ARCHAIC MAN 1 
	104 	The word "archaic" means primal, original. While it is one 
of the most difficult and thankless of tasks to say anything of importance about the civilized man of today, we are apparently in a more favourable position when it comes to archaic man. In the first case, the speaker finds himself caught in the same presuppositions and is blinded by the same prejudices as those whom he wishes to view from a superior standpoint. In the case of archaic man, however, we are far removed from his world in time, our mental equipment, being more differentiated, is superior to his, so that from this more elevated coign of vantage it is possible for us to survey his world and the meaning it held for him. 
	105 	vVith this sentence I have set limits to the subject to be 
covered in my lecture. Unless I restricted myself to the psychic life of archaic man, I could hardly paint a sufficiently comprehensive picture of him in so small a space. I should like to confine myself to this picture, and shall say nothing about the findings of anthropology. When we speak of man in general, we do not have his anatomy, the shape of his skull, or the colour of his skin in mind, but mean rather his psychic world, his state of consciousness, and his mode of life. Since all this belongs to the subject-matter of psychology, we shall be dealing here chiefly with the psychology of archaic man and with the primitive mentality. Despite this limitation we shall find we have actually widened our theme, because it is not only primitive man 
1 [First published as "Der archaische Mensch," Europiiische Revue (Berlin), VII (1931),182-2°3. Revised and republished in Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart (Zurich, 1931), pp. 211-47; trans. by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London and New York, 1933), pp. 143-74. The latter trans. has been consulted.-EDIToRs.] 
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ARCHAIC MAN 
whose psychology is archaic. It is the psychology also of modern, civilized man, and not merely of individual "throw-backs" in modern society. On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits. 
	106 	When we first come into contact with primitive peoples or 
read about primitive psychology in scientific works, we cannot fail to be deeply impressed with the strangeness of archaic man. Levy-Bruhl himself, an authority in the field of primitive psychology, never wearies of emphasizing the striking difference between the "prelogical" state of mind and our own conscious outlook. It seems to him, as a civilized man, ineXplicable that the primitive should disregard the obvious lessons of experience, should flatly deny the most evident causal connections, and instead of accounting for things as simply due to chance or on reasonable grounds of causality, should take his "collective representations" as being intrinsically valid. By "collective representations" Levy-Bruhl means widely current ideas whose truth is held to be self-evident from the start, such as the primitive ideas concerning spirits, witchcraft, the power of medicines, and so forth. While it is perfectly understandable to us that people die of advanced age or as the result of diseases that are recognized to be fatal, this is not the case with primitive man. When old persons die, he does not believe it to be the result of age. He argues that there are persons who have lived to be much older. Likewise, no one dies as the result of disease, for there have been other people who recovered from the same disease, or never contracted ir. To him, the real explanation is always magic. Either a spirit has killed the man, or it was sorcery. Many primitive tribes recognize death in battle as the only natural death. Still others regard even death in battle as unnatural, holding that the enemy who caused it must either have been a sorcerer or have used a charmed weapon. This grotesque idea can on occasion take an even more impressive form. For instance, two anklets were found in the stomach of;a crocodile shot by a European. The natives recognized the ank1ets as the property of two women 
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who, some time before, had been devoured by a crocodile. At once the charge of witchcraft was raised; for this quite natural occurrence, which would never have aroused the suspicions of a European, was given an unexpected interpretation in the light of one of those presuppositions which Levy-Bruhl calls "collective representations." The natives said that an unknown sorcerer had summoned the crocodile, and had bidden it catch the two women and bring them to him. The crocodile had carried out this command. But what about the anklets in the beast's stomach? Crocodiles, they explained, never ate people unless bidden to do so. The crocodile had merely received the anklets from the sorcerer as a reward. 
	107 	This story is a perfect example of that capricious way of 
explaining things which is characteristic of the "prelogical" state of mind. We call it prelogical, because to us such an explanation seems absurdly illogical. But it seems so to us only because we start from assumptions wholly different from those of primitive man. If we were as convinced as he is of the existence of sorcerers and other mysterious powers, instead of believing in so-called natural causes, his inferences would seem to us perfectly logical. As a matter of fact, primitive man is no more logical or illogical than we are. Only his presuppositions are different, and that is what distinguishes him from us. His thinking and his conduct are based on assumptions quite unlike our own. To all that is in any way out of the ordinary and that therefore disturbs, frightens or astonishes him, he ascribes what we would call a supernatural origin. For him, of course, these things are not supernatural, but belong to his world of experience. We feel we are stating a natural sequence of events when we say: 
This house was burned down because it was struck by lightning. Primitive man senses an equally natural sequence of events when he says: A sorcerer used the lightning to set fire to this house. There is absolutely nothing in the world of the primitive -provided that it is at all unusual or impressive-that will not be accounted for on essentially similar grounds. But in explaining things in this way he is acting just like ourselves: he does not examine his assumptions. To him it is an unquestionable truth that disease and other ills are caused by spirits or witchcraft, just as for us it is a foregone conclusion that an illness has a natural cause. We would no more put it down to sorcery than 
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he to natural causes. His mental functioning does not differ i any fundamental way from ours. It is, as I have said, his assumr tions alone that distinguish him from ourselves. 
	108 	It is also supposed that primitive man has other feeling 
than we, and another kind of morality-that he has, so to spea1 a "prelogical" temperament. Undoubtedly he has a differen code of morals. When asked about the difference between gooe and evil, a Negro chieftain declared: "When I steal my enemy' wives, it is good, when he steals mine, it is bad." In many region it is a terrible insult to tread on a person's shadow, and in other it is an unpardonable sin to scrape a sealskin with an iron knifl instead of a flint one. But let us be honest. Do we not think it ; sin to eat fish with a steel knife, for a man to keep his hat or in a room, or to greet a lady with a cigar in his mouth? With us as well as with primitives, such things have nothing to do wit! ethics. There are good and loyal head-hunters, and there an others who piously and conscientiously perform cruel rites, OJ commit murder from sacred conviction. The primitive is no les1 prompt than we are to value an ethical attitude. His good is jus1 as good as ours, and his evil is just as bad as ours. Only the forml under which they appear are different; the process of ethical judgment is the same. 
	109 	It is likewise thought that primitive man has keener senses 
than we, or that they are somehow different. But his highly refined sense of direction or of hearing and sight is entirely a matter of professional differentiation. If he is confronted with things that are outside his experience, he is amazingly slow and clumsy. I once showed some native hunters, who were as keensighted as hawks, magazine pictures in which any child of ours would instantly have recognized human figures. But my hunters turned the pictures round and round until one of them, tracing the outline with his finger, finally exclaimed: "These are White men!" It was hailed by all as a great discovery. 
	liO 	The .incredibly accurate sense of direction shown by many 
primitives is essentially occupational. It is absolutely necessary that they should be able to find their way in forests and in the bush. Even the European, after a short while in Africa, begins to notice things he would never have dreamed of noticing before -and from fear of going hONlessly astray in spite of his compass. 
	III 	There is nothing to sho~ that primitive man thinks, feels, or 
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perceives in a way fundamentally different from ours. It is relatively unimportant that he has, or seems to have, a smaller area of consciousness than we, and that he has little or no aptitude for concentrated mental activity. This last, it is true, strikes the European as strange. For instance, I could never hold a palaver for longer than two hours, since by that time the natives declared themselves tired. They said it was too difficult, and yet I had asked only quite simple questions in the most desultory way. But these same people were capable of astonishing concentration and endurance when out hunting or on a journey. My letter-carrier, for instance, could run seventy-five miles at a stretch. I saw a woman in her sixth month of pregnancy, carrying a baby on her back and smoking a long pipe of tobacco, dance almost the whole night through round a blazing fire when the temperature was 950, without collapsing. It cannot be denied that primitives are quite capable of concentrating on things that interest them. If we have to give our attention to uninteresting matters, we soon notice how feeble our powers of concentration are. We are just as dependent as they are on emotional impulses. 
	112 	It is true that primitives are simpler and more childlike than 
we, in good and evil alike. This in itself does not impress us as strange. And yet, when we approach the world of archaic man, we have the feeling of something prodigiously strange. As far as I have been able to analyse it, this feeling comes predominantly from the fact that the primary assumptions of archaic man are essentially different from ours, so that he lives in a different world. Until we come to know his presuppositions, he is a hard riddle to read; but when we know them, all is relatively simple. We might equally well say that primitive man ceases to be a riddle for us as soon as we get to know our own presuppositions. 
	113 	It is a rational presupposition of ours that everything has a 
natural and perceptible cause. vVe are convinced of this right from the start. Causality is one of our most sacred dogmas. There is no legitimate place in our world for invisible, arbitrary, and so-called supernatural powers-unless, indeed, we descend with the modern physicist into the obscure, microcosmic world inside the atom, where, it appears, some very curious things happen. But that lies far from the beaten track. We distinctly resent the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is not so long ago 
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that we made our escape from that frightening world of dreams and superstitions, and constructed for ourselves a picture of the cosmos worthy of our rational consciousness-that latest and greatest achievement of man. We are now surrounded by a world that is obedient to rational laws. It is true that we do not know the causes of everything, but in time they will be discovered, and these discoveries will accord with our reasoned expectations. There are, to be sure, also chance occurrences, but they are merely accidental, and we do not doubt that they have a causality of their own. Chance happenings are repellent to the mind that loves order. They disturb the regular, predictable course of events in the most absurd and irritating way. We resent them as much as we resent invisible, arbitrary forces, for they remind us too much of Satanic imps or of the caprice of a deus ex machina. They are the worst enemies of our careful calculations and a continual threat to all our undertakings. Being admittedly contrary to reason, they deserve all our abuse, and yet we should not fail to give them their due. The Arab shows them greater respect than we. He writes on every letter lnsha' allah) "If God wills," for only then will the letter arrive. In spite of our resentment and in spite of the fact that events run true to general laws, it is undeniable that we are always and everywhere exposed to incalculable accidents. And what is more invisible and capricious than chance? What is more unavoidable and more annoying? 
	114 	If we consider the matter, we could as well say that the causal 
connection of events according to general laws is a theory which is borne out about half the time, while for the rest the demon of chance holds sway. Chance events certainly have their natural causes, and all too often we must discover to our sorrow how commonplace they are. It is not this causality that annoys us; the irritating thing about chance events is that they have to befall us here and now in an apparently arbitrary way. At least that is how it strikes us, and even the most obdurate rationalist may occasionally be moved to curse them. However we interpret chance makes no difference to its power. The more regulated the conditions of life become, the more chance is excluded and the less we need to protect ourselves against it. But despite this everyone in practice takes precautions against chance occur- 
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rences or hopes for them, even though there is nothing about chance in the official credo. 
	115 	It is our assumption, amounting to a positive conviction, that 
everything has a "natural" cause which, at least in theory, is perceptible. Primitive man, on the other hand, assumes that everything is brought about by invisible, arbitrary powers-in other words, that everything is chance. Only he does not call it chance, but intention. Natural causation is to him a mere pretence and not worthy of mention. If three women go to the river to draw water, and a crocodile seizes the one in the middle and pulls her under, our view of things leads us to the verdict that it was pure chance that that particular woman was seized. The fact that the crocodile seized her at all seems to us quite natural, for these beasts do occasionally eat human beings. 
	116 	For primitive man such an explanation completely obliter- 
ates the facts and accounts for no aspect of the whole exciting story. He rightly finds our explanation superficial or even absurd, for according to this view the accident could just as well not have happened and the same explanation would fit that case too-that it was "pure chance" it did not. The prejudice of the European does not allow him to see how little he is saying when he explains things in that way. 
	117 	Primitive man expects far more of an explanation. What we 
call pure chance is for him wilful intention. It was therefore the intention of the crocodile-as everyone could observe-to seize the middle one of the three women. If it had not had this intention it would have taken one of the others. But why did the crocodile have this intention? Ordinarily these creatures do not eat human beings. That is quite correct-as correct as the statement that it does not ordinarily rain in the Sahara. Crocodiles are rather timid animals, easily frightened. Considering their numbers, they kill astonishingly few people, and it is an unexpected and unnatural event when they devour a man. Such an event calls for an explanation. Of his own accord the crocodile would not take a human life. By whom, then, was he ordered to do so? 
	llS 	It is on the facts of the world around him that primitive man 
bases his verdicts. When the unexpected occurs he is justifiably astonished and wishes to know the specific causes. To this extent he behaves exactly as we do. But he goes further than we. He has 
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one or more theories about the arbitrary power of chance. We say: Pure chance. He says: Calculating intention. He lays the chief stress on the confusing and confused breaks in the chain of causation, which we call chance-on those occurrences that fail to show the neat causal connections which science expects, and that constitute the other half of happenings in general. He has long ago adapted himself to nature in so far as it conforms to general laws; what he fears is unpredictable chance whose power makes him see in it an arbitrary and incalculable agent. Here again he is right. It is quite understandable that everything out of the ordinary should frighten him. Anteaters are fairly numerous in the regions south of Mount Elgon where I stayed for some time. The anteater is a shy, nocturnal animal that is rarely seen. If one happens to be seen by day, it is an extraordinary and unnatural event which astonishes the natives as much as the discovery of a brook that occasionally flows uphill would astonish us. If we knew of actual cases in which water suddenly overcame the force of gravity, such a discovery would be exceedingly disquieting. We know that tremendous masses of water surround us, and can easily imagine what would happen if water no longer conformed to gravitational law. This is the situation in which primitive man finds himself with respect to the happenings in his world. He is thoroughly familiar with the habits of anteaters, but when one of them suddenly transgresses the natural order of things it acquires for him an unknown sphere of action. Primitive man is so strongly impressed by things as they are that a transgression of the laws of his world exposes him to incalculable possibilities. It is a portent, an omen, comparable to a comet or an eclipse. Since such an unnatural event as the appearance of an anteater by day can have no natural causes, some invisible power must be behind it. And the alarming manifestation of a power which can transgress the natural order obviously calls for extraordinary measures of placation or defence. The neighbouring villages must be aroused, and the anteater must be dug up with their concerted efforts and killed. The oldest maternal uncle of the man who saw the anteater must then sacrifice a bull. -r:he man descends into the sacrificial pit and receives the first pIece of the animal's flesh, whereupon the uncle and the other part~cipants in the ceremony also eat. In this way the dangerous capnce of nature is expiated. 
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122 
121 
CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
	119 	As for us, we should certainly be alarmed if water suddenly 
began to run uphill for unknown reasons, but are not when an anteater is seen by day, or an albino is born, or an eclipse takes place. We know the meaning and sphere of action of such happenings, while primitive man does not. Ordinary events constitute for him a coherent whole in which he and all other creatures are embraced. He is therefore extremely conservative, and does what others have always done. If something happens, at any point, to break the coherence of this whole, he feels there is a rift in his well-ordered world. Then anything may happenheaven knows what. All occurrences that are in any way striking are at once brought into connection with the unusual event. For instance, a missionary set up a flagstaff in front of his house so that he could fly the Union Jack on Sundays. But this innocent pleasure cost him dear, for when shortly after his revolutionary action a devastating storm broke out, the flagstaff was of course made responsible. This sufficed to start a general uprising against the missionary. 
	120 	It is the regularity of ordinary occurrences that gives primi- 
tive man a sense of security in his world. Every exception seems to him a threatening act of an arbitrary power that must somehow be propitiated. It is not only a momentary interruption of the ordinary course of things, but a portent of other untoward events. This seems absurd to us, inasmuch as we forget how our grandparents and great-grandparents still felt about the world. A calf is born with two heads and five legs. In the next village a cock has laid an egg. An old woman has had a dream, a comet appears in the sky, there is a great fire in the nearest town, and the following year a war breaks out. In this way history was always written from remote antiquity down to the eighteenth century. This concatenation of events, so meaningless to us, is significant and convincing to primitive man. And, contrary to all expectation, he is right to find it so. His powers of observa· tion can be trusted. From age-old experience he knows that such concatenations actually exist. What seems to us a wholly senseless heaping-up of single, haphazard occurrences-because we pay attention only to single events and their particular causes-is for the primitive a completely logical sequence of omens and of happenings indicated by them. It is a fatal outbreak of demonic power showing itself in a thoroughly consistent way. 
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The calf with two heads and the war are one and the same, 
for the calf was only an anticipation of the war. Primitive man finds this connection so unquestionable and convincing because the whims of chance seem to him a far more important factor in the happenings of the world than regularity and conformity to law. Thanks to his close attention to the unusual, he discovered long before us that chance events arrange themselves in groups or series. The law of the duplication of cases is known to all doctors engaged in clinical work. An old professor of psychiatry at Wiirzburg always used to say of a particularly rare clinical case: "Gentlemen, this case is absolutely unique-tomorrow we shall have another just like it." I myself often observed the same thing during my eight years' practice in an insane asylum. On one occasion a person was committed for a very rare twilight state of consciousness-the first case of this kind I had ever seen. Within two days we had a similar case, and that was the last. "Duplication of cases" is a joke with us in the clinics, but it was also the first object of primitive science. A recent investigator has ventured the statement: "Magic is the science of the jungle." Astrology and other methods of divination may certainly be 
called the science of antiquity. 
What happens regularly is easily observed because we are prepared for it. Knowledge and skill are needed only in situations where the course of events is interrupted in a way hard to fathom. Generally it is one of the shrewdest and wiliest men of the tribe who is entrusted with the observation of meteorological events. His knowledge must suffice to explain all unusual occurrences, and his art to combat them. He is the scholar, the specialist, the expert on chance, and at the same time the keeper of the archives of the tribe's traditional lore. Surrounded by respect and fear, he enjoys great authority, yet not so great but that his tribe is secretly convinced that the neighbouring tribe has a sorcerer who is stronger than theirs. The best medicine is never to be found close at hand, but as far away as possible. I stayed for some time with a tribe who held their old medicineman in the greatest awe. Nevertheless he was consulted only for the minor ailments of cattle and men. In all serious cases a foreign authority was called in-a M' ganga who was brought at a high fee from Uganda-just as with us. 
	123 	Chance events occur most often in larger or smaller series or 
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groups. An old and well-tried rule for foretelling the weather is this, that when it has rained for several days it will also rain tomorrow. A proverb says, "Misfortunes never come singly." Another has it that "It never rains but it pours." This proverbial wisdom is primitive science. The common people still believe it and fear it, but the educated man smiles at it-until something unusual happens to him. I will tell you a disagreeable story. A woman I know was awakened one morning by a peculiar tinkling on her night-table. After looking about her for a while she discovered the cause: the rim of her tumbler had snapped off in a ring about a quarter of an inch wide. This struck her as peculiar, and she rang for another glass. About five minutes later she heard the same tinkling, and again the rim of the glass had broken off. This time she was greatly disquieted, and had a third glass brought. Within twenty minutes the rim broke off again with the same tinkling noise. Three such accidents in immediate succession were too much for her. She gave up her belief in natural causes on the spot and brought out in its place a primitive "collective representation" -the conviction that an arbitrary power was at work. Something of this sort happens to many modern people-provided they are not too thick-skulledwhen they are confronted with events which natural causation fails to explain. We naturally prefer to deny such occurrences. They are unpleasant because they disrupt the orderly course of our world and make anything seem possible, thus proving that the primitive mind in us is not yet dead. 
	124 	Primitive man's belief in an arbitrary power does not arise 
out of thin air, as was always supposed, but is grounded in experience. The grouping of chance occurrences justifies what we call his superstition, for there is a real measure of probability that unusual events will coincide in time and place. We must not forget that our experience is apt to leave us in the lurch here. Our observation is inadequate because our point of view leads us to overlook these matters. For instance, it would never seriously occur to us to take the following events as a sequence: in the morning a bird flies into your room, an hour later you witness an accident in the street, in the afternoon a relative dies, in the evening the cook drops the soup tureen, and, on coming home at night, you find that you have lost your key. Primitive man would not have overlooked a single item in this chain of 
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events. Every new link would have confirmed his expectations, and he would be right-much more nearly right than we are willing to admit. His anxious expectations are fully justified and serve a purpose. Such a day is ill-omened, and on it nothing should be undertaken. In our world this would be reprehensible superstition, but in the world of the primitive it is highly appropriate shrewdness. In that world man is far more exposed to accidents than we are in our sheltered and well-regulated existence. When you are in the bush you dare not take too many chances. The European soon comes to appreciate this. 
	125 	When a Pueblo Indian does not feel in the right mood, he 
stays away from the men's council. When an ancient Roman stumbled on the threshold as he left his house, he gave up his plans for the day. This seems to us senseless, but under primitive conditions such an omen inclines one at least to be cautious. When I am not in full control of myself, I am hampered in my movements, my attention wanders, I get absent-minded. As a result I knock against something, stumble, drop something, forget something. Under civilized conditions all these are mere trifles, but in the primeval forest they mean mortal danger. I make a false step on a slippery tree-trunk that serves as a bridge over a river teeming with crocodiles. I lose my compass in the high grass. I forget to load my rifle and blunder into a rhinoceros trail in the jungle. I am preoccupied with my thoughts and step on a puff-adder. At nightfall I forget to put on my mosquitoboots in time and eleven days later I die from an onset of tropical malaria. To forget to keep one's mouth shut while bathing is enough to bring on a fatal attack of dysentery. For us accidents of this kind have their recognizable natural cause in a somewhat distracted psychological state, but for the primitive they are objectively conditioned omens, or sorcery. 
	126 	It may be rather more than a question of inattention, how- 
ever. In the Kitoshi region south of Mount Elgon, in East Africa, I went on an expedition into the Kabras forest. There, in the thick grass, I nearly stepped on a puff-adder, and only managed to jump away just in time. That afternoon my companion returned from a hunt, deathly pale and trembling in every limb. He had narrowly escaped being bitten by a seven-foot mamba which darted at him from behind a termite hill. He would undoubtedly have been killed had he not been able to wound the 
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brute with a shot at the last moment. At nine o'clock that night our camp was attacked by a pack of ravenous hyenas which had surprised a man in his sleep the day before and torn him to pieces. In spite of the fire they swarmed into the hut of our cook, who fled screaming over the stockade. Thenceforth there were no accidents throughout the whole of our journey. Such a day gave our Negroes food for thought. For us it was a simple multiplication of chance events, but for them the inevitable fulfilment of an omen that had occurred on the first day of our journey into the wilds. It so happened that we had fallen, Ford car, bridge, and all, into a stream we were trying to cross. Our boys had exchanged glances as if to say: "Well, that's a fine start." To cap this calamity, a tropical thunderstorm blew up and soaked us so thoroughly that I was prostrated with fever for several days. On the evening of the day when my friend had had such a narrow escape out hunting, I could not help saying to him as we white men sat looking at one another: "You know, it seems to me as if the trouble had begun still further back. Do you remember the dream you told me in Zurich just before we left?" At that time he had had a very impressive nightmare. He dreamed he was hunting in Africa, and was suddenly attacked by a hug-e mamba, so that he woke up with a cry of terror. The dream had disturbed him greatly, and he now confessed to me that he had thought it portended the death of one of us. He had of course assumed that it was my death, because we always hope it is the other fellow. But it was he who later fell ill of a severe malarial fever that brought him to the brink of the grave. 
	127 	To read of such a conversation in a corner of the world 
where there are no mambas and no anopheles mosquitoes means very little. One must imagine the velvety blue of a tropical night, the overhanging black masses of gigantic trees standing in the primeval forest, the mysterious voices of the nocturnal spaces, a lonely fire with loaded rifles stacked beside it, mosquitonets, boiled swamp-water to drink, and above all the conviction expressed by an old Afrikander who knew what he was talking about: "This isn't man's country-it's God's country." There man is not king; it is rather nature, the animals, plants, and the microbes. Given the mood that goes with the place, one understands how it is that we found a dawning significance in things that anywhere else would provoke a smile. That is the world of 
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unrestrained capricious powers which primitive man has to deal with every day. The unusual event is no joke to him. He draws his own conclusions. "This is not a good place," "The day is unfavourable" -and who knows what dangers he avoids by following such warnings? 
	128 	"Magic is the science of the jungle." The portent brings 
about an immediate alteration of a course of action, the abandonment of a planned undertaking, a change of psychic attitude. These are all highly expedient reactions in view of the fact that chance occurrences tend to fall into sequences and that primitive man is wholly unconscious of psychic causality. Thanks to our one-sided emphasis on so-called natural causes, we have learned to differentiate what is subjective and psychic from what is objective and "naturaL" For primitive man, on the contrary, the psychic and the objective coalesce in the external world. In the face of something extraordinary it is not he who is astonished, but rather the thing which is astonishing. It is manaendowed with magic power. What we would call the powers of imagination and suggestion seem to him invisible forces which act on him from without. His country is neither a geographical nor a political entity. It is that territory which contains his mythology, his religion, all his thinking and feeling in so far as he is unconscious of these functions. His fear is localized in certain places that are "not good." The spirits of the departed inhabit such and such a wood. That cave harbours devils who strangle any man who enters. In yonder mountain lives the great serpent; that hill is the grave of the legendary king; near this spring or rock or tree every woman becomes pregnant; that ford is guarded by snake-demons; this towering tree has a voice that can call certain people. Primitive man is unpsychological. Psychic happenings take place outside him in an objective way. Even the things he dreams about are real to him; that is his only reason for paying attention to dreams. Our Elgonyi porters maintained in all seriousness that they never had dreams -only the medicine-man had them. When I questioned the medicine-man, he declared that he had stopped having dreams when the British entered the land. His father had still had "big" dreams, he told me, and had known where the herds strayed, where the cows took their calves, and when there was going to be a war or a pestilence. It was now the District Co m- 
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mISS lOner who knew everything, and they knew nothing. He was as resigned as certain Papuans who believe that the crocodiles have for the most part gone over to the British Government. It happened that a native convict who had escaped from the authorities had been badly mangled by a crocodile while trying to cross a river. They therefore concluded that it must have been a police crocodile. God now speaks in dreams to the British, and not to the medicine-man of the Elgonyi, he told me, because it is the British who have the power. Dream activity has emigrated. Occasionally the souls of the natives wander off too, and the medicine-man catches them in cages as if they were birds, or strange souls come in as immigrants and cause peculiar diseases. 
	129 	This projection of psychic happenings naturally gives rise 
to relations between men and men, or between men and animals or things, that to us are inconceivable. A white man shoots a crocodile. At once a crowd of people come running from the nearest village and excitedly demand compensation. They explain that the crocodile was a certain old woman in their village who had died at the moment when the shot was fired. The crocodile was obviously her bush-soul. Another man shot a leopard that was lying in wait for his cattle. Just then a woman died in a neighbouring village. She and the leopard were identical. 
	13° 	Levy-Bruhl has coined the expression particiPation mys- 
tique for these remarkable relationships. It seems to me that the word "mystical" is not happily chosen. Primitive man does not see anything mystical in these matters, but considers them perfectly natural. It is only we who find them so strange, because we appear to know nothing about the phenomena of psychic dissociation. In reality, however, they occur in us too, not in this naive but in a rather more civilized form. In daily life it happens all the time that we presume that the psychology of other people is the same as ours. We suppose that what is pleasing or desirable to us is the same to others, and that what seems bad to us must also seem bad to them. It is only recently that our courts of law have nerved themselves to admit the psychological relativity of guilt in pronouncing sentence. The tenet quod licet Jovi non licet bovi still rankles in the minds of all unsophisticated people; equality before the law is still a precious 
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achievement. And we still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior "soul" has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. 
	131 	Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena. It 
is the same as particiPation mystique> which Levy-Bruhl, to his great credit, emphasized as being an especially characteristic feature of primitive man. We merely give it another name, and as a rule deny that we are guilty of it. Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly. We no longer subject him to the test of drinking poison; we do not burn him or put the screws on him; but we injure him by means of moral verdicts pronounced with the deepest conviction. What we combat in him is usually our own inferior side. 
	132 	The simple truth is that primitive man is somewhat more 
given to projection than we because of the undifferentiated state of his mind and his consequent inability to criticize himself. Everything to him is absolutely objective, and his speech reflects this in a drastic way. With a touch of humour we can picture to ourselves what a leopard-woman is like, just as we do when we call a person a goose, a cow, a hen, a snake, an ox, or an ass. These uncomplimentary epithets are familiar to us all. But when primitive man attributes a bush-soul to a person, the poison of moral judgment is absent. He is too naturalistic for that; he is too much impressed by things as they are and much less prone to pass judgment than we. The Pueblo Indians declared in a matter-of-fact way that I belonged to the Bear Totem -in other words, that I was a bear-because I did not come down a ladder standing up like a man, but bunched up on all fours like a .bear. If anyone in Europe said I had a bearish nature this would amount to the same thing, but with a rather different shade of meaning. The theme of the bush-soul, which seems so strange to us when we meet with it among primitives, has become with us a mere figure of speech, like so much else. If we take our metaphors concretely we return to the primitive point of view. For instance, we have the expression "to handle 
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a patient." In concrete terms this means "to lay hands on" a person, "to work at with the hands," "to manipulate." And this is precisely what the medicine-man does with his patients. 
	133 	We find the bush-soul hard to understand because we are 
baffled by such a concrete way of looking at things. We cannot conceive of a "soul" that splits off completely and takes up its abode in a wild animal. When we describe someone as an ass, we do not mean that he is in every aspect the quadruped called an ass. We mean that he resembles an ass in some particular respect. We split off a bit of his personality or psyche and personify it as an ass. So, too, for primitive man the leopard-woman is a human being, only her bush-soul is a leopard. Since all unconscious psychic life is concrete and objective for him, he supposes that a person describable as a leopard has the soul of a leopard. If the splitting and concretizing go still further, he assumes that the leopard-soul lives in the bush in the form of a real leopard. 
	134 	These identifications, brought about by projection, create 
a world in which man is completely contained psychically as well as physically. To a certain extent he coalesces with it. In no way is he master of this world, but only a fragment of it. Primitive man is still far from the glorification of human powers. He does not dream of regarding himself as the lord of creation. In Africa, for instance, his zoological classification does not culminate in Homo saPiens) but in the elephant. Next comes the lion, then the python or the crocodile, then man and the lesser creatures. Man is still dovetailed into nature. It never occurs to him that he might be able to rule her; all his efforts are devoted to protecting himself against her dangerous caprices. It is civilized man who strives to dominate nature and therefore devotes his greatest energies to the discovery of natural causes which will give him the key to her secret laboratory. That is why he strongly resents the idea of arbitrary powers and denies them. Their existence would amount to proof that his attempt to dominate nature is futile after all. 
	135 	Summing up, we may say that the outstanding trait of archaic 
man is his attitude towards the arbitrary power of chance, which he considers a far more important factor in the worldprocess than natural causes. It consists on the one hand in the observed tendency of chance occurrences to take place in a 
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series, and on the other in the projection of unconscious psychic contents through participation mystique. For archaic man this distinction does not exist, because psychic happenings are projected so completely that they cannot be distinguished from objective, physical events. For him the vagaries of chance are arbitrary and intentional acts, interventions by animate beings. He does not realize that unusual events stir him so deeply only because he invests them with the power of his own astonish. ment or fear. Here, it is true, we move on treacherous ground. Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it? Or is it the objective beauty of the thing that compels me to acknowledge it? As we know, great minds have wrestled with the problem whether it is the glorious sun that illuminates the world, or the sunlike human eye. Archaic man believes it to be the sun, and civilized man believes it to be the eye-so far, at any rate, as he reflects at all and does not suffer from the disease of the poets. He must de-psychize nature in order to dominate her; and in order to see his world objectively he must take back all his archaic projections. 
	136 	In the archaic world everything has soul-the soul of man, 
or let us say of mankind, the collective unconscious, for the individual has as yet no soul of his own. We must not forget that what the Christian sacrament of baptism purports to do is a landmark of the utmost significance in the psychic development of mankind. Baptism endows the individual with a living soul. I do not mean that the baptismal rite in itself does this, by a unique and magical act. I mean that the idea of baptism lifts man out of his archaic identification with the world and transforms him into a being who stands above it. The fact that mankind has risen to the level of this idea is baptism in the deepest sense, for it means the birth of the spiritual man who transcends nature. 
	137 	In the psychology of the unconscious it is an axiom that every 
relatively independent portion of the psyche has the character of personality, that it is personified as soon as it is given an ?pportunity for independent expression. We find the clearest Instances of this in the hallucinations of the insane and in mediumistic communications. Whenever an autonomous component of the psyche is projected, an invisible person comes Into being. In this way the spirits arise at an ordinary spiritual. 
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istic seance. So too among primitives. If an important psychic component is projected on a human being, he becomes mana) extraordinarily effective-a sorcerer, witch, werewolf, or the like. The primitive idea that the medicine-man catches the souls that have wandered away by night and puts them in cages like birds is a striking illustration of this. These projections give the medicine-man his man a, they cause animals, trees, and stones to speak, and because they are his own psychic components they compel the projicient to obey them absolutely. For this reason an insane person is helplessly at the mercy of his voices; they are projections of his own psychic activity whose unconscious subject he is. He is the one who speaks through his voices, just as he is the one who hears, sees, and obeys. 
	138 	From a psychological point of view, therefore, the primitive 
theory that the arbitrary power of chance is the outcome of the intentions of spirits and sorcerers is perfectly natural, because it is an unavoidable inference from the facts as primitive man sees them. Let us not delude ourselves in this connection. If we explain our scientific views to an intelligent native he will accuse us of ludicrous superstitiousness and a disgraceful want of logic, for he believes that the world is lighted by the sun and not by the human eye. My friend Mountain Lake, a Pueblo chief, once called me sharply to account because I had made insinuating use of the Augustinian argument: "Not this sun is our Lord, but he who made this 'sun." Pointing to the sun he cried indignantly: "He who goes there is our father. You can see him. From him comes all light, all life-there is nothing that he has not made." He became greatly excited, struggled for words, and finally cried out: "Even a man in the mountains, who goes alone, cannot make his fire without him." The archaic standpoint could hardly be more beautifully expressed than by these words. The power that rules us is outside, in the external world, and through it alone are we permitted to live. Religious thought keeps alive the archaic state of mind even today, in a time bereft of gods. Untold millions of people still think like this. 
	139 	Speaking earlier of primitive man's attitude to the arbitrary 
power of chance, I expressed the view that this attitude serves a purpose and therefore has a meaning. Shall we, for the moment at least, venture the hypothesis that the primitive belief 
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in arbitrary powers is justified by the facts and not merely from a psychological point of view? This sounds alarming, but I have no intention of jumping from the frying-pan into the fire and trying to prove that witchcraft actually works. I merely wish to consider the conclusions to which we shall be led if we follow primitive man in assuming that all light comes from the sun, that things are beautiful in themselves, and that a bit of the human soul is a leopard-in other words, that the mana theory is correct. According to this theory, beauty moves us) it is not we who create beauty. A certain person is a devil, we have not projected our own evil on him and in this way made a devil out of him. There are people-man a personalities-who are impressive in their own right and in no way thanks to our imagination. The mana theory maintains that there is something like a widely distributed power in the external world that produces all those extraordinary effects. Everything that exists acts, otherwise it would not be. It can be only by virtue of its inherent energy. Being is a field of force. The primitive idea of mana, as you can see, has in it the beginnings of a crude theory of energy. 
	14° 	So far we can easily follow this primitive idea. The difficulty 
arises when we try to carry its implications further, for they reverse the process of psychic projection of which I have spoken. It is then not my imagination or my awe that makes the medicine-man a sorcerer; on the contrary, he is a sorcerer and projects his magical powers on me. Spirits are not hallucinations of my mind, but appear to me of their own volition. Although such statements are logical derivatives of the mana idea, we hesitate to accept them and begin to look around for a comfortable theory of psychic projection. The question is nothing less than this: Does the psychic in general-the soul or spirit or the unconscious-originate in us) or is the psyche, in the early stages of conscious evolution, actually outside us in the form of arbitrary powers with intentions of their own, and does it gradually take, its place within us in the course of psychic development? Were the split-off "souls" -or dissociated psychic contents, as we would call them-ever parts of the psyches of individuals,. or were they from the beginning psychic entities existing in themselves according to the primitive view as ghosts, ancestral spirits, and the like? Were they only by degrees embodied in man in the course of development, so that they gradu- 
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ally constituted in him that world which we now call the psyche? 
	141 	This whole idea strikes us as dangerously paradoxical, but, 
at bottom, it is not altogether inconceivable. Not only the religious instructor but the educator as well assumes that it is possible to implant something psychic in man that was not there before. The power of suggestion and influence is a fact; indeed, the modern behaviourists have extravagant expectations in this respect. The idea of a complex building-up of the psyche is expressed on a primitive level in a variety of forms, for instance in the widespread belief in possession, the incarnation of ancestral spirits, the immigration of souls, and so forth. When someone sneezes, we still say: "God bless you," by which is meant: "I hope your new soul will do you no harm." When in the course of our own development we feel ourselves achieving a unified personality out of a multitude of contradictory tendencies, we experience something like a complex growing-together of the psyche. Since the human body is built up by heredity out of a multitude of Mendelian units, it does not seem altogether out of the question that the human psyche is similarly put together. 
	142 	The materialistic views of our day have one tendency which 
they share with archaic thought: both lead to the conclusion that the individual is a mere resultant. In the first case he is the resultant of natural causes, and in the second of chance occurrences. According to both accounts, human individuality is nothing in its own right, but rather the accidental product of forces contained in the objective environment. This is thoroughly consistent with the archaic view of the world, in which the ordinary individual is never important, but always interchangeable with any other and easily dispensable. By the roundabout way of strict causalism, modern materialism has returned to the standpoint of archaic man. But the materialist is more radical, because he is more systematic. Archaic man has the advantage of being inconsistent: he makes an exception of the mana personality. In the course of history these mana personalities were exalted to the position of divine figures; they became heroes and kings who shared the immortality of the gods by eating the food of eternal youth. This idea of the immortality of the individual and of his imperishable worth can be found 
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on the earliest archaic levels, first of all in the belief in spirits, and then in myths of the age when death had not yet gained entry into the world through human carelessness or folly. 
	143 	Primitive man is not aware of this contradiction in his views. 
My Elgonyi porters assured me that they had no idea what would happen to them after death. According to them a man is simply dead, he does not breathe any more, and the corpse is carried into the bush where the hyenas eat it. That is what they think by day, but the night teems with spirits of the dead who bring diseases to cattle and men, who attack and strangle the nocturnal traveller and indulge in other forms of violence. The primitive mind is full of such contradictions. They could worry a European out of his skin, and it would never Occur to him that something quite similar is to be found in our civilized midst. We have universities where the very thought of divine intervention is considered beneath dispute, but where theology is a part of the curriculum. A research worker in natural science who thinks it positively obscene to attribute the smallest variation of an animal species to an act of divine arbitrariness may have in another compartment of his mind a full-blown Christian faith which he likes to parade on Sundays. Why should we excite ourselves about primitive inconsistency? 
	144 	It is impossible to derive any philosophical system from the 
fundamental thoughts of primitive man. They provide only antinomies, but it is just these that are the inexhaustible source of all spiritual problems in all times and in all civilizations. We may ask whether the "collective representations" of archaic man are really profound, or do they only seem so? I cannot answer this most difficult of questions, but I would like, in conclusion, to tell you of an observation I made among the mountain tribe of the Elgonyi. I searched and inquired far and wide for traces of religious ideas and ceremonies, and for weeks on end I discovered nothing. The natives let me see everything and were willing to gh-:e me any information. I could talk with them Without the hindrance of a native interpreter, for many of the old men spoke Swahili. At first they were rather reserved, but once the ice was broken I had the friendliest reception. They knew nothing of religious customs. But I did not give up, and finally, at the end of one of many fruitless palavers, an old man sUddenly exclaimed: "In the morning, when the Sun comes up, 
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we go out of the huts, spit in our hands, and hold them up to the sun." I got them to perform the ceremony for me and describe it exactly. They hold their hands before their faces and spit or blow into them vigorously. Then they turn their hands round and hold the palms towards the sun. I asked them the meaning of what they did-why they blew or spat in their hands. My question was futile. "That is how it has always been done," they said. It was impossible to get an explanation, and it became clear to me that they knew only what they did and not why they did it. They see no meaning in their action. They greet the new moon with the same gesture. 
	145 	Now let us suppose that I am a total stranger in Zurich and 
have come to this city to explore the customs of the place. First I settle down on the outskirts near some suburban homes, and come into neighbourly contact with their owners. I then say to Messrs. Muller and Meyer: "Please tell me something about your religious customs." Both gentlemen are taken aback. They never go to church, know nothing about it, and emphatically deny that they practise any such customs. It is spring, and Easter is approaching. One morning I surprise Mr. Muller at a curious occupation. He is busily running about the garden, hiding coloured eggs and setting up peculiar rabbit idols. I have caught him in flagrante. "Why did you conceal this highly interesting ceremony from me?" I ask him. "What ceremony?" he retorts. "This is nothing. Everybody does it at Eastertime." "But what is the meaning of these idols and eggs, and why do you hide them?" Mr. Muller is stunned. He does not know, any more than he knows the meaning of the Christmas-tree. And yet he does these things, just like a primitive. Did the distant ancestors of the Elgonyi know any better what they were doing? It is highly improbable. Archaic man everywhere does what he does, and only civilized man knows what he does. 
	146 	What is the meaning of the Elgonyi ceremony just cited? 
Clearly it is an offering to the sun, which for these natives is mungu-that is, mana) or divine-only at the moment of rising. If they have spittle on their hands, this is the substance which, according to primitive belief, contains the personal mana) the life-force, the power to heal and to make magic. If they breathe into their hands, breath is wind and spirit-it is roho) in Arabic ruch) in Hebrew ruach) and in Greek pneuma. The action 
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means: I offer my living soul to God. It is a wordless, acted prayer, which could equally well be spoken: "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit." 
	147 	Does this merely happen so, or was this thought brooded and 
willed even before man existed? I must leave this question unanswered. 
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THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN 1 
	148 	The spiritual problem of modern man is one of those ques- 
tions which are so much a part of the age we live in that we cannot see them in the proper perspective. Modern man is an entirely new phenomenon; a modern problem is one which has just arisen and whose answer still lies in the future. In speaking of the spiritual problem of modern man we can at most frame a question, and we should perhaps frame it quite differently if we had but the faintest inkling of the answer the future will give. The question, moreover, seems rather vague; but the truth is that it has to do with something so universal that it exceeds the grasp of any single individual. We have reason enough, therefore, to approach such a problem in all modesty and with the greatest caution. This open avowal of our limitations seems to me essential, because it is these problems more than any others which tempt us to the use of high-sounding and empty words, and because I shall myself be forced to say certain things which may sound immoderate and incautious, and could easily lead us astray. Too many of us already have fallen victim to our own grandiloquence. 
	149 	To begin at once with an example of such apparent lack of 
caution, I must say that the man we call modern, the man who is aware of the immediate present, is by no means the average man. He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens, and below him the whole of mankind with a 
1 [First pub. as "Das Seelenproblem des modernen Menschen," Europaische Revue (Berlin), IV (J928), 7°°-715. Revised and expanded in Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart (Zurich, 1931), pp. 401-35. Trans. by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London and New York, 1933), pp. 226-54. The latter version has been consulted.-EDIToRs.] 
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history that disappears in primeval mists. The modern manor, let us say again, the man of the immediate present-is rarely met with, for he must be conscious to a superlative degree. Since to be wholly of the present means to be fully conscious of one's existence as a man, it requires the most intensive and extensive consciousness, with a minimum of unconsciousness. It must be clearly understood that the mere fact of living in the present does not make a man modern, for in that case everyone at present alive would be so. He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present. 
	15° 	The man who has attained consciousness of the present is 
solitary. The "modern" man has at all times been so, for every step towards fuller consciousness removes him further from his original, purely animal particiPation mystique with the herd, from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells. Even in a civilized community the people who form, psychologically speaking, the lowest stratum live in a state of unconsciousness little different from that of primitives. Those of the succeeding strata live on a level of consciousness which corresponds to the beginnings of human culture, while those of the highest stratum have a consciousness that reflects the life of the last few centuries. Only the man who is modern in our meaning of the term really lives in the present; he alone has a present-day consciousness, and he alone finds that the ways of life on those earlier levels have begun to pall upon him. The values and strivings of those past worlds no longer interest him save from the historical standpoint. Thus he has become "unhistorical" in the deepest sense and has estranged himself from the mass of men who live entirely within the bounds of tradition. Indeed, he is completely modern only when he has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and Outgrown, and·acknowledging that he stands before the Nothing out of which All may grow.2 
	ISI 	This sounds so grand that it borders suspiciously on bathos, 
for nothing is easier than to affect a consciousness of the present. A greilt horde of worthless people do in fact give themselves 
2 ["In this, your Nothing, I may find my All!" Faust, Part Two.- TRANs.] 
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a deceptive air of modernity by skipping the various stages of development and the tasks of life they represent. Suddenly they appear by the side of the truly modern man-uprooted wraiths, bloodsucking ghosts whose emptiness casts discredit upon him in his unenviable loneliness. Thus it is that the few present-day men are seen by the undiscerning eyes of the masses only through the dismal veil of those spectres, the pseudo-modems, and are confused with them. It cannot be helped; the "modern" man is questionable and suspect, and has been so at all times, beginning with Socrates and Jesus. 
	152 	An honest admission of modernity means voluntarily declar- 
ing oneself bankrupt, taking the vows of poverty and chastity in a new sense, and-what is still more painful-renouncing the halo of sanctity which history bestows. To be "unhistorical" is the Promethean sin, and in this sense the modern man is sinful. A higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt. But, as I have said, only the man who has outgrown the stages of consciousness belonging to the past, and has amply fulfilled the duties appointed for him by his world, can achieve full consciousness of the present. To do this he must be sound and proficient in the best sense-a man who has achieved as much as other people, and even a little more. It is these qualities which enable him to gain the next highest level of consciousness. 
	153 	I know that the idea of proficiency is especially repugnant 
to the pseudo-moderns, for it reminds them unpleasantly of their trickery. This, however, should not prevent us from taking it as our criterion of the modern man. We are even forced to do so, for unless he is proficient, the man who claims to be modern is nothing but a trickster. He must be proficient in the highest degree, for unless he can atone by creative ability for his break with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past. To deny the past for the sake of being conscious only of the present would be sheer futility. Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow. It is a process of transition that forms the link between past and future. Only the man who is conscious of the present in this sense may call himself modern. 
	154 	Many people call themselves modern-especially the pseudo- 
modems. Therefore the really modern man is often to be found among those who call themselves old-fashioned. They do this 
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firstly in order to make amends for their guilty break with tradition by laying all the more emphasis on the past, and secondly in order to avoid the misfortune of being taken for pseudomodems. Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing good can come into the world without at once producing a corresponding evil. This painful fact renders illusory the feeling of elation that so often goes with consciousness of the presentthe feeling that we are the culmination of the whole history of mankind, the fulfilment and end-product of countless generations. At best it should be a proud admission of our poverty: we are also the disappointment of the hopes and expectations of the ages. Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian Idealism followed, not by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, but by the World War among Christian nations with its barbed wire and poison gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and on earth! 
	155 	In the face of such a picture we may well grow humble again. 
It is true that modern man is a culmination, but tomorrow he will be surpassed. He is indeed the product of an age-old development, but he is at the same time the worst conceivable disappointment of the hopes of mankind. The modern man is conscious of this. He has seen how beneficent are science, technology, and organization, but also how catastrophic they can be. He has likewise seen how all well-meaning governments have so thoroughly paved the way for peace on the principle "in time of peace prepare for war" that Europe has nearly gone to rack and ruin. And as for ideals, neither the Christian Church, nor the brotherhood of man, nor international social democracy, nor the solidarity of economic interests has stood up to the acid test of reality. Today, ten years after the war,3 we observe once more the same optimism, the same organizations, the same political aspirations, the same phrases and catchwords at work. How. can we but fear that they will inevitably lead to f~rther catastrophes? Agreements to outlaw war leave us sceptIcal, even while we wish them every possible success. At bottom, behind every such palliative measure there is a gnawing doubt. I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that modern 
8 [This essay was originally written in 1928.-EDITORS.] 
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man has suffered an almost fatal shock, psychologically speaking, and as a result has fallen into profound uncertainty. 
	156 	These statements make it clear enough that my views are 
coloured by a professional bias. A doctor always spies out diseases, and I cannot cease to be a doctor. But it is essential to the physician's art that he should not discover diseases where none exists. I will therefore not make the assertion that Western man, and the white man in particular, is sick, or that the Western world is on the verge of collapse. I am in no way competent to pass such a judgment. 
	157 	Whenever you hear anyone talking about a cultural or even 
about a human problem, you should never forget to inquire who the speaker really is. The more general the problem, the more he will smuggle his own, most personal psychology into the account he gives of it. This can, without a doubt, lead to intolerable distortions and false conclusions which may have very serious consequences. On the other hand, the very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee that the speaker has really experienced it, and perhaps gained something from his sufferings. He will then reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us a truth. But if he projects his own psychology into the problem, he falsifies it by his personal bias, and on the pretence of presenting it objectively so distorts it that no truth emerges but merely a deceptive fiction. 
	158 	It is of course only from my own experience with other per- 
sons and with myself that I draw my knowledge of the spiritual problem of modern man. I know something of the intimate psychic life of many hundreds of educated persons, both sick and healthy, coming from every quarter of the civilized, white world; and upon this experience I base my statements. No doubt I can draw only a one-sided picture, for everything I have observed lies in the psyche-it is all inside. I must add at once that this is a remarkable fact in itself, for the psyche is not always and everyw"here to be found on the inside. There are peoples and epochs where it is found outside) because they were wholly unpsychological. As examples we may choose any of the ancient civilizations, but especially that of Egypt with its monumental objectivity and its naIve confession of sins that have not been committed. We can no more feel psychic problems lurking 
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THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN 
behind the Apis tombs of Saqqara and the PyramIds than we can behind the music of Bach. 
	159 	Whenever there exists some external form, be It an ideal or 
a ritual, by which all the yearnings and hopes of the soul are adequately expressed-as for instance in a living religion-then we may say that the psyche is outside and that there is no psychic problem, just as there is then no unconscious in our sense of the word. In consonance with this truth, the discovery of psychology falls entirely within the last decades, although long before that man was introspective and intelligent enough to recognize the facts that are the subject-matter of psychology. It was the same with technical knowledge. The Romans were familiar with all the mechanical principles and physical facts which would have enabled them to construct a steam engine, but all that came of it was the toy made by Hero of Alexandria. The reason for this is that there was no compelling necessity to go further. This need arose only with the enormous division of labour and the growth of specialization in the nineteenth century. So also a spiritual need has produced in our time the "discovery" of psychology. The psychic facts still existed earlier, of course, but they did not attract attention-no one noticed them. People got along without them. But today we can no longer get along unless we pay attention to the psyche. 
	160 	It was men of the medical profession who were the first to 
learn this truth. For the priest, the psyche can only be something that needs fitting into a recognized form or system of belief in order to ensure its undisturbed functioning. So long as this system gives true expression to life, psychology can be nothing but a technical adjuvant to healthy living, and the psyche cannot be regarded as a factor sui generis. While man still lives as a herd-animal he has no psyche of his own, nor does he need any, except the usual belief in the immortality of the soul. But as soon as he has outgrown whatever local form of religion he was born to-as soon as this religion can no longer embrace his life in all its fullness-then the psyche becomes a factor in its own right which cannot be dealt with by the customary measures. It is for this reason that we today have a psychology founded on experience, and not upon articles of faith or the postulates of any philosophical system. The very fact that We have such a psychology is to me symptomatic of a profound 
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convulsion of the collective psyche. For the collective psyche shows the same pattern of change as the psyche of the individual. So long as all goes well and all our psychic energies find an outlet in adequate and well-regulated ways, we are disturbed by nothing from within. No uncertainty or doubt besets us, and we cannot be divided against ourselves. But no sooner are one or two channels of psychic activity blocked up than phenomena of obstruction appear. The stream tries to flow back against the current, the inner man wants something different from the outer man, and we are at war with ourselves. Only then, in this situation of distress, do we discover the psyche as something which thwarts our will, which is strange and even hostile to us, and which is incompatible with our conscious standpoint. Freud's psychoanalytic endeavours show this process in the clearest way. The very first thing he discovered was the existence of sexually perverse and criminal fantasies which at their face value are wholly incompatible with the conscious outlook of civilized man. A person who adopted the standpoint of these fantasies would be nothing less than a rebel, a criminal, or a madman. 
	161 	We cannot suppose that the unconscious or hinterland of 
man's mind has developed this aspect only in recent times. Probably it was always there, in every culture. And although every culture had its destructive opponent, a Herostratus who burned down its temples, no culture before ours was ever forced to take these psychic undercurrents in deadly earnest. The psyche was merely part of a metaphysical system of some sort. But the conscious, modern man can no longer refrain from acknowledging the might of the psyche, despite the most strenuous and dogged efforts at self-defence. This distinguishes our time from all others. We can no longer deny that the dark stirrings of the unconscious are active powers, that psychic forces exist which, for the present at least, cannot be fitted into our rational world order. We have even elevated them into a science-one more proof of how seriously we take them. Previous centuries could throw them aside unnoticed; for us they are a shirt of Nessus which we cannot strip off. 
	162 	The revolution in our conscious outlook, brought about by 
the catastrophic results of the World War, shows itself in our inner life by the shattering of our faith in ourselves and our 80 

THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN 
own worth. We used to regard foreigners as political and moral reprobates, but the modern man is forced to recognize that he is politically and morally just like anyone else. Whereas formerly I believed it was my bounden duty to call others to order, I must now admit that I need calling to order myself, and that I would do better to set my own house to rights first. I admit this the more readily because I realize only too well that my faith in the rational organization of the world-that old dream of the millennium when peace and harmony reign-has grown pale. Modern man's scepticism in this respect has chilled his enthusiasm for politics and world-reform; more than that, it is the worst possible basis for a smooth flow of psychic energies into the outer world, just as doubt concerning the morality of a friend is bound to prejudice the relationship and hamper its development. Through his scepticism modern man is thrown back on himself; his energies flow towards their source, and the collision washes to the surface those psychic contents which are at all times there, but lie hidden in the silt so long as the stream flows smoothly in its course. How totally different did the world appear to medieval man! For him the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe, circled by a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness; and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. That age lies as far behind as childhood, when one's own father was unquestionably the handsomest and strongest man on earth. 
	163 	Modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his 
medieval brother, and set up in their place the ideals of material security, general welfare and humanitarianism. But anyone who has still managed to preserve these ideals unshaken must have been injected with a more than ordinary dose of optimism. Even security has gone by the board, for modern man has begun to see that every step forward in material "progress" steadily increases the threat of a still more stupendous catastrophe. The imagination shrinks in terror from such a picture. What are we to think when the great cities today are 
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169 
167 
CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
perfecting defence measures against gas attacks, and even practise them in dress rehearsals? It can only mean that these attacks have already been planned and provided for, again on the principle "in time of peace prepare for war." Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use. It is well known that fire-arms go off of themselves if only enough of them are together. 
	164 	An intimation of the terrible law that governs blind con- 
tingency, which Heraclitus called the rule of enantiodromia (a running towards the opposite), now steals upon modern man through the by-ways of his mind, chilling him with fear and paralysing his faith in the lasting effectiveness of social and political measures in the face of these monstrous forces. If he turns away from the terrifying prospect of a blind world in which building and destroying successively tip the scales, and then gazes into the recesses of his own mind, he will discover a chaos and a darkness there which everyone would gladly ignore. Science has destroyed even this last refuge; what was once a sheltering haven has become a cesspool. 
	165 	And yet it is almost a relief to come upon so much evil in 
the depths of our own psyche. Here at least, we think, is the root of all the evil in mankind. Even though we are shocked and disillusioned at first, we still feel, just because these things are part of our psyche, that we have them more or less in hand and can correct them or at any rate effectively suppress them. We like to assume that, if we succeeded in this, we should at least have rooted out some fraction of the evil in the world. Given a widespread knowledge of the unconscious, everyone could see when a statesman was being led astray by his own bad motives. The very newspapers would pull him up: "Please have yourself analysed; you are suffering from a repressed fathercomplex." 
	166 	I have purposely chosen this grotesque example to show to 
what absurdities we are led by the illusion that because something is psychic it is under our control. It is, however, true that much of the evil in the world comes from the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious, as it is also true that with increasing insight we can combat this evil at its source in our- 
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THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN 
selves, in the same way that science enables us to deal effectively with injuries inflicted from without. 
The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes. Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness. 
The psychological interest of the present time is an indica- 
tion that modem man expects something from the psyche which the outer world has not given him: doubtless something which our religion ought to contain, but no longer does contain, at least for modern man. For him the various forms of religion no longer appear to come from within, from the psyche; they seem more like items from the inventory of the outside world. No spirit not of this world vouchsafes him inner revelation; instead, he tries on a variety of religions and beliefs as if they were 
Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes. 
Yet he is somehow fascinated by the almost pathological mani- 
festations from the hinterland of the psyche, difficult though it is to explain how something which all previous ages have rejected should suddenly become interesting. That there is a general interest in these matters cannot be denied, however much it offends against good taste. I am not thinking merely of the interest taken in psychology as a science, or of the still narrower interest in the psychoanalysis of Freud, but of the widespread and ever-growing interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena, including spiritualism, astrology, Theosophy, parapsychology, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of our time have, in fact, a. deep affinity.with Gnosticism. There is even an "tglise gnostIque de la France," and I know of two schools in Germany which openly declare themselves Gnostic. The most impressive m.ovement numerically is undoubtedly Theosophy, together ':l~h its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure GnostICIsm in Hindu dress. Compared with them the interest in scientific psychology is negligible. What is striking about these 
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Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively on the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings penetrate into the dark side of life, as is clearly shown by the refurbished European version of Kundalini-yoga. The same is true of parapsychology, as everyone acquainted with this subject will agree. 
	170 	The passionate interest in these movements undoubtedly 
arises from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete religious forms. For this reason such movements have a genuinely religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific. It changes nothing when Rudolf Steiner calls his Anthroposophy "spiritual science," or when Mrs. Eddy invents a "Christian Science." These attempts at concealment merely show that religion has grown suspect-almost as suspect as politics and world-reform. 
	171 	I do not believe that I am going too far when I say that 
modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns to the psyche with very great expectations, and does so without reference to any traditional creed but rather with a view to Gnostic experience. The fact that all the movements I have mentioned give themselves a scientific veneer is not just a grotesque caricature or a masquerade, but a positive sign that they are actually pursuing "science," i.e., knowledge) instead of faith) which is the essence of the Western forms of religion. Modern man abhors faith and the religions based upon it. He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know-to experience for himself. 
	172 	The age of discovery has only just come to an end in our 
day, when no part of the earth remains unexplored; it began when men would no longer believe that the Hyperboreans were one-footed monsters, or something of that kind, but wanted to find out and see with their own eyes what existed beyond the boundaries of the known world. Our age is apparently setting out to discover what exists in the psyche beyond consciousness. The question asked in every spiritualistic circle is: What happens after the medium has lost consciousness? Every Theosophist asks: What shall I experience at the higher levels of consciousness? The question which every astrologer asks is: 
What are the operative forces that determine my fate despite 84 

THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN 
my conscious intention? And every psychoanalyst wants to know: What are the unconscious drives behind the neurosis? 
	173 	Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself. It wants 
original experience and not assumptions, though it is willing to make use of all the existing assumptions as a means to this end, including those of the recognized religions and the authentic sciences. The European of yesterday will feel a slight shudder run down his spine when he gazes more deeply into these delvings. Not only does he consider the subject of this so-called research obscure and shuddersome, but even the methods employed seem to him a shocking misuse of man's finest intellectual attainments. What is the professional astronomer to say when he is told that at least a thousand times more horoscopes are cast today than were cast three hundred years ago? What will the educator and advocate of philosophical enlightenment say about the fact that the world has not grown poorer by a single superstition since the days of antiquity? Freud himself, the founder of psychoanalysis, has taken the greatest pains to throw as glaring a light as possible on the dirt and darkness and evil of the psychic background, and to interpret it in such a way as to make us lose all desire to look for anything behind it except refuse and smut. He did not succeed, and his attempt at deterrence has even brought about the exact opposite-an admiration for all this filth. Such a perverse phenomenon would normally be inexplicable were it not that even the scatologists are drawn by the secret fascination of the psyche. 
	174 	There can be no doubt that from the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century-ever since the time of the French Revolutionthe psyche has moved more and more into the foreground of T?an's interest, and with a steadily increasing power of attractIon. The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre ~)ame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great signifIcance for the Western world-rather like the hewing down of Wotan's oak by Christian missionaries. On both occasions no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down. 
	175 		I' 	. I 
		. 	t IS certam y more than an amusing freak of history that 
Just at the time of the Revolution a Frenchman, Anquetil du P~rron, should be living in India and, at the beginning of the nIneteenth century, brought back with him a translation of the Oupnek'hat) a collection of fifty Upanishads, which gave the 
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West its first deep insight into the baffling mind of the East. To the historian this is a mere coincidence independent of the historical nexw; of cause and effect. My medical bias prevents me from seeing it simply as an accident. Everything happened in accordance with a psychological law which is unfailingly valid in personal affairs. 1£ anything of importance is devalued in our conscious life, and perishes-so runs the law-there arises a compensation in the unconscious. We may see in this an analogy to the conservation of energy in the physical world, for our psychic processes also have a quantitative, energic aspect. No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity. This is a fundamental rule which is repeatedly verified in the daily practice of the psychotherapist and never fails. The doctor in me refuses point blank to consider the life of a people as something that does not conform to psychological law. For him the psyche of a people is only a somewhat more complex structure than the psyche of an individual. Moreover, has not a poet spoken of the "nations of his soul"? And quite correctly, it seems to me, for in one of its aspects the psyche is not individual, but is derived from the nation, from the collectivity, from humanity even. In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single "greatest man," the homo maximusJ to quote Swedenborg. 
	176 	And so we can draw a parallel: just as in me, a single indi- 
vidual, the darkness calls forth a helpful light, so it does in the psychic life of a people. In the crowds that poured into N otre Dame, bent on destruction, dark and nameless forces were at work that swept the individual off his feet; these forces worked also upon Anquetil du Perron and provoked an answer which has come down in history and speaks to us through the mouths of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For he brought the Eastern mind to the West, and its influence upon us we cannot as yet measure. Let us beware of underestimating itl So far, indeed, there is little of it to be seen on the intellectual surface: a handful of orientalists, one or two Buddhist enthusiasts, a few sombre celebrities like Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant with her Krishnamurti. These manifestations are like tiny scattered islands in the ocean of mankind; in reality they are the peaks of submarine mountain-ranges. The cultural Philis- 
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- 
tines believed until recently that astrology had been disposed 
of long since and was something that could safely be laughed at. But today, rising out of the social deeps, it knocks at the doors of the universities from which it was banished some three hundred years ago. The same is true of Eastern ideas; they take root in the lower levels and slowly grow to the surface. Where did the five or six million Swiss francs for the Anthroposophist temple at Dornach come from? Certainly not from one individual. Unfortunately there are no statistics to tell us the exact number of avowed Theosophists today, not to mention the unavowed. But we can be sure there are several millions of them. To this number we must add a few million Spiritualists of Christian or Theosophist leanings. 
	177 	Great innovations never come from above; they come invari- 
ably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward, but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything has become relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, with democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty. And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche; it is the much-derided, silent folk of the land, who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. Looked at from above, they often present a dreary or laughable spectacle; yet they are as impressively simple as those Galileans who were once called blessed. Is it not touching to see the offscourings of man's psyche gathered together in compendia a foot thick? We find the merest babblings, the most absurd actions, the wildest fantasies recorded with scrupulous care in the volumes of A nthropoPhyteia)4 while men like Havelock Ellis and Freud have dealt with like matters in serious treatises which have been accorded all scientific honours. Their rea?ing public is scattered over the breadth of the civilized, whIte world. How are we to explain this zeal, this almost fanatical worship of everything unsavoury? It is because these 
4 [See bibliography.] 
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things are psychological-they are of the substance of the psyche and therefore as precious as fragments of manuscript salvaged from ancient middens. Even the secret and noisome things of the psyche are valuable to modern man because they serve his purpose. But what purpose? 
	178 	Freud prefixed to his Interpretation of Dreams the motto: 
Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo-"lf I cannot bend the gods on high, I will at least set Acheron in uproar." 
But to what purpose? 
	179 	The gods whom we are called upon to dethrone are the 
idolized values of our conscious world. Nothing, as we know, discredited the ancient gods so much as their love-scandals, and now history is repeating itself. People are laying bare the dubious foundations of our belauded virtues and incomparable ideals, and are calling out to us in triumph: "There are your man-made gods, mere snares and delusions tainted with human baseness-whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness." We recognize a familiar strain, and the Gospel words which we failed to digest at Confirmation come to life again .. 
	180 	I am deeply convinced that these are not just vague an· 
alogies. There are too many persons to whom Freudian psychology is dearer than the Gospels, and to whom Bolshevism means more than civic virtue. And yet they are all our brothers, and in each of us there is at least one voice which seconds them, for in the end there is one psyche which embraces us all. 
	181 	The unexpected result of this development is that an uglier 
face is put upon the world. It becomes so ugly that no one can love it any longer; we cannot even love ourselves, and in the end there is nothing in the outer world to draw us away from the reality of the life within. Here, no doubt, we have the true significance of this whole development. After all, what does Theosophy, with its doctrines of karma and reincarnation, seek to teach except that this world of appearance is but a temporary health-resort for the morally unperfected? It depreciates the intrinsic value of the present-day world no less radically than does the modern outlook, but with the help of a different technique; it does not vilify our world, but grants it only a relative meaning in that it promises other and higher worlds. The result 
in either case is the same. 
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	182 	I admit that all these ideas are extremely unacademic, the 
truth being that they touch modern man on the side where he is least conscious. Is it again a mere coincidence that modern thought has had to come to terms with Einstein's relativity theory and with nuclear theories which lead us away from determinism and border on the inconceivable? Even physics is volatilizing our material world. It is no wonder, then, in my opinion, if modern man falls back on the reality of psychic life and expects from it that certainty which the world denies him. 
	183 	Spiritually the Western world is in a precarious situation, 
and the danger is greater the more we blind ourselves to the merciless truth with illusions about our beauty of soul. Western man lives in a thick cloud of incense which he burns to himself so that his own countenance may be veiled from him in the smoke. But howdo we strike men of another colour? What do China and India think of us? What feelings do we arouse in the black man? And what about all those whom we rob of their lands and exterminate with rum and venereal disease? 
	184 	I have an American Indian friend who is a Pueblo chieftain. 
Once when we were talking confidentially about the white man, he said to me: "We don't understand the whites. They are always wanting something, always restless, always looking for something. What is it? We don't know. 'Ve can't understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy." 
	185 	My friend had recognized, without being able to name it, 
the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land, even those that concern him not at all. And he had also noted that megalomania of ours which leads us to suppose, among other things, that Christianity is the only truth and the White Christ the only redeemer. After setting the whole East in turmoil with our science and technology, and exacting tribute from it, we send our missionaries even to China. The comedy of Christianity in Africa is really pitiful. There the stamping 0.ut of polygamy, no doubt highly pleasing to God, has given nse to prostitution on such a scale that in Uganda alone twenty ~housand pounds are spent annually on preventives of venereal Infection: And the good European pays his missionaries for these edifying achievements! Need we also mention the story of suffering in Polynesia and the blessings of the opium trade? 
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That is how the European looks when he is extricated from the cloud of his own moral incense. No wonder that unearthing the psyche is like undertaking a full-scale drainage operation. Only a great idealist like Freud could devote a lifetime to such unclean work. It was not he who caused the bad smell, but all of us-we who think ourselves so clean and decent from sheer ignorance and the grossest self-deception. Thus our psychology, the acquaintance with our own souls, begins in every respect from the most repulsive end, that is to say with all those things which we do not wish to see. 
But if the psyche consisted only of evil and worthless things, no power on earth could induce the normal man to find it attractive. That is why people who see in Theosophy nothing but lamentable intellectual superficiality, and in Freudian psychology nothing but sensationalism, prophesy an early and inglorious end to these movements. They overlook the fact that such movements derive their force from the fascination of the psyche, and that it will express itself in these forms until they are replaced by something better. They are transitional or embryonic stages from which new and riper forms will emerge. 
We have not yet realized that Western Theosophy is an amateurish, indeed barbarous imitation of the East. We are just beginning to take up astrology again, which to the Oriental is his daily bread. Our studies of sexual life, originating in Vienna and England, are matched or surpassed by Hindu teachings on this subject. Oriental texts ten centuries old introduce us to philosophical relativism, while the idea of indeterminacy, newly broached in the West, is the very basis of Chinese science. As to our discoveries in psychology, Richard Wilhelm has shown me that certain complicated psychic processes are recognizably described in ancient Chinese texts. Psychoanalysis itself and the lines of thought to which it gives rise-a development which we consider specifically Western-are only a beginner's attempt compared with what is an immemorial art in the East. It may not perhaps be known that parallels between psychoanalysis and yoga have already been drawn by Oscar Schmitz.5 
Another thing we have not realized is that while we are turn- 
5 [Psychoanalyse und Yoga.] 
go 

THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN 
-- 
ing the material world of the East upside down with our tech- 
nical proficiency, the East with its superior psychic proficiency is throwing our spiritual world into confusion. We have never yet hit upon the thought that while we are overpowering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold on us from within. Such an idea strikes us as almost insane, because we have eyes only for obvious causal connections and fail to see that we must lay the blame for the confusion of our intellectual middle class at the doors of Max Muller, Oldenberg, Deussen, Wilhelm, and others like them. What does the example of the Roman Empire teach us? After the conquest of Asia Minor, Rome became Asiatic; Europe was infected by Asia and remains so today. Out of Cilicia came the Mithraic cult, the religion of the Roman legions, and it spread from Egypt to fog-bound Britain. Need I point out the Asiatic origin of Christianity? 
	190 	The Theosophists have an amusing idea that certain Mahat- 
mas, seated somewhere in the Himalayas or Tibet, inspire and direct every mind in the world. So strong, in fact, can be the influence of the Eastern belief in magic that Europeans of sound mind have assured me that every good thing I say is unwittingly inspired in me by the Mahatmas, my own inspirations being of no account whatever. This myth of the Mahatmas, widely circulated in the West and firmly believed, far from being nonsense, is-like every myth-an important psychological truth. It seems to be quite true that the East is at the bottom of the spiritual change we are passing through today. Only, this East is not a Tibetan monastery full of Mahatmas, but lies essentially within us. It is our own psyche, constantly at work creating new spiritual forms and spiritual forces which may help us to subdue the boundless lust for prey of Aryan man. We shall perhaps come to know something of that narrowing of horizons which has grown in the East into a dubious quietism, and also something of that stability which human existence acquires when the claims of the spirit become as imperative as the necessities of social life. Yet in this age of Americanization we are still far from anything of the sort; it seems to me that w~ are only at the threshold of a new spiritual epoch. I do not WIsh to pass myself off as a prophet, but one can hardly attempt to sketch the spiritual problem of modern man without mentioning the longing for rest in a period of unrest, the longing 
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for security in an age of insecurity. It is from need and distress that new forms of existence arise, and not from idealistic requirements or mere wishes. 
	191 	To me the crux of the spiritual problem today is to be found 
in the fascination which the psyche holds for modern man. If we are pessimists, we shall call it a sign of decadence; if we are optimistically inclined, we shall see in it the promise of a farreaching spiritual change in the Western world. At all events, it is a significant phenomenon. It is the more noteworthy because it is rooted in the deeper social strata, and the more important because it touches those irrational and-as history shows -incalculable psychic forces which transform the life of peoples and civilizations in ways that are unforeseen and unforeseeable. These are the forces, still invisible to many persons today, which are at the bottom of the present "psychological" interest. The fascination of the psyche is not by any means a morbid perversity; it is an attraction so strong that it does not shrink even from what it finds repellent. 
	192 	Along the great highways of the world everything seems deso- 
late and outworn. Instinctively modern man leaves the trodden paths to explore the by-ways and lanes, just as the man of the Greco-Roman world cast off his defunct Olympian gods and turned to the mystery cults of Asia. Our instinct turns outward, and appropriates Eastern theosophy and magic; but it also turns inward, and leads us to contemplate the dark background of the psyche. It does this with the same scepticism and the same ruthlessness which impelled the Buddha to sweep aside his two million gods that he might attain the original experience which alone is convincing. 
	193 	And now we must ask a final question. Is what I have said 
of modern man really true, or is it perhaps an illusion? There can be no doubt whatever that to many millions of Westerners the facts I have adduced are wholly irrelevant and fortuitous, and regrettable aberrations to a large number of educated persons. But-did a cultivated Roman think any differently when he saw Christianity spreading among the lower classes? Today the God of the West is still a living person for vast numbers of people, just as Allah is beyond the Mediterranean, and the one believer holds the other an inferior heretic, to be pitied and tolerated failing all else. To make matters worse, the en- 
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- 
lightened European is of the opinion that religion and such 
things are good enough for the masses and for women, but of little consequence compared with immediate economic and political questions. 
	194 	So I am refuted all along the line, like a man who predicts 
a thunderstorm when there is not a cloud in the sky. Perhaps it is a storm below the horizon, and perhaps it will never reach us. But what is significant in psychic life always lies below the horizon of consciousness, and when we speak of the spiritual problem of modern man we are speaking of things that are barely visible-of the most intimate and fragile things, of flowers that open only in the night. In daylight everything is clear and tangible, but the night lasts as long as the day, and we live in the night-time also. There are people who have bad dreams which even spoil their days for them. And for many people the day's life is such a bad dream that they long for the night when the spirit awakes. I believe that there are nowadays a great many such people, and this is why I also maintain that the spiritual problem of modern man is much as I have presented it. 
	195 	I must plead guilty, however, to the charge of one-sidedness, 
for I have passed over in silence the spirit of the times, about which everyone has so much to say because it is so clearly apparent to us all. It shows itself in the ideal of internationalism and supernationalism, embodied in the League of Nations and the like; we see it also in sport and, significantly, in cinema and jazz. These are characteristic symptoms of our time, which has extended the humanistic ideal even to the body. Sport puts an exceptional valuation on the body, and this tendency is emphasized still further in modern dancing. The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age. It is not difficult to see how these symptoms link up with our psychological situation. The fascination of the psyche brings about a new self-appraisal, a reassessment of our fundamental human nature. "\le can hardly be surprised if this leads to a rediscovery of the body after its long subjection to the spirit-we are even tempted to say that t?e flesh is getting its own back. When Keyserling sarcastically smgles out the chauffeur as the culture-hero of our time, he has struck, as he often does, close to the mark. The body lays claim 
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to equal recognition; it exerts the same fascination as the psyche. If we are still caught in the old idea of an antithesis between mind and matter, this state of affairs must seem like an unbearable contradiction. But if we can reconcile ourselves to the mysterious truth that the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit-the two being really one-then we can understand why the striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due, and why recognition of the body cannot tolerate a philosophy that denies it in the name of the spirit. These claims of physical and psychic life, incomparably stronger than they were in the past, may seem a sign of decadence, but they may also signify a rejuvenation, for as Holderlin says: 
Where danger is, Arises salvation also. 
	196 	And indeed we see, as the Western world strikes up a more 
rapid tempo-the American tempo-the exact opposite of quietism and world-negating resignation. An unprecedented tension arises between outside and inside, between objective and subjective reality. Perhaps it is a final race between aging Europe and young America; perhaps it is a healthier or a last desperate effort to escape the dark sway of natural law, and to wrest a yet greater and more heroic victory of waking consciousness over the sleep of the nations. This is a question only history can answer. 
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11 
THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT 
WOMAN IN EUROPE 
THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
THE STATE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY TODAY 

THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT 1 
	197 	It is, I assure you, with no light heart that I undertake the 
task of opening your discussion of the love problem of a student by reading a general paper on this subject. Such a discussion is an unusual one, and presents difficulties if taken in a spirit of seriousness and with a fitting sense of responsibility. 
	198 	Love is always a problem, whatever our age may be. In child- 
hood, the love of one's parents is a problem, and for the old man the problem is what he has made of his love. Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. We must, I think, understand love in this way if we are to do any sort of justice to the problems it involves. They are of immense scope and complexity, not confined to any particular province but covering every aspect of human life. Love may be an ethical, a social, a psychological, a philosophical, an aesthetic, a religious, a medical, a legal, or a physiological problem, to name only a few aspects of this many-sided phenomenon. This invasion of love into all the collective spheres of life is, however, only a minor difficulty in comparison with the fact that love is also an intensely individual problem. For it means that every general criterion and rule loses its validity, in exactly the same way that religious beliefs, although constantly codified in the course of history, are always, in essence, an individual experience which bows to no traditional rule. 
	199 	The very word "love" is itself an obstacle to our discussion. 
What, indeed, has not been called "love"! Beginning with the highest mystery of the Christian religion, we encounter, on the 
1. [A lecture to Zurich University students, probably in Dec., 1922. Originally published in English as "The Love Problem of the Student," trans. by C. F. and H. G. Baynes from the unpublished German ms., in Contributions to Analytical Psychology (London and New York, 1928). For the present trans. the Baynes version has been consulted.-EDITORS.] 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION
next-lower stages, the amor Dei of Origen, the am or intellectualis Dei of Spinoza, Plato's love of the Idea, and the Gottesminne of the mystics. Goethe's words introduce us to the human 
sphere of love: 
Let now the savage instincts sleep And all the violence they do; When human love stirs in the deep The love of God is stirring too. 
Here we find the love of one's neighbour, in the Christian sense as well as in the Buddhist sense of compassion, and the love of mankind as expressed in social service. Next there is love of one's country, and the love for ideal institutions such as the Church. Then comes parental love, above all mother-love, then filial love. When we come to conjugal love we leave the sphere of the spiritual and enter that intermediate realm between spirit and instinct. Here the pure flame of Eros sets fire to sexuality, and the ideal forms of love-love of parents, of country, of one's neighbour, etc.-are mingled with the lust for personal power and the desire to possess and to rule. This does not mean that all contact with instinct debases love. On the contrary, its beauty and truth and strength become the more perfect the more instinct it can absorb into itself. Only if instinct predominates does the animal come to the surface. Conjugal love can be of the kind of which Goethe says at the end of Faust: 
Spirit by attraction draws Elemental matter, 
Forges bonds no man can force And no angel shatter. 
Double natures single grown, Inwardly united, 
By Eternal Love alone Can it be divided. 
	201 	But it need not necessarily be such a love. It may recall 
Nietzsche's words: "Two animals have lighted on each other." The love of the lover is again different. Even though the sacrament of marriage be lacking, and the pledge of a life together, this love may be transfigured by the power of fate or by its own 
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THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT 
THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT
tragic nature. But as a rule instinct predominates, with its dark glow or its flickering fires. 
Even this has not brought us to the limits of love. By "love" we also mean the sexual act on all levels, from officially sanctioned, wedded cohabitation to the physiological need which drives a man to prostitutes and to the mere business they make or are forced to make of love. 
We also speak of "the love of boys," meaning homosexuality, which since classical times has lost its glamour as a social and educative institution, and now ekes out a miserable, terrorstricken existence as a so-called perversion and punishable offence, at least where men are concerned. In Anglo-Saxon countries it seems on the other hand that female homosexuality means rather more than Sapphic lyricism, since it somehow acts as a stimulus to the social and political organization of women, just as male homosexuality was an important factor in the rise of the Greek polis. 
Finally, the word "love" must be stretched still further to cover all sexual perversions. There is incestuous love, and a masturbatory self-love that goes by the name of narcissism. The word "love" includes every kind of morbid sexual abomination as well as every kind of greed that has ever degraded man to the level of a beast or a machine. 
Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of beginning a discussion about a matter or concept whose outlines are of the vaguest and whose extent is well-nigh illimitable. At least for the purposes of the present discussion, one would like to restrict the concept of love to the problem of how a young student should come to terms with sex. But this just cannot be done, because all the meanings of the word "love" which I have already mentioned enter actively into the love problem of a student. 
We can, however, agree to discuss the question of the way in which the average so-called normal person behaves under the conditions I have described. Disregarding the fact the "normal" person does not exist, we find, nevertheless, sufficient similarities even among individuals of the most varied types to warrant a discussion of the "average" problem. As always, the practical solution of the problem depends on two factors: the 
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