1942), p. 62.
23. Journal of Analytical Psychology 9, no. 2 (July 1964): 103ff.; also The Archetype: Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Analytical Psychology, edited by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig (Basel/New York: S. Karger, 1964), pp. 16–29.
24. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 72.
25. C. G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16), p. 204.
26. Fraser, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 112.
27. C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14), p. 113.
28. Ibid., p. 289.
29. Jung, Psychology and Religion, pp. 91f.
30. Fraser, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 113.
31. R. T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 40.
32. E. A. Wallis Budge, Osiris the Egyptian Religion of Resurrection, 2 vols. (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961), vol. 2, p. 355.
33. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 432.
34. Ibid., p. 432.
35. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, fig. 4, p. 38.
36. Solomon Trismosin, Splendor Solis (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1920), pl. 10.
37. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 546.
38. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, p. 236 n.
39. Marie-Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), pp. 155f.
40. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 44, art. 3.
41. Ruland, op. cit., p. 272.
42. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 184 n.
43. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 4 n.
44. Von Franz, op. cit., p. 314.
45. Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), vol. 7, pp. 253ff.
46. John Milton, Areopagitica.
47. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), pp. 259ff.
48. Clark, op. cit., p. 236.
49. Fraser, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 107.
50. Pistis Sophia, translated by G. R. S. Mead (London: John M. Watkins, 1947), p. 2 et passim.
51. Francis Legge, Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1964), vol. 2, p. 296.
52. Henri-Charles Puech, “The Concept of Redemption in Manichaeism,” in The Mystic Vision: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 312f.
53. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 395.
Spring: Contributions to Jungian Thought (1969): 101–27
© Copyright 1969 The Analytical Psychology Club of New York, Inc.