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object:1.01 - Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
book class:The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


I - ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS



THE CONCEPT OF THE
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS



CONCERNING THE ARCHETYPES,
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE
TO THE ANIMA CONCEPT



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS 1

The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the
class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to
possess and use as familiar conceptions. This has been the case
with the concept of the unconscious in general. After the philo-
sophical idea of the unconscious, in the form presented chiefly
by Carus and von Hartmann, had gone down under the over-
whelming wave of materialism and empiricism, leaving hardly
a ripple behind it, it gradually reappeared in the scientific do-
main of medical psychology.

At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denot-
ing the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with
Freud, who makes the unconscious at least metaphorically
take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the
gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a
functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accord-
ingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, 2
although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought-
forms.

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is un-
doubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this
personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not
derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisi-
tion but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective uncon-
scious. I have chosen the term "collective" because this part of
the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to

1 [First published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1934, and later revised and published
in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954) , from which version the
present translation is made. The translation of the original version, by Stanley
Dell, in The Integration of the Personality (New York, 1939; London, 1940), has
been freely consulted. Editors.]

2 In his later works Freud differentiated the basic view mentioned here. He called
the instinctual psyche the "id," and his "super-ego" denotes the collective con-
sciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partly unconscious
(because it is repressed).

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THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that
are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It
is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a
common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is
present in every one of us.

Psychic existence can be recognized only by the presence of
contents that are capable of consciousness. We can therefore
speak of an unconscious only in so far as we are able to demon-
strate its contents. The contents of the personal unconscious are
chiefly the feeling-toned complexes, as they are called; they con-
stitute the personal and private side of psychic life. The contents
of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as
archetypes.

The term "archetype" occurs as early as Philo Judaeus, 3 with
reference to the Imago Dei (God-image) in man. It can also be
found in Irenaeus, who says: "The creator of the world did not
fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from
archetypes outside himself." 4 In the Corpus Hermeticum? God
is called apxirvwov
several times in Dionysius the Areopagite, as for instance in De
caelesti hierarchia, II, 4: "immaterial Archetypes," 6 and in
De divinis nominibus, I, 6: "Archetypal stone." 7 The term
"archetype" is not found in St. Augustine, but the idea of it is.
Thus in De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII he speaks of "ideae
principales, 'which are themselves not formed . . . but are con-
tained in the divine understanding.' " 8 "Archetype" is an explan-
atory paraphrase of the Platonic etSo?. For our purposes this term
is apposite and helpful, because it tells us that so far as the col-

3 De opificio mundi, I, 69. Cf. Colson/Whitaker trans., I, p. 55.

4 Adversus haereses II, 7, 5: "Mundi fabricator non a semetipso fecit haec, sed de
alienis archetypis transtulit." (Cf. Roberts /Rambaut trans., I, p. 139.)

5 Scott, Hermetica, I, p. 140. 6 In Migne, P.G., vol. 3, col. 144.

7 Ibid., col. 595. Cf. The Divine Names (trans, by Rolt), pp. 62, 72.

8 Migne, P.L., vol. 40, col. 30. "Archetype" is used in the same way by the alche-
mists, as in the "Tractatus aureus" of Hermes Trismegistus (Theatrum chemicum,
IV, 1613, p. 718): "As God [contains] all the treasure of his godhead . . . hidden
in himself as in an archetype [in se tanquam archetypo absconditum] ... in
like manner Saturn carries the similitudes of metallic bodies hiddenly in him-
self." In the "Tractatus de igne et sale" of Vigenerus (Theatr. chem., VI, 1661,
p. 3), the world is "ad archetypi sui similitudinem factus" (made after the like-
ness of its archetype) and is therefore called the "magnus homo" (the "homo
maximus" of Swedenborg).

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ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

lective unconscious contents are concerned we are dealing with
archaic or I would say primordial types, that is, with universal
images that have existed since the remotest times. The term
"representations collectives," used by Levy-Bruhl to denote the
symbolic figures in the primitive view of the world, could easily
be applied to unconscious contents as well, since it means prac-
tically the same thing. Primitive tribal lore is concerned with
archetypes that have been modified in a special way. They are
no longer contents of the unconscious, but have already been
changed into conscious formulae taught according to tradition,
generally in the form of esoteric teaching. This last is a typical
means of expression for the transmission of collective contents
originally derived from the unconscious.

Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth
and fairytale. But here too we are dealing with forms that have
received a specific stamp and have been handed down through
long periods of time. The term "archetype" thus applies only
indirectly to the "representations collectives," since it designates
only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted
to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum
of psychic experience. In this sense there is a considerable dif-
ference between the archetype and the historical formula that
has evolved. Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching
the archetypes appear in a form that reveals quite unmistakably
the critical and evaluating influence of conscious elaboration.
Their immediate manifestation, as we encounter it in dreams
and visions, is much more individual, less understandable, and
more naive than in myths, for example. The archetype is essen-
tially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming con-
scious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the
individual consciousness in which it happens to appear. 9

What the word "archetype" means in the nominal sense is
clear enough, then, from its relations with myth, esoteric teach-
ing, and fairytale. But if we try to establish what an archetype
is psychologically, the matter becomes more complicated. So far
mythologists have always helped themselves out with solar,

9 One must, for the sake of accuracy, distinguish between "archetype" and
"archetypal ideas." The archetype as such is a hypothetical and irrepresen table
model, something like the "pattern of behaviour" in biology. Cf. "On the Nature
of the Psyche," sec. 7.

5



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

lunar, meteorological, vegetal, and other ideas of the kind. The
fact that myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that
reveal the nature of the soul is something they have absolutely
refused to see until now. Primitive man is not much interested
in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an impera-
tive need or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible
urge to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic
events. It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and
set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic
happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a
god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in
the soul of man. All the mythologized processes of nature, such
as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy sea-
sons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories 10 of these objective
occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner,
unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to
man's consciousness by way of projection that is, mirrored in
the events of nature. The projection is so fundamental that it
has taken several thousand years of civilization to detach it in
some measure from its outer object. In the case of astrology, for
instance, this age-old "scientia intuitiva" came to be branded as
rank heresy because man had not yet succeeded in making the
psychological description of character independent of the stars.
Even today, people who still believe in astrology fall almost
without exception for the old superstitious assumption of the
influence of the stars. And yet anyone who can calculate a horo-
scope should know that, since the days of Hipparchus of Alex-
andria, the spring-point has been fixed at o Aries, and that the
zodiac on which every horoscope is based is therefore quite
arbitrary, the spring-point having gradually advanced, since
then, into the first degrees of Pisces, owing to the precession of
the equinoxes.

Primitive man impresses us so strongly with his subjectivity
that we should really have guessed long ago that myths refer
to something psychic. His knowledge of nature is essentially the
language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic process. But
the very fact that this process is unconscious gives us the reason

10 An allegory is a paraphrase of a conscious content, whereas a symbol is the
best possible expression for an unconscious content whose nature can only be
guessed, because it is still unknown.

6



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

why man has thought of everything except the psyche in his
attempts to explain myths. He simply didn't know that the
psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to
myths, and that our unconscious is an acting and suffering sub-
ject with an inner drama which primitive man rediscovers, by
means of analogy, in the processes of nature both great and
small. 11

9 "The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast," 12 says Seni
to Wallenstein a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we
knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so
far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to
assert that things are any better today.

i Tribal lore is always sacred and dangerous. All esoteric teach-
ings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche,
and all claim supreme authority for themselves. What is true of
primitive lore is true in even higher degree of the ruling world
religions. They contain a revealed knowledge that was originally
hidden, and they set forth the secrets of the soul in glorious
images. Their temples and their sacred writings proclaim in
image and word the doctrine hallowed from of old, making it
accessible to every believing heart, every sensitive vision, every
farthest range of thought. Indeed, we are compelled to say that
the more beautiful, the more sublime, the more comprehensive
the image that has evolved and been handed down by tradi-
tion, the further removed it is from individual experience. We
can just feel our way into it and sense something of it, but the
original experience has been lost.

11 Why is psychology the youngest of the empirical sciences?
Why have we not long since discovered the unconscious and
raised up its treasure-house of eternal images? Simply because
we had a religious formula for everything psychic and one that
is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate expe-
rience. Though the Christian view of the world has paled for
many people, the symbolic treasure-rooms of the East are still
full of marvels that can nourish for a long time to come the pas-
sion for show and new clothes. What is more, these imagesbe
they Christian or Buddhist or what you will are lovely,

li Cf. my papers on the divine child and the Kore in the present volume, and
Kernyi's complementary essays in Essays on [or Introduction to] a Science of
Mythology. 12 [Schiller, Piccolomini, II, 6. Editors.]

7



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

mysterious, richly intuitive. Naturally, the more familiar we are
with them the more does constant usage polish them smooth, so
that what remains is only banal superficiality and meaningless
paradox. The mystery of the Virgin Birth, or the homoousia of
the Son with the Father, or the Trinity which is nevertheless
not a triad these no longer lend wings to any philosophical
fancy. They have stiffened into mere objects of belief. So it is
not surprising if the religious need, the believing mind, and the
philosophical speculations of the educated European are at-
tracted by the symbols of the East those grandiose conceptions
of divinity in India and the abysms of Taoist philosophy in
China just as once before the heart and mind of the men of
antiquity were gripped by Christian ideas. There are many
Europeans who began by surrendering completely to the in-
fluence of the Christian symbol until they landed themselves in
a Kierkegaardian neurosis, or whose relation to God, owing to
the progressive impoverishment of symbolism, developed into
an unbearably sophisticated I-You relationship only to fall
victims in their turn to the magic and novelty of Eastern sym-
bols. This surrender is not necessarily a defeat; rather it proves
the receptiveness and vitality of the religious sense. We can
observe much the same thing in the educated Oriental, who not
infrequently feels drawn to the Christian symbol or to the sci-
ence that is so unsuited to the Oriental mind, and even develops
an enviable understanding of them. That people should suc-
cumb to these eternal images is entirely normal, in fact it is
what these images are for. They are meant to attract, to con-
vince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of
the primal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-unique expe-
rience of divinity. That is why they always give man a premoni-
tion of the divine while at the same time safeguarding him from
immediate experience of it. Thanks to the labours of the human
spirit over the centuries, these images have become embedded in
a comprehensive system of thought that ascribes an order to the
world, and are at the same time represented by a mighty, far-
spread, and venerable institution called the Church.

I can best illustrate my meaning by taking as an example the
Swiss mystic and hermit, Brother Nicholas of Fliie, 13 who
has recently been canonized. Probably his most important re-

13 Cf. my "Brother Klaus."

8



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

ligious experience was the so-called Trinity Vision, which pre-
occupied him to such an extent that he painted it, or had it
painted, on the wall of his cell. The painting is still preserved
in the parish church at Sachseln. It is a mandala divided into six
parts, and in the centre is the crowned countenance of God.
Now we know that Brother Klaus investigated the nature of his
vision with the help of an illustrated devotional booklet by a
German mystic, and that he struggled to get his original expe-
rience into a form he could understand. He occupied himself
with it for years. This is what I call the "elaboration" of the
symbol. His reflections on the nature of the vision, influenced
as they were by the mystic diagrams he used as a guiding thread,
inevitably led him to the conclusion that he must have gazed
upon the Holy Trinity itself the summum bonum, eternal love.
This is borne out by the "expurgated" version now in Sachseln.
*3 The original experience, however, was entirely different. In
his ecstasy there was revealed to Brother Klaus a sight so terrible
that his own countenance was changed by it so much so, in-
deed, that people were terrified and felt afraid of him. What he
had seen was a vision of the utmost intensity. Woelflin, 14 our
oldest source, writes as follows:

All who came to him were filled with terror at the first glance. As
to the cause of this, he himself used to say that he had seen a pierc-
ing light resembling a human face. At the sight of it he feared that
his heart would burst into little pieces. Therefore, overcome with
terror, he instantly turned his face away and fell to the ground. And
that was the reason why his face was now terrible to others.

H This vision has rightly been compared 15 with the one in
Revelation 1 : i3ff., that strange apocalyptic Christ-image, which
for sheer gruesomeness and singularity is surpassed only by the
monstrous seven-eyed lamb with seven horns (Rev. 5 : 6f.). It is
certainly very difficult to see what is the relationship between
this figure and the Christ of the gospels. Hence Brother Klaus's
vision was interpreted in a quite definite way by the earliest
sources. In 1508, the humanist Karl Bovillus (Charles de
Bouelles) wrote to a friend:

14 Heinrich Woelflin, also called by the Latin form Lupulus, born 1470, humanist
and director of Latin studies at Bern. Cited in Fritz Blanke, Bruder Klaus von
Flue, pp. Q2f.

15 Ibid., p. 94.

9



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

I wish to tell you of a vision which appeared to him in the sky, on a
night when the stars were shining and he stood in prayer and con-
templation. He saw the head of a human figure with a terrifying
face, full of wrath and threats. 16

This interpretation agrees perfectly with the modern ampli-
fication furnished by Revelation 1 : 13. 17 Nor should we forget
Brother Klaus's other visions, for instance, of Christ in the bear-
skin, of God the Father and God the Mother, and of himself as
the Son. They exhibit features which are very undogmatic
indeed.

Traditionally this great vision was brought into connection
with the Trinity picture in the church at Sachseln, and so, like-
wise, was the wheel symbolism in the so-called "Pilgrim's
Tract." 18 Brother Klaus, we are told, showed the picture of the
wheel to a visiting pilgrim. Evidently this picture had preoc-
cupied him for some time. Blanke is of the opinion that, con-
trary to tradition, there is no connection between the vision
and the Trinity picture. 19 This scepticism seems to me to go too
far. There must have been some reason for Brother Klaus's
interest in the wheel. Visions like the one he had often cause
mental confusion and disintegration (witness the heart bursting
"into little pieces"). We know from experience that the pro-
tective circle, the mandala, is the traditional antidote for chaotic
states of mind. It is therefore only too clear why Brother Klaus
was fascinated by the symbol of the wheel. The interpretation
of the terrifying vision as an experience of God need not be so
wide of the mark either. The connection between the great
vision and the Trinity picture, and of both with the wheel-
symbol, therefore seems to me very probable on psychological
grounds.

16 Ein gesichte Bruder Clausen ynn Schweytz und seine deutunge (Wittemberg,
1528), p. 5. Cited in Alban Stoeckli, O. M. Cap., Die Visionen des seligen Bruder
Klaus, p. 34.

17 M. B. Lavaud, O.P. (Vie Profonde de Nicolas de Flue) gives just as apt a
parallel with a text from the Horologium sapientiae of Henry Suso, where the
apocalyptic Christ appears as an infuriated and wrathful avenger, very much in
contrast to the Jesus who preached the Sermon on the Mount. [Cf. Suso, Little
Book of Eternal Wisdom, Clark trans., pp. 77-78 Editors.]

18 Ein nutzlicher und loblicher Tractat von Bruder Claus und einem Bilger
(1488).

19 Blanke, pp. 95ff.

IO



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

17 This vision, undoubtedly fearful and highly perturbing,
which burst like a volcano upon his religious view of the world,
without any dogmatic prelude and without exegetical com-
mentary, naturally needed a long labour of assimilation in order
to fit it into the total structure of the psyche and thus restore the
disturbed psychic balance. Brother Klaus came to terms with
his experience on the basis of dogma, then firm as a rock; and
the dogma proved its powers of assimilation by turning some-
thing horribly alive into the beautiful abstraction of the Trinity
idea. But the reconciliation might have taken place on a quite
different basis provided by the vision itself and its unearthly
actuality much to the disadvantage of the Christian conception
of God and no doubt to the still greater disadvantage of Brother
Klaus himself, who would then have become not a saint but a
heretic (if not a lunatic) and would probably have ended his
life at the stake.

18 This example demonstrates the use of the dogmatic symbol:
it formulates a tremendous and dangerously decisive psychic
experience, fittingly called an "experience of the Divine," in a
way that is tolerable to our human understanding, without
either limiting the scope of the experience or doing damage to
its overwhelming significance. The vision of divine wrath, which
we also meet in Jakob Bohme, ill accords with the God of the
New Testament, the loving Father in heaven, and for this
reason it might easily have become the source of an inner con-
flict. That would have been quite in keeping with the spirit of
the age the end of the fifteenth century, the time of Nicholas
Cusanus, whose formula of the "complexio oppositorum" actu-
ally anticipated the schism that was imminent. Not long after-
wards the Yahwistic conception of God went through a series of
rebirths in Protestantism. Yahweh is a God-concept that con-
tains the opposites in a still undivided state.

19 Brother Klaus put himself outside the beaten track of con-
vention and habit by leaving his home and family, living alone
for years, and gazing deep into the dark mirror, so that the
wondrous and terrible boon of original experience befell him.
In this situation the dogmatic image of divinity that had been
developed over the centuries worked like a healing draught. It
helped him to assimilate the fatal incursion of an archetypal
image and so escape being torn asunder. Angelus Silesius was

11



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

not so fortunate; the inner conflict tore him to pieces, because in
his day the stability of the Church that dogma guarantees was
already shattered.

20 Jakob Bohme, too, knew a God of the "Wrath -fire," a real
Deus absconditus. He was able to bridge the profound and
agonizing contradiction on the one hand by means of the Chris-
tian formula of Father and Son and embody it speculatively in
his view of the world which, though Gnostic, was in all essen-
tial points Christian. Otherwise he would have become a dualist.
On the other hand it was undoubtedly alchemy, long brewing
the union of opposites in secret, that came to his aid. Neverthe-
less the opposition has left obvious traces in the mandala ap-
pended to his XL Questions concerning the Soule, 20 showing
the nature of the divinity. The mandala is divided into a dark
and a light half, and the semicircles that are drawn round them,
instead of joining up to form a ring, are turned back to back. 21

21 Dogma takes the place of the collective unconscious by for-
mulating its contents on a grand scale. The Catholic way of life
is completely unaware of psychological problems in this sense.
Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been
channelled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along
like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and rit-
ual. It manifests itself in the inwardness of the Catholic psyche.
The collective unconscious, as we understand it today, was
never a matter of "psychology," for before the Christian Church
existed there were the antique mysteries, and these reach back
into the grey mists of neolithic prehistory. Mankind has never
lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the un-
canny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the
figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and
healing images and in this way were expelled from the psyche
into cosmic space.

22 The iconoclasm of the Reformation, however, quite literally
made a breach in the protective wall of sacred images, and since
then one image after another has crumbled away. They became
dubious, for they conflicted with awakening reason. Besides,
people had long since forgotten what they meant. Or had they
really forgotten? Could it be that men had never really known
what they meant, and that only in recent times did it occur to

20 London, 1647. 21 Cf. my "Study in the Process of Individuation," infra.

12



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

the Protestant part of mankind that actually we haven't the re-
motest conception of what is meant by the Virgin Birth, the
divinity of Christ, and the complexities of the Trinity? It al-
most seems as if these images had just lived, and as if their
living existence had simply been accepted without question and
without reflection, much as everyone decorates Christmas trees
or hides Easter eggs without ever knowing what these customs
mean. The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with
meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what
they really do mean. That the gods die from time to time is due
to man's sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that
they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone.
In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then
he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts
thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls
"reason" which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-
total of all his prejudices and myopic views.

2 3 The history of Protestantism has been one of chronic icono-
clasm. One wall after another fell. And the work of destruction
was not too difficult once the authority of the Church had been
shattered. We all know how, in large things as in small, in gen-
eral as well as in particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how
the alarming poverty of symbols that is now the condition of our
life came about. With that the power of the Church has van-
ished too a fortress robbed of its bastions and casemates, a
house whose walls have been plucked away, exposed to all the
winds of the world and to all dangers.

2 4 Although this is, properly speaking, a lamentable collapse
that offends our sense of history, the disintegration of Protes-
tantism into nearly four hundred denominations is yet a sure
sign that the restlessness continues. The Protestant is cast out
into a state of defencelessness that might well make the natural
man shudder. His enlightened consciousness, of course, refuses
to take cognizance of this fact, and is quietly looking elsewhere
for what has been lost to Europe. We seek the effective images,
the thought-forms that satisfy the restlessness of heart and mind,
and we find the treasures of the East.

25 There is no objection to this, in and for itself. Nobody forced
the Romans to import Asiatic cults in bulk. If Christianity had
really been as so often described "alien" to the Germanic

13



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

tribes, they could easily have rejected it when the prestige of
the Roman legions began to wane. But Christianity had come
to stay, because it fits in with the existing archetypal pattern. In
the course of the centuries, however, it turned into something
its founder might well have wondered at had he lived to see it;
and the Christianity of Negroes and other dark-skinned con-
verts is certainly an occasion for historical reflections. Why,
then, should the West not assimilate Eastern forms? The Ro-
mans too went to Eleusis, Samothrace, and Egypt in order to get
themselves initiated. In Egypt there even seems to have been a
regular tourist trade in this commodity.

26 The gods of Greece and Rome perished from the same dis-
ease as did our Christian symbols: people discovered then, as
today, that they had no thoughts whatever on the subject. On
the other hand, the gods of the strangers still had unexhausted
mana. Their names were weird and incomprehensible and their
deeds portentously dark something altogether different from
the hackneyed chronique scandaleuse of Olympus. At least one
couldn't understand the Asiatic symbols, and for this reason
they were not banal like the conventional gods. The fact that
people accepted the new as unthinkingly as they had rejected
the old did not become a problem at that time.

2 7 Is it becoming a problem today? Shall we be able to put on,
like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign
soil, saturated with foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue,
nourished by a foreign culture, interwoven with foreign history,
and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself in kingly raiment,
a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this is pos-
sible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to
go in for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment
ourselves?

28 I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols
has a meaning. It is a development that has an inner consistency.
Everything that we have not thought about, and that has there-
fore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our de-
veloping consciousness, has got lost. If we now try to cover our
nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the the-
osophists do, we would be playing our own history false. A man
does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an
Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would be far better



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS



stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, in-
stead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate
heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian sym-
bolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We
have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we
try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew.
Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satis-
fied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position
today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from
it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd
political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished
by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get along with
these pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious
for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns
out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more
persuasive. This fear is far from unjustified, for where God is
closest the danger seems greatest. It is dangerous to avow spirit-
ual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has
desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts
it drastically: "Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind
every poor man two."

2 9 Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the
mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty
seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to with-
draw not only from the sorry remnants which today call them-
selves the Protestant church of a great past, but also from all
the allurements of the odorous East; in order, finally, to dwell
with itself alone, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the
blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars.

3 We have inherited this poverty from our fathers. I well re-
member the confirmation lessons I received at the hands of my
own father. The catechism bored me unspeakably. One day I
was turning over the pages of my little book, in the hope of
finding something interesting, when my eye fell on the para-
graphs about the Trinity. This interested me at once, and I
waited impatiently for the lessons to get to that section. But
when the longed-for lesson arrived, my father said: "We'll skip
this bit; I can't make head or tail of it myself." With that my
last hope was laid in the grave. I admired my father's honesty,

15



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

but this did not alter the fact that from then on all talk of re-
ligion bored me to death.

3 1 Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but
in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.
We are absolutely convinced that even with the aid of the latest
and largest reflecting telescope, now being built in America,
men will discover behind the farthest nebulae no fiery empy-
rean; and we know that our eyes will wander despairingly
through the dead emptiness of interstellar space. Nor is it any
better when mathematical physics reveals to us the world of the
infinitely small. In the end we dig up the wisdom of all ages and
peoples, only to find that everything most dear and precious to
us has already been said in the most superb language. Like
greedy children we stretch out our hands and think that, if only
we could grasp it, we would possess it too. But what we possess
is no longer valid, and our hands grow weary from the grasping,
for riches lie everywhere, as far as the eye can reach. All these
possessions turn to water, and more than one sorcerer's appren-
tice has been drowned in the waters called up by himself if he
did not first succumb to the saving delusion that this wisdom
was good and that was bad. It is from these adepts that there
come those terrifying invalids who think they have a prophetic
mission. For the artificial sundering of true and false wisdom
creates a tension in the psyche, and from this there arises a lone-
liness and a craving like that of the morphine addict, who al-
ways hopes to find companions in his vice.

32 When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the
spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights.
But when spirit becomes heavy it turns to water, and with
Luciferian presumption the intellect usurps the seat where once
the spirit was enthroned. The spirit may legitimately claim the
patria potestas over the soul; not so the earth-born intellect,
which is man's sword or hammer, and not a creator of spiritual
worlds, a father of the soul. Hence Ludwig Klages 22 and Max
Scheler 23 were moderate enough in their attempts to rehabili-
tate the spirit, for both were children of an age in which the
spirit was no longer up above but down below, no longer fire
but water.

22 [Cf. Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele.]

23 [Cf., e.g., Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. Editors.]

16



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

33 Therefore the way of the soul in search of its lost father-
like Sophia seeking Bythos leads to the water, to the dark mir-
ror that reposes at its bottom. Whoever has elected for the
state of spiritual poverty, the true heritage of Protestantism
carried to its logical conclusion, goes the way of the soul that
leads to the water. This water is no figure of speech, but a living
symbol of the dark psyche. I can best illustrate this by a con-
crete example, one out of many:

34 A Protestant theologian often dreamed the same dream: He
stood on a mountain slope with a deep valley below, and in it a
dark lake. He knew in the dream that something had always
prevented him from approaching the lake. This time he resolved
to go to the water. As he approached the shore, everything grew
dark and uncanny, and a gust of wind suddenly rushed over the
face of the water. He was seized by a panic fear, and awoke.

35 This dream shows us the natural symbolism. The dreamer
descends into his own depths, and the way leads him to the
mysterious water. And now there occurs the miracle of the pool
of Bethesda: an angel comes down and touches the water, en-
dowing it with healing power. In the dream it is the wind, the
pneuma, which bloweth where it listeth. Man's descent to the
water is needed in order to evoke the miracle of its coming to
life. But the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is
uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know since it
is not ourselves. It hints at an unseen presence, a numen to
which neither human expectations nor the machinations of the
will have given life. It lives of itself, and a shudder runs through
the man who thought that "spirit" was merely what he believes,
what he makes himself, what is said in books, or what people
talk about. But when it happens spontaneously it is a spookish
thing, and primitive fear seizes the naive mind. The elders of
the Elgonyi tribe in Kenya gave me exactly the same description
of the nocturnal god whom they call the "maker of fear." "He
comes to you," they said, "like a cold gust of wind, and you
shudder, or he goes whistling round in the tall grass" an Afri-
can Pan who glides among the reeds in the haunted noontide
hour, playing on his pipes and frightening the shepherds.

3 6 Thus, in the dream, the breath of the pneuma frightened
another pastor, a shepherd of the flock, who in the darkness of
the night trod the reed-grown shore in the deep valley of the

*7



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

psyche. Yes, that erstwhile fiery spirit has made a descent to the
realm of nature, to the trees and rocks and the waters of
the psyche, like the old man in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, who,
wearied of humankind, withdrew into the forest to growl with
the bears in honour of the Creator.

37 We must surely go the way of the waters, which always tend
downward, if we would raise up the treasure, the precious herit-
age of the father. In the Gnostic hymn to the soul, 24 the son is
sent forth by his parents to seek the pearl that fell from the
King's crown. It lies at the bottom of a deep well, guarded by a
dragon, in the land of the Egyptians that land of fleshpots and
drunkenness with all its material and spiritual riches. The son
and heir sets out to fetch the jewel, but forgets himself and his
task in the orgies of Egyptian worldliness, until a letter from his
father reminds him what his duty is. He then sets out for the
water and plunges into the dark depths of the well, where he
finds the pearl on the bottom, and in the end offers it to the
highest divinity.

3 8 This hymn, ascribed to Bardesanes, dates from an age that
resembled ours in more than one respect. Mankind looked and
waited, and it was a fish "levatus de prof undo" (drawn from the
deep) 25 that became the symbol of the saviour, the bringer of
healing.

3 9 As I wrote these lines, I received a letter from Vancouver,
from a person unknown to me. The writer is puzzled by his
dreams, which are always about water: "Almost every time I
dream it is about water: either I am having a bath, or the water-
closet is overflowing, or a pipe is bursting, or my home has
drifted down to the water's edge, or I see an acquaintance about
to sink into water, or I am trying to get out of water, or I am
having a bath and the tub is about to overflow," etc.

4 Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The
lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were,
underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the
"subconscious," usually with the pejorative connotation of an
inferior consciousness. Water is the "valley spirit," the water
dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water a yang embraced
in the yin. Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that

24 James, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 411-15.

25 Augustine, Confessions, Lib. XIII, cap. XXI.

18



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

has become unconscious. So the dream of the theologian is quite
right in telling him that down by the water he could experience
the working of the living spirit like a miracle of healing in the
pool of Bethesda. The descent into the depths always seems to
precede the ascent. Thus another theologian 26 dreamed that he
saw on a mountain a kind of Castle of the Grail. He went along
a road that seemed to lead straight to the foot of the mountain
and up it. But as he drew nearer he discovered to his great dis-
appointment that a chasm separated him from the mountain, a
deep, darksome gorge with underworldly water rushing along
the bottom. A steep path led downwards and toilsomely climbed
up again on the other side. But the prospect looked uninviting,
and the dreamer awoke. Here again the dreamer, thirsting for
the shining heights, had first to descend into the dark depths,
and this proves to be the indispensable condition for climbing
any higher. The prudent man avoids the danger lurking in
these depths, but he also throws away the good which a bold but
imprudent venture might bring.

The statement made by the dream meets with violent re-
sistance from the conscious mind, which knows "spirit" only as
something to be found in the heights. "Spirit" always seems to
come from above, while from below comes everything that is
sordid and worthless. For people who think in this way, spirit
means highest freedom, a soaring over the depths, deliverance
from the prison of the chthonic world, and hence a refuge for all
those timorous souls who do not want to become anything dif-
ferent. But water is earthy and tangible, it is also the fluid of
the instinct-driven body, blood and the flowing of blood, the
odour of the beast, carnality heavy with passion. The uncon-
scious is the psyche that reaches down from the daylight of
mentally and morally lucid consciousness into the nervous sys-
tem that for ages has been known as the "sympathetic." This
does not govern perception and muscular activity like the
cerebrospinal system, and thus control the environment; but,
though functioning without sense-organs, it maintains the bal-
ance of life and, through the mysterious paths of sympathetic

26 The fact that it was another theologian who dreamed this dream is not so sur-
prising, since priests and clergymen have a professional interest in the motif of
"ascent." They have to speak of it so often that the question naturally arises as to
what they are doing about their own spiritual ascent.

l 9



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

excitation, not only gives us knowledge of the innermost
life of other beings but also has an inner effect upon them. In
this sense it is an extremely collective system, the operative basis
of all participation mystique, whereas the cerebrospinal function
reaches its high point in separating off the specific qualities of
the ego, and only apprehends surfaces and externals always
through the medium of space. It experiences everything as an
outside, whereas the sympathetic system experiences everything
as an inside.

42 The unconscious is commonly regarded as a sort of incapsu-
lated fragment of our most personal and intimate life some-
thing like what the Bible calls the "heart" and considers the
source of all evil thoughts. In the chambers of the heart dwell
the wicked blood-spirits, swift anger and sensual weakness. This
is how the unconscious looks when seen from the conscious side.
But consciousness appears to be essentially an affair of the cere-
brum, which sees everything separately and in isolation, and
therefore sees the unconscious in this way too, regarding it out-
right as my unconscious. Hence it is generally believed that
anyone who descends into the unconscious gets into a suffocat-
ing atmosphere of egocentric subjectivity, and in this blind
alley is exposed to the attack of all the ferocious beasts which the
caverns of the psychic underworld are supposed to harbour.

43 True, whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see
first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a con-
frontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faith-
fully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never
show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the
mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and
shows the true face.

44 This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner
way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people, for the meeting
with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things that can
be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into
the environment. But if we are able to see our own shadow and
can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has
already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal
unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and
therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued
out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness. This problem

20



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole
man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and
ineffectuality. Strong natures or should one rather call them
weak? do not like to be reminded of this, but prefer to think of
themselves as heroes who are beyond good and evil, and to
cut the Gordian knot instead of untying it. Nevertheless, the
account has to be settled sooner or later. In the end one has to
admit that there are problems which one simply cannot solve on
one's own resources. Such an admission has the advantage of
being honest, truthful, and in accord with reality, and this pre-
pares the ground for a compensatory reaction from the collec-
tive unconscious: you are now more inclined to give heed to a
helpful idea or intuition, or to notice thoughts which had not
been allowed to voice themselves before. Perhaps you will pay
attention to the dreams that visit you at such moments, or will
reflect on certain inner and outer occurrences that take place
just at this time. If you have an attitude of this kind, then the
helpful powers slumbering in the deeper strata of man's nature
can come awake and intervene, for helplessness and weakness
are the eternal experience and the eternal problem of mankind.
To this problem there is also an eternal answer, otherwise it
would have been all up with humanity long ago. When you have
done everything that could possibly be done, the only thing that
remains is what you could still do if only you knew it. But how
much do we know of ourselves? Precious little, to judge by
experience. Hence there is still a great deal of room left for the
unconscious. Prayer, as we know, calls for a very similar attitude
and therefore has much the same effect.
45 The necessary and needful reaction from the collective un-
conscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The
meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own
shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose
painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep
well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who
one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a
boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with
apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no
here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.
It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where
the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything

21



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I
experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself expe-
riences me.

4 6 No, the collective unconscious is anything but an incapsu-
lated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world
and open to all the world. There I am the object of every sub-
ject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I
am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one
with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily
who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing
this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could
see it. That is why we must know who we are.

47 The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are it we
become unconscious of ourselves. That is the age-old danger,
instinctively known and feared by primitive man, who himself
stands so very close to this pleroma. His consciousness is still un-
certain, wobbling on its feet. It is still childish, having just
emerged from the primal waters. A wave of the unconscious may
easily roll over it, and then he forgets who he was and does
things that are strange to him. Hence primitives are afraid of un-
controlled emotions, because consciousness breaks down under
them and gives way to possession. All man's strivings have there-
fore been directed towards the consolidation of consciousness.
This was the purpose of rite and dogma; they were dams and
walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the "perils of
the soul." Primitive rites consist accordingly in the exorcizing
of spirits, the lifting of spells, the averting of the evil omen,
propitiation, purification, and the production by sympathetic
magic of helpful occurrences.

4 8 It is these barriers, erected in primitive times, that later be-
came the foundations of the Church. It is also these barriers
that collapse when the symbols become weak with age. Then the
waters rise and boundless catastrophes break over mankind.
The religious leader of the Taos pueblo, known as the Loco
Tenente Gobernador, once said to me: "The Americans should
stop meddling with our religion, for when it dies and we can no
longer help the sun our Father to cross the sky, the Americans
and the whole world will learn something in ten years' time, for
then the sun won't rise any more." In other words, night will

22



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

fall, the light of consciousness is extinguished, and the dark sea
of the unconscious breaks in.

49 Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the
brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The
whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war,
to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against man-
kind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we
call the gods "factors," which comes from facere, 'to make.' The
makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in
great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are
our own masters; we seem to be the "factors" themselves. But if
we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror
that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is de-
cidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the
discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primi-
tive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously
guarded supremacy of consciousness which is in truth one of
the secrets of human success is questioned in the most dan-
gerous way. But since ignorance is no guarantee of security, and
in fact only makes our insecurity still worse, it is probably bet-
ter despite our fear to know where the danger lies. To ask the
right question is already half the solution of a problem. At any
rate we then know that the greatest danger threatening us comes
from the unpredictability of the psyche's reactions. Discerning
persons have realized for some time that external historical con-
ditions, of whatever kind, are only occasions, jumping-off
grounds, for the real dangers that threaten our lives. These are
the present politico-social delusional systems. We should not re-
gard them causally, as necessary consequences of external condi-
tions, but as decisions precipitated by the collective unconscious.

5 This is a new problem. All ages before us have believed in
gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverish-
ment of symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as
psychic factors, that is, as archetypes of the unconscious. No
doubt this discovery is hardly credible at present. To be con-
vinced, we need to have the experience pictured in the dream of
the theologian, for only then do we experience the self-activity
of the spirit moving over the waters. Since the stars have fallen
from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life
holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology

23



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be
quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols.
Symbols are spirit from above, and under those conditions the
spirit is above too. Therefore it would be a foolish and sense-
less undertaking for such people to wish to experience or investi-
gate an unconscious that contains nothing but the silent,
undisturbed sway of nature. Our unconscious, on the other
hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and
that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the
cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair
memory of things that once were. But "the heart glows," and a
secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being. In the words of
the Voliispa we may ask:

What murmurs Wotan over Mimir's head?
Already the spring boils . . .

5 1 Our concern with the unconscious has become a vital ques-
tion for us a question of spiritual being or non-being. All those
who have had an experience like that mentioned in the dream
know that the treasure lies in the depths of the water and will
try to salvage it. As they must never forget who they are, they
must on no account imperil their consciousness. They will keep
their standpoint firmly anchored to the earth, and will thus to
preserve the metaphor become fishers who catch with hook and
net what swims in the water. There may be consummate fools
who do not understand what fishermen do, but the latter will
not mistake the timeless meaning of their action, for the symbol
of their craft is many centuries older than the still unfaded story
of the Grail. But not every man is a fisherman. Sometimes this
figure remains arrested at an early, instinctive level, and then it
is an otter, as we know from Oskar Schmitz's fairytales. 27

52 Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind
it living creatures soon loom up; fishes, presumably, harmless
dwellers of the deep harmless, if only the lake were not
haunted. They are water-beings of a peculiar sort. Sometimes a
nixie gets into the fisherman's net, a female, half-human fish. 28

27 [The "Fischottermarchen" in Marchen aus dem Unbewussten, pp. 14ft. ,
43ff. Editors.]

28 Cf. Paracelsus, De vita longa (1562), and my commentary in "Paracelsus as a
Spiritual Phenomenon" [concerning Melusina, pars. 179!:., 2152.].

24



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Nixies are entrancing creatures:

Half drew she him,
Half sank he down
And nevermore was seen.

53 The nixie is an even more instinctive version of a magical
feminine being whom I call the anima. She can also be a siren,
melusina (mermaid), 29 wood-nymph, Grace, or Erlking's daugh-
ter, or a lamia or succubus, who infatuates young men and sucks
the life out of them. Moralizing critics will say that these figures
are projections of soulful emotional states and are nothing but
worthless fantasies. One must admit that there is a certain
amount of truth in this. But is it the whole truth? Is the nixie
really nothing but a product of moral laxity? Were there not
such beings long ago, in an age when dawning human conscious-
ness was still wholly bound to nature? Surely there were spirits
of forest, field, and stream long before the question of moral
conscience ever existed. What is more, these beings were as
much dreaded as adored, so that their rather peculiar erotic
charms were only one of their characteristics. Man's conscious-
ness was then far simpler, and his possession of it absurdly small.
An unlimited amount of what we now feel to be an integral part
of our psychic being disports itself merrily for the primitive in
projections ranging far and wide.

54 The word "projection" is not really appropriate, for nothing
has been cast out of the psyche; rather, the psyche has attained
its present complexity by a series of acts of introjection. Its com-
plexity has increased in proportion to the despiritualization of
nature. An alluring nixie from the dim bygone is today called
an "erotic fantasy," and she may complicate our psychic life in
a most painful way. She comes upon us just as a nixie might;
she sits on top of us like a succubus; she changes into all sorts
of shapes like a witch, and in general displays an unbearable
independence that does not seem at all proper in a psychic

29 Cf. the picture of the adept in Liber mutus (1677) (fig. 13 in The Practice of
Psycho therapy, p. 320). He is fishing, and has caught a nixie. His soror mystica,
however, catches birds in her net, symbolizing the animus. The idea of the anima
often turns up in the literature of the 16th and 17th cent., for instance in Rich-
ardus Vitus, Aldrovandus, and the commentator of the Tractatus aureus. Cf.
"The Enigma of Bologna" in my Mysterium Coniunctionis, pars. 51ft.

25



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

content. Occasionally she causes states of fascination that rival
the best bewitchment, or unleashes terrors in us not to be out-
done by any manifestation of the devil. She is a mischievous
being who crosses our path in numerous transformations and
disguises, playing all kinds of tricks on us, causing happy and
unhappy delusions, depressions and ecstasies, outbursts of af-
fect, etc. Even in a state of reasonable introjection the nixie
has not laid aside her roguery. The witch has not ceased to mix
her vile potions of love and death; her magic poison has been
refined into intrigue and self-deception, unseen though none
the less dangerous for that.

55 But how do we dare to call this elfin being the "anima"?
Anima means soul and should designate something very wonder-
ful and immortal. Yet this was not always so. We should not
forget that this kind of soul is a dogmatic conception whose pur-
pose it is to pin down and capture something uncannily alive
and active. The German word Seele is closely related, via the
Gothic form saiwalo, to the Greek word al6\o
'quick-moving,' 'changeful of hue,' 'twinkling,' something like
a butterfly \pvxn in Greek which reels drunkenly from flower
to flower and lives on honey and love. In Gnostic typology the
avdpo)Tro<; l/or^xo?, 'psychic man,' is inferior to the Trvev/xartKo?,
'spiritual man,' and finally there are wicked souls who must
roast in hell for all eternity. Even the quite innocent soul of the
unbaptized newborn babe is deprived of the contemplation of
God. Among primitives, the soul is the magic breath of life
(hence the term "anima"), or a flame. An uncanonical saying of
our Lord's aptly declares: "Whoso is near unto me is near to the
fire." For Heraclitus the soul at the highest level is fiery and dry,
because if^xn as such is closely akin to "cool breath" i/nj'xv means
'to breathe,' 'to blow'; \jrvxpos and ifix * niean 'cold,' 'chill,'
'damp.'

5 6 Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing
in man, that which lives of itself and causes life. Therefore God
breathed into Adam a living breath, that he might live. With
her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inert-
ness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe
incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and
traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth,
entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be

26



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

lived; as Eve in the garden of Eden could not rest content until
she had convinced Adam of the goodness of the forbidden apple.
Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man
would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. 30 A certain kind
of reasonableness is its advocate, and a certain kind of morality
adds its blessing. But to have soul is the whole venture of life,
for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above
and below human existence, for which reason in the realm of
dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman pun-
ishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of
human beings. Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the
soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity
would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly
Jerusalem.

57 The anima is not the soul in the dogmatic sense, not an
anima rationalis, which is a philosophical conception, but a
natural archetype that satisfactorily sums up all the statements
of the unconscious, of the primitive mind, of the history of lan-
guage and religion. It is a "factor" in the proper sense of the
word. Man cannot make it; on the contrary, it is always the
a priori element in his moods, reactions, impulses, and what-
ever else is spontaneous in psychic life. It is something that lives
of itself, that makes us live; it is a life behind consciousness that
cannot be completely integrated with it, but from which, on the
contrary, consciousness arises. For, in the last analysis, psychic
life is for the greater part an unconscious life that surrounds
consciousness on all sides a notion that is sufficiently obvious
when one considers how much unconscious preparation is
needed, for instance, to register a sense-impression.

5 8 Although it seems as if the whole of our unconscious psychic
life could be ascribed to the anima, she is yet only one archetype
among many. Therefore, she is not characteristic of the uncon-
scious in its entirety. She is only one of its aspects. This is shown
by the very fact of her femininity. What is not-I, not masculine,
is most probably feminine, and because the not-I is felt as not
belonging to me and therefore as outside me, the anima-image
is usually projected upon women. Either sex is inhabited by the
opposite sex up to a point, for, biologically speaking, it is simply
the greater number of masculine genes that tips the scales in

30 La Rochefoucauld, P ensues DLX. Quoted in Symbols of Transformation, p. 174.

27



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

favour of masculinity. The smaller number of feminine genes
seems to form a feminine character, which usually remains un-
conscious because of its subordinate position.

59 With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of the
gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself.
Everything the anima touches becomes numinous uncondi-
tional, dangerous, taboo, magical. She is the serpent in the para-
dise of the harmless man with good resolutions and still better
intentions. She affords the most convincing reasons for not pry-
ing into the unconscious, an occupation that would break down
our moral inhibitions and unleash forces that had better been
left unconscious and undisturbed. As usual, there is something
in what the anima says; for life in itself is not good only, it is also
bad. Because the anima wants life, she wants both good and bad.
These categories do not exist in the elfin realm. Bodily life as
well as psychic life have the impudence to get along much better
without conventional morality, and they often remain the
healthier for it.

60 The anima believes in the ko,\6v KayaOov, the 'beautiful and
the good,' a primitive conception that antedates the discovery of
the conflict between aesthetics and morals. It took more than a
thousand years of Christian differentiation to make it clear that
the good is not always the beautiful and the beautiful not neces-
sarily good. The paradox of this marriage of ideas troubled the
ancients as little as it does the primitives. The anima is con-
servative and clings in the most exasperating fashion to the ways
of earlier humanity. She likes to appear in historic dress, with
a predilection for Greece and Egypt. In this connection we
would mention the classic anima stories of Rider Haggard and
Pierre Benoit. The Renaissance dream known as the Ipneroto-
machia of Poliphilo, 31 and Goethe's Faust, likewise reach deep
into antiquity in order to find "le vrai mot" for the situation.
Poliphilo conjured up Queen Venus; Goethe, Helen of Troy.
Aniela Jaffe 32 has sketched a lively picture of the anima in the
age of Biedermeier and the Romantics. If you want to know
what happens when the anima appears in modern society, I can
warmly recommend John Erskine's Private Life of Helen of

31 Cf. The Dream of Poliphilo, ed. by Linda Fierz-David. [For Haggard and
Benoit, see the bibliography. Editors.]

32 "Bilder und Symbole aus E. T. A. Hoffmanns Marchen 'Der Goldne Topf.' "

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ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Troy. She is not a shallow creation, for the breath of eternity
lies over everything that is really alive. The anima lives beyond
all categories, and can therefore dispense with blame as well as
with praise. Since the beginning of time man, with his whole-
some animal instinct, has been engaged in combat with his soul
and its daemonism. If the soul were uniformly dark it would
be a simple matter. Unfortunately this is not so, for the anima
can appear also as an angel of light, a psychopomp who points
the way to the highest meaning, as we know from Faust.
61 If the encounter with the shadow is the "apprentice-piece"
in the individual's development, then that with the anima is the
"master-piece." The relation with the anima is again a test of
courage, an ordeal by fire for the spiritual and moral forces of
man. We should never forget that in dealing with the anima we
are dealing with psychic facts which have never been in man's
possession before, since they were always found "outside" his
psychic territory, so to speak, in the form of projections. For the
son, the anima is hidden in the dominating power of the mother,
and sometimes she leaves him with a sentimental attachment
that lasts throughout life and seriously impairs the fate of the
adult. On the other hand, she may spur him on to the highest
flights. To the men of antiquity the anima appeared as a goddess
or a witch, while for medieval man the goddess was replaced by
the Queen of Heaven and Mother Church. The desymbolized
world of the Protestant produced first an unhealthy sentimen-
tality and then a sharpening of the moral conflict, which, be-
cause it was so unbearable, led logically to Nietzsche's "beyond
good and evil." In centres of civilization this state shows itself
in the increasing insecurity of marriage. The American divorce
rate has been reached, if not exceeded, in many European coun-
tries, which proves that the anima projects herself by preference
on the opposite sex, thus giving rise to magically complicated
relationships. This fact, largely because of its pathological conse-
quences, has led to the growth of modern psychology, which in
its Freudian form cherishes the belief that the essential cause of
all disturbances is sexuality a view that only exacerbates the al-
ready existing conflict. 33 There is a confusion here between
cause and effect. The sexual disturbance is by no means the
cause of neurotic difficulties, but is, like these, one of the patho-

33 I have expounded my views at some length in "Psychology of the Transference."

29



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

logical effects of a maladaptation of consciousness, as when con-
sciousness is faced with situations and tasks to which it is not
equal. Such a person simply does not understand how the world
has altered, and what his attitude would have to be in order to
adapt to it.
g 2 In dealing with the shadow or anima it is not sufficient just
to know about these concepts and to reflect on them. Nor can
we ever experience their content by feeling our way into them
or by appropriating other people's feelings. It is no use at all to
learn a list of archetypes by heart. Archetypes are complexes of
experience that come upon us like fate, and their effects are felt
in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path
as a goddess, but, it may be, as an intimately personal misad-
venture, or perhaps as our best venture. When, for instance, a
highly esteemed professor in his seventies abandons his family
and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the
gods have claimed another victim. This is how daemonic power
reveals itself to us. Until not so long ago it would have been an
easy matter to do away with the young woman as a witch.

6 3 In my experience there are very many people of intelligence
and education who have no trouble in grasping the idea of the
anima and her relative autonomy, and can also understand the
phenomenology of the animus in women. Psychologists have
more difficulties to overcome in this respect, probably because
they are under no compulsion to grapple with the complex facts
peculiar to the psychology of the unconscious. If they are doctors
as well, their somato-psychological thinking gets in the way,
with its assumption that psychological processes can be ex-
pressed in intellectual, biological, or physiological terms. Psy-
chology, however, is neither biology nor physiology nor any
other science than just this knowledge of the psyche.

6 4 The picture I have drawn of the anima so far is not com-
plete. Although she may be the chaotic urge to life, something
strangely meaningful clings to her, a secret knowledge or hidden
wisdom, which contrasts most curiously with her irrational elfin
nature. Here I would like to refer again to the authors already
cited. Rider Haggard calls She "Wisdom's Daughter"; Benoit's
Queen of Atlantis has an excellent library that even contains a
lost book of Plato. Helen of Troy, in her reincarnation, is

30



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

rescued from a Tyrian brothel by the wise Simon Magus and
accompanies him on his travels. I purposely refrained from men-
tioning this thoroughly characteristic aspect of the anima earlier,
because the first encounter with her usually leads one to infer
anything rather than wisdom. 34 This aspect appears only to the
person who gets to grips with her seriously. Only then, when
this hard task has been faced, 35 does he come to realize more
and more that behind all her cruel sporting with human fate
there lies something like a hidden purpose which seems to re-
flect a superior knowledge of life's laws. It is just the most un-
expected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal
a deeper meaning. And the more this meaning is recognized,
the more the anima loses her impetuous and compulsive char-
acter. Gradually breakwaters are built against the surging of
chaos, and the meaningful divides itself from the meaningless.
When sense and nonsense are no longer identical, the force of
chaos is weakened by their subtraction; sense is then endued
with the force of meaning, and nonsense with the force of mean-
inglessness. In this way a new cosmos arises. This is not a new
discovery in the realm of medical psychology, but the age-old
truth that out of the richness of a man's experience there comes
a teaching which the father can pass on to the son. 36
6 5 In elfin nature wisdom and folly appear as one and the same;
and they are one and the same as long as they are acted out by
the anima. Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we
do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other,
life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest
scale. There is then little sense and little nonsense either. When
you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when
there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what
happened. Interpretations are only for those who don't under-
stand; it is only the things we don't understand that have any
meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and
that is why he tries to interpret it.

34 I am referring here to literary examples that are generally accessible and not to
clinical material. These are quite sufficient for our purpose.

35 I.e., coming to terms with the contents of the collective unconscious in general.
This is the great task of the integration process.

36 A good example is the little book by Gustav Schmaltz, Ostliche Weisheit und
Westliche Psycho therapie.

31



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS



66



Thus the anima and life itself are meaningless in so far as
they offer no interpretation. Yet they have a nature that can be
interpreted, for in all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a
secret order, in all caprice a fixed law, for everything that works
is grounded on its opposite. It takes man's discriminating under-
standing, which breaks everything down, into antinomial judg-
ments, to recognize this. Once he comes to grips with the anima,
her chaotic capriciousness will give him cause to suspect a secret
order, to sense a plan, a meaning, a purpose over and above her
nature, or even we might almost be tempted to say to "postu-
late" such a thing, though this would not be in accord with the
truth. For in actual reality we do not have at our comm and
any power of cool reflection, nor does any science or philosophy
help us, and the traditional teachings of religion do so only to
a limited degree. We are caught and entangled in aimless expe-
rience, and the judging intellect with its categories proves itself
powerless. Human interpretation fails, for a turbulent life-situa-
tion has arisen that refuses to fit any of the traditional meanings
assigned to it. It is a moment of collapse. We sink into a final
depth Apuleius calls it "a kind of voluntary death." It is a
surrender of our own powers, not artificially willed but forced
upon us by nature; not a voluntary submission and humiliation
decked in moral garb but an utter and unmistakable defeat
crowned with the panic fear of demoralization. Only when all
props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers
even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us
to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden
behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This
is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype
of life itself.
6 7 It always seems to us as if meaning compared with life-
were the younger event, because we assume, with some justifica-
tion, that we assign it of ourselves, and because we believe,
equally rightly no doubt, that the great world can get along
without being interpreted. But how do we assign meaning?
From what source, in the last analysis, do we derive meaning?
The forms we use for assigning meaning are historical categories
that reach back into the mists of time a fact we do not take
sufficiently into account. Interpretations make use of certain
linguistic matrices that are themselves derived from primordial

32



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

images. From whatever side we approach this question, every-
where we find ourselves confronted with the history of language,
with images and motifs that lead straight back to the primitive
wonder-world.

68 Take, for instance, the word "idea." It goes back to the
c ISos concept of Plato, and the eternal ideas are primordial
images stored up eV Wcpovpavtw to (in a supracelestial place) as
eternal, transcendent forms. The eye of the seer perceives them
as "imagines et lares," or as images in dreams and revelatory
visions. Or let us take the concept of energy, which is an in-
terpretation of physical events. In earlier times it was the secret
fire of the alchemists, or phlogiston, or the heat-force inherent
in matter, like the "primal warmth" of the Stoics, or the Hera-
clitean ttv P dei &ov (ever-living fire), which borders on the primi-
tive notion of an all-pervading vital force, a power of growth
and magic healing that is generally called mana.

6 9 I will not go on needlessly giving examples. It is sufficient to
know that there is not a single important idea or view that does
not possess historical antecedents. Ultimately they are all
founded on primordial archetypal forms whose concreteness
dates from a time when consciousness did not think, but only
perceived. "Thoughts" were objects of inner perception, not
thought at all, but sensed as external phenomena seen or heard,
so to speak. Thought was essentially revelation, not invented
but forced upon us or bringing conviction through its imme-
diacy and actuality. Thinking of this kind precedes the primi-
tive ego-consciousness, and the latter is more its object than its
subject. But we ourselves have not yet climbed the last peak of
consciousness, so we also have a pre-existent thinking, of which
we are not aware so long as we are supported by traditional
symbols or, to put it in the language of dreams, so long as the
father or the king is not dead.

7 I would like to give you an example of how the unconscious
"thinks" and paves the way for solutions. It is the case of a
young theological student, whom I did not know personally. He
was in great straits because of his religious beliefs, and about
this time he dreamed the following dream: 37

37 I have already used this dream in "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy-
tales," par. 398, infra, and in "Psychology and Education," pp. 1 17ft., as an ex-
ample of a "big" dream, without commenting on it more closely.

33



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

7 1 He was standing in the presence of a handsome old man
dressed entirely in black. He knew it was the white magician.
This personage had just addressed him at considerable length,
but the dreamer could no longer remember what it was about.
He had only retained the closing words: "And for this we need
the help of the black magician." At that moment the door
opened and in came another old man exactly like the first, ex-
cept that he was dressed in white. He said to the white magician,
"I need your advice/' but threw a sidelong, questioning look at
the dreamer, whereupon the white magician answered: "You
can speak freely, he is an innocent." The black magician then
began to relate his story. He had come from a distant land where
something extraordinary had happened. The country was ruled
by an old king who felt his death near. He the king had
sought out a tomb for himself. For there were in that land a
great number of tombs from ancient times, and the king had
chosen the finest for himself. According to legend, a virgin had
been buried in it. The king caused the tomb to be opened, in
order to get it ready for use. But when the bones it contained
were exposed to the light of day, they suddenly took on life and
changed into a black horse, which at once fled into the desert
and there vanished. The black magician had heard of this story
and immediately set forth in pursuit of the horse. After a jour-
ney of many days, always on the tracks of the horse, he came to
the desert and crossed to the other side, where the grasslands
began again. There he met the horse grazing, and there also he
came upon the find on whose account he now needed the advice
of the white magician. For he had found the lost keys of para-
dise, and he did not know what to do with them. At this excit-
ing moment the dreamer awoke.

72 In the light of our earlier remarks the meaning of the dream
is not hard to guess: the old king is the ruling symbol that wants
to go to its eternal rest, and in the very place where similar
"dominants" lie buried. His choice falls, fittingly enough, on the
grave of anima, who lies in the death trance of a Sleeping
Beauty so long as the king is alive that is, so long as a valid
principle (Prince or princeps) regulates and expresses life. But
when the king draws to his end, 38 she comes to life again and
changes into a black horse, which in Plato's parable stands for

38 Cf. the motif of the "old king" in alchemy. Psychology and Alchemy, pars. 434ff.

34



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

the unruliness of the passions. Anyone who follows this horse
comes into the desert, into a wild land remote from men an
image of spiritual and moral isolation. But there lie the keys of
paradise.

73 Now what is paradise? Clearly, the Garden of Eden with its
two-faced tree of life and knowledge and its four streams. In the
Christian version it is also the heavenly city of the Apocalypse,
which, like the Garden of Eden, is conceived as a mandala. But
the mandala is a symbol of individuation. So it is the black
magician who finds the keys to the solution of the problems of
belief weighing on the dreamer, the keys that open the way of
individuation. The contrast between desert and paradise there-
fore signifies isolation as contrasted with individuation, or the
becoming of the self.

74 This part of the dream is a remarkable paraphrase of the
Oxyrhynchus sayings of Jesus, 39 in which the way to the king-
dom of heaven is pointed out by animals, and where we find the
admonition: "Therefore know yourselves, for you are the city,
and the city is the kingdom." It is also a paraphrase of the
serpent of paradise who persuaded our first parents to sin, and
who finally leads to the redemption of mankind through the
Son of God. As we know, this causal nexus gave rise to the
Ophitic identification of the serpent with the Swnjp (Saviour).
The black horse and the black magician are half-evil elements
whose relativity with respect to good is hinted at in the exchange
of garments. The two magicians are, indeed, two aspects of the
wise old man, the superior master and teacher, the archetype of
the spirit, who symbolizes the pre-existent meaning hidden in
the chaos of life. He is the father of the soul, and yet the soul,
in some miraculous manner, is also his virgin mother, for which
reason he was called by the alchemists the "first son of the
mother." The black magician and the black horse correspond to
the descent into darkness in the dreams mentioned earlier.

75 What an unbearably hard lesson for a young student of
theology! Fortunately he was not in the least aware that the
father of all prophets had spoken to him in the dream and
placed a great secret almost within his grasp. One marvels at the
inappropriateness of such occurrences. Why this prodigality?
But I have to admit that we do not know how this dream

39 Cf. James, The Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 27L

35



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

affected the student in the long run, and I must emphasize that
to me, at least, the dream had a very great deal to say. It was not
allowed to get lost, even though the dreamer did not understand
it.

7 6 The old man in this dream is obviously trying to show how
good and evil function together, presumably as an answer to the
still unresolved moral conflict in the Christian psyche. With this
peculiar relativization of opposites we find ourselves approach-
ing nearer to the ideas of the East, to the nirdvandva of Hindu
philosophy, the freedom from opposites, which is shown as a
possible way of solving the conflict through reconciliation. How
perilously fraught with meaning this Eastern relativity of good
and evil is, can be seen from the Indian aphoristic question:
"Who takes longer to reach perfection, the man who loves God,
or the man who hates him?" And the answer is: "He who loves
God takes seven reincarnations to reach perfection, and he who
hates God takes only three, for he who hates God will think of
him more than he who loves him." Freedom from opposites
presupposes their functional equivalence, and this offends our
Christian feelings. Nonetheless, as our dream example shows,
the balanced co-operation of moral opposites is a natural truth
which has been recognized just as naturally by the East. The
clearest example of this is to be found in Taoist philosophy. But
in the Christian tradition, too, there are various sayings that
come very close to this standpoint. I need only remind you of
the parable of the unjust steward.

77 Our dream is by no means unique in this respect, for the
tendency to relativize opposites is a notable peculiarity of the
unconscious- One must immediately add, however, that this is
true only in cases of exaggerated moral sensibility; in other cases
the unconscious can insist just as inexorably on the irreconcil-
ability of the opposites. As a rule, the standpoint of the uncon-
scious is relative to the conscious attitude. We can probably say,
therefore, that our dream presupposes the specific beliefs and
doubts of a theological consciousness of Protestant persuasion.
This limits the statement of the dream to a definite set of prob-
lems. But even with this paring down of its validity the dream
clearly demonstrates the superiority of its standpoint. Fittingly
enough, it expresses its meaning in the opinion and voice of a
wise magician, who goes back in direct line to the figure of the

36



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

medicine man in primitive society. He is, like the anima, an
immortal daemon that pierces the chaotic darknesses of brute
life with the light of meaning. He is the enlightener, the master
and teacher, a psychopomp whose personification even Nie-
tzsche, that breaker of tablets, could not escape for he had
called up his reincarnation in Zarathustra, the lofty spirit of an
almost Homeric age, as the carrier and mouthpiece of his own
"Dionysian" enlightenment and ecstasy. For him God was dead,
but the driving daemon of wisdom became as it were his bodily
double. He himself says:

Then one was changed to two
And Zarathustra passed me by.

7 8 Zarathustra is more for Nietzsche than a poetic figure; he is
an involuntary confession, a testament. Nietzsche too had lost
his way in the darknesses of a life that turned its back upon God
and Christianity, and that is why there came to him the revealer
and enlightener, the speaking fountainhead of his soul. Here is
the source of the hieratic language of Zarathustra, for that is the
style of this archetype.

79 Modern man, in experiencing this archetype, comes to know
that most ancient form of thinking as an autonomous activity
whose object he is. Hermes Trismegistus or the Thoth of Her-
metic literature, Orpheus, the Poimandres (shepherd of men)
and his near relation the Poimen of Hermes, 40 are other formu-
lations of the same experience. If the name "Lucifer" were not
prejudicial, it would be a very suitable one for this archetype.
But I have been content to call it the archetype of the wise old
man, or of meaning. Like all archetypes it has a positive and a
negative aspect, though I don't want to enter into this here. The
reader will find a detailed exposition of the two-facedness of the
wise old man in "The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy-
tales."

80 The three archetypes so far discussed the shadow, the ani-
ma, and the wise old man are of a kind that can be directly
experienced in personified form. In the foregoing I tried to
indicate the general psychological conditions in which such an
experience arises. But what I conveyed were only abstract

40 Reitzenstein interprets the "Shepherd" of Hernias as a Christian rejoinder to
the Poimandres writings.

37



THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

generalizations. One could, or rather should, really give a de-
scription of the process as it occurs in immediate experience. In
the course of this process the archetypes appear as active per-
sonalities in dreams and fantasies. But the process itself involves
another class of archetypes which one could call the archetypes
of transformation. They are not personalities, but are typical
situations, places, ways and means, that symbolize the kind of
transformation in question. Like the personalities, these arche-
types are true and genuine symbols that cannot be exhaustively
interpreted, either as signs or as allegories. They are genuine
symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-
glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible. The
ground principles, the apxai, of the unconscious are indescribable
because of their wealth of reference, although in themselves
recognizable. The discriminating intellect naturally keeps on
trying to establish their singleness of meaning and thus misses
the essential point; for what we can above all establish as the one
thing consistent with their nature is their manifold meaning,
their almost limitless wealth of reference, which makes any uni-
lateral formulation impossible. Besides this, they are in prin-
ciple paradoxical, just as for the alchemists the spirit was
conceived as "senex et iuvenis simul" an old man and a youth
at once.

81 If one wants to form a picture of the symbolic process, the
series of pictures found in alchemy are good examples, though
the symbols they contain are for the most part traditional
despite their often obscure origin and significance. An excellent
Eastern example is the Tantric chakra system, 41 or the mystical
nerve system of Chinese yoga. 42 It also seems as if the set of pic-
tures in the Tarot cards were distantly descended from the
archetypes of transformation, a view that has been confirmed
for me in a very enlightening lecture by Professor Bernoulli. 43

82 The symbolic process is an experience in images and of
images. Its development usually shows an enantiodromian struc-
ture like the text of the / Ching, and so presents a rhythm of
negative and positive, loss and gain, dark and light. Its begin-
ning is almost invariably characterized by one's getting stuck

41 Arthur Avalon, The Serpent Power.

42 Erwin Rousselle, "Spiritual Guidance in Contemporary Taoism."

43 R. Bernoulli, "Zur Symbolik geometrischer Figuren und Zahlen," pp. 397ff.

38



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

in a blind alley or in some impossible situation; and its goal is,
broadly speaking, illumination or higher consciousness, by
means of which the initial situation is overcome on a higher
level. As regards the time factor, the process may be compressed
into a single dream or into a short moment of experience, or it
may extend over months and years, depending on the nature of
the initial situation, the person involved in the process, and the
goal to be reached. The wealth of symbols naturally varies
enormously from case to case. Although everything is experi-
enced in image form, i.e., symbolically, it is by no means a ques-
tion of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the
fate of a whole life may depend. The chief danger is that of
succumbing to the fascinating influence of the archetypes, and
this is most likely to happen when the archetypal images are
not made conscious. If there is already a predisposition to
psychosis, it may even happen that the archetypal figures, which
are endowed with a certain autonomy anyway on account of
their natural numinosity, will escape from conscious control
altogether and become completely independent, thus produc-
ing the phenomena of possession. In the case of an anima-pos-
session, for instance, the patient will want to change himself
into a woman through self-castration, or he is afraid that some-
thing of the sort will be done to him by force. The best-known
example of this is Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
Patients often discover a whole anima mythology with numerous
archaic motifs. A case of this kind was published some time ago
by Nelken. 44 Another patient has described his experiences him-
self and commented on them in a book. 45 I mention these ex-
amples because there are still people who think that the
archetypes are subjective chimeras of my own brain.
8 3 The things that come to light brutally in insanity remain
hidden in the background in neurosis, but they continue to
influence consciousness nonetheless. When, therefore, the analy-
sis penetrates the background of conscious phenomena, it dis-
covers the same archetypal figures that activate the deliriums
of psychotics. Finally, there is any amount of literary and histori-
cal evidence to prove that in the case of these archetypes we are
dealing with normal types of fantasy that occur practically

44 "Analytische Beobachtungen iiber Phantasien eines Schizophrenen," pp. 504ff.

45 John distance, Wisdom, Madness, and Folly.

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THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

everywhere and not with the monstrous products of insanity.
The pathological element does not lie in the existence of these
ideas, but in the dissociation of consciousness that can no longer
control the unconscious. In all cases of dissociation it is there-
fore necessary to integrate the unconscious into consciousness.
This is a synthetic process which I have termed the "individua-
tion process."

84 As a matter of fact, this process follows the natural course of
life a life in which the individual becomes what he always was.
Because man has consciousness, a development of this kind does
not run very smoothly; often it is varied and disturbed, because
consciousness deviates again and again from its archetypal, in-
stinctual foundation and finds itself in opposition to it. There
then arises the need for a synthesis of the two positions. This
amounts to psycho therapy even on the primitive level, where it
takes the form of restitution ceremonies. As examples I would
mention the identification of the Australian aborigines with
their ancestors in the alcheringa period, identification with the
"sons of the sun" among the Pueblos of Taos, the Helios apothe-
osis in the Isis mysteries, and so on. Accordingly, the therapeutic
method of complex psychology consists on the one hand in mak-
ing as fully conscious as possible the constellated unconscious
contents, and on the other hand in synthetizing them with con-
sciousness through the act of recognition. Since, however, civi-
lized man possesses a high degree of dissociability and makes
continual use of it in order to avoid every possible risk, it is by
no means a foregone conclusion that recognition will be fol-
lowed by the appropriate action. On the contrary, we have to
reckon with the singular ineffectiveness of recognition and must
therefore insist on a meaningful application of it. Recognition
by itself does not as a rule do this, nor does it imply, as such,
any moral strength. In these cases it becomes very clear how
much the cure of neurosis is a moral problem.

8 5 As the archetypes, like all numinous contents, are relatively
autonomous, they cannot be integrated simply by rational
means, but require a dialectical procedure, a real coming to
terms with them, often conducted by the patient in dialogue
form, so that, without knowing it, he puts into effect the
alchemical definition of the meditatio: "an inner colloquy with

40



86



ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

one's good angel." 46 Usually the process runs a dramatic course,
with many ups and downs. It expresses itself in, or is accom-
panied by, dream symbols that are related to the "representa-
tions collectives," which in the form of mythological motifs have
portrayed psychic processes of transformation since the earliest
times. 47

In the short space of a lecture I must content myself with
giving only a few examples of archetypes. I have chosen the ones
that play the chief part in an analysis of the masculine psyche,
and have tried to give you some idea of the transformation
process in which they appear. Since this lecture was first pub-
lished, the figures of the shadow, anima, and wise old man,
together with the corresponding figures of the feminine uncon-
scious, have been dealt with in greater detail in my contribu-
tions to the symbolism of the self, 48 and the individuation
process in its relation to alchemical symbolism has also been
subjected to closer investigation. 49

46Ruland, Lexicon alchemiae (1612). 48 Aion, Part II of this volume.

47 Cf. Symbols of Transformation. 49 Psychology and Alchemy.



41




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