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to turn out rationalists, materialists, specialists, technicians and others of the kind who, unconscious of their origins, are precipitated abruptly into the present and contribute to the disorientation and fragmentation of society. By the same token, no psychotherapy can lead to satisfactory results if it confines itself to single aspects only. The temptation to do this is so great, and the danger of loss of instinct so threatening in the breathless tempo of modern civilization, that every expression of instinct must be watched very carefully, since it is part of the total picture and is essential for man's psychic balance. 
For these reasons the sexual aspect of the Ufos merits our attention, as it shows that a very powerful instinct like sexuality has its share in the structure of the phenomenon. It is probably no accident that in one of the dreams we have been discussing a feminine symbol appears, and in the other a masculine, in accordance with the reports of lens-shaped and cigar-shaped Ufos, for where one appears, we may also expect its partner. 
The vision is a symbol consisting not only of archetypal forms of thought but of instinctual elements as well, so that it can justly lay claim to be a "reality." It is not only "historical," but topical and dynamic. Hence it does not appeal only to man's conscious technological fantasies, or to his philosophical speculations, but strikes deep down into his "animal" nature. This is what we would expect a genuine symbol to do; it must affect and express the whole man. However unsatisfactory a sexual interpretation may be in this case, the contribution it makes should not be overlooked and must be given due consideration. 
In the same way the power instinct expresses itself in both dreams; the dreamer appears in a unique situation, she is singled out, indeed "chosen" like one whose countenance is burned by the divine fire. Both interpretations, so far as they claim to be exclusive, do away with the symbolic meaning of the dreams and eliminate the individual in favour of the instinctual manifestations. The feebleness of the individual in the face of the overwhelming power of instinct is once more established. For anyone who was not yet aware of this fact, such an interpretation would of course be novel and impressive. But our dreamer does not belong to the host of ingenues, and in her case it would be pointless to reduce the dream in this way. She is, on the contrary, one of those moderns who realize what the elim- 
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ination of the individual means. The paralysing feeling of nothingness and lostness is compensated by the dreams: she is the only one to withstand the panic and to recognize its cause. It is at her that the unearthly thing points, and on her it leaves the visible traces of its power. She is set apart as one of the elect. Such a gesture on the part of the unconscious naturally has a useful meaning only when feelings of inferiority and the senselessness of a merely functional existence threaten to stifle the personality. 
This case may serve as a paradigm for the widespread anxiety and insecurity of thoughtful people today, while at the same time revealing the compensating power of the unconscious. 
DREAM 3 
This dream is an excerpt from a longer dream which a 42year-old woman patient recorded about six years ago. At the time she had heard nothing of Flying Saucers and the like. She dreamt she was standing in a garden, when suddenly the humming of an engine became audible overhead. She sat down on the garden wall in order to see what was going on. A black metallic object appeared and circled over her: it was a huge flying sPider made of metal, with great dark eyes. It was round in shape, and was a new and unique aeroPlane. From the body of the spider there issued a solemn voice, loud and distinct; it uttered a prayer that was intended as an admonition and a warning to everybody, fj)r those on earth as well as for the occupants of the sPider. The gist of the prayer was: "Lead us downwards and keep us (safe) below ... Carry us up to the height!" Adjoining the garden was a large administrative building where international decisions were being taken. Flying incredibly low, the sPider passed along the windows of the building, for the obvious purpose of letting the voice influence the peoPle inside and point out the way to peace, which was the way to the inner, secret world. They were to take reconciling decisions. There were several other spectators in the garden. She felt somewhat embarrassed because she was not fully clothed. 
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COMMENTARY TO DREAM 3 
In the preceding part of the dream the dreamer's bed had stood close to the garden wall. In her dream, therefore, she had slept under the open sky and been exposed to the free influences of Nature, which means psychologically the impersonal, collective unconscious, for this forms the counterpart to our natural environment and is always projected upon it. The wall denotes a barrier separating the immediate world of the dreamer from a more distant one (administrative building). A round metallic object appears, described as a flying spider. This description fits the Ufos. As regards the designation "spider," we are reminded of the hypothesis that Ufos are a species of insect coming from another planet and possessing a shell or carapace that shines like metal. An analogy would be the metallic-looking, chitinous covering of our beetles. Each Ufo is supposed to be a single insect, not a swarm.1° In reading the numerous reports I must admit that I, too, was struck by the thought that the peculiar behaviour of the Ufos was reminiscent of certain insects. To the speculative mind there is nothing inherently impossible in the idea that under other conditions Nature could express her "knowledge" in quite other ways than those mentioned earlier; for instance, instead of light-producing insects she might evolve creatures capable of "anti-gravity." In any case our technological imagination often lags a long way behind Nature's. Everything in our experience is subject to the law of gravity with one great exception: the psyche, which, as we experience it, is weightlessness itself. The psychic "object" and gravity are, to the best of our knowledge, incommensurable. They seem to be different in principle. The psyche represents the only opposite of gravity known to us. It is "anti-gravity" in the truest sense of the word. In corroboration of this we could cite the parapsychological experience of levitation and other psychic phenomena, denied only by the ignorant, which relativize time and space. 
10 Sievers, Flying Saucers iiber Siidafrika, p. 157, mentions Gerald Heard's hypothesis that they are a species of bees from Mars (Is Another World Watching? The Riddle of the Flying Saucers). Harold T. Wilkins, in Flying Saucers on the Attack, mentions a report of a "rain of threads," supposed to come from unknown spiders. 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
Obviously the "flying spider" is based on an unconscious 
fantasy of this kind. In the Ufo literature, too, reference is made to flying spiders in an attempt to explain the alleged "rain of threads" in Oloron and Gaillac.11 Note that the dream cannot help making a concession to modern technological fantasies: it calls the spider a "new and unique aeroplane." 
	669 	The psychic nature of the spider is shown by the fact that it 
contains a "voice," evidently issuing from something like a human being. This curious phenomenon reminds one of similar occurrences in insane people, who can hear voices issuing from anything or anybody. "Voices," like visions, are autonomous manifestations of the senses caused by the activity of the unconscious. "Voices from the aether" also Occur in the Ufo literature.12 
	670 	Emphasis is laid on the eyes, which denote seeing and the 
intention to see. The intention is expressed by the voice, whose message is addressed both to the earth dwellers and to the "occupants of the spider." The association with "aeroplane" here gives rise to the illogical idea of a machine that transports passengers. The passengers are evidently thought of as quasi-human, for the message is meant for them as well as for human beings. We can therefore suppose that both are simply different 
aspects of man, e.g., the empirical man below on earth and the spiritual man in heaven. 
The cryptic message or "prayer" is spoken by a single voice, 
by a kind of prayer leader. He addresses himself to that which "leads" and "carries," and this must be the spider. We are therefore obliged to examine the symbol of the spider somewhat more closely. As we know, although this animal is quite harmless in our latitudes, it is for many people an object of horror and superstitious belief (araignee du matinJ grand chagrin)' araignee du soir) grand espoir).13 When someone is not quite right in the head, we say in German that he "spins" and "has cobwebs in the attic." Spiders, like all animals that are not warm-blooded or have no cerebrospinal nervous system, function in dreams as symbols of a profoundly alien psychic world. 11 Aime MicheI, The Truth about Flying Saucers. 
12 Wilkins, p. 138. 
13 The horror people feel for spiders has been vividly described by ]eremias Gott. helf in his story The Black Spider . 
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SO far as I can see, they express contents which, though active, are unable to reach consciousness; they have not yet entered the sphere of the cerebrospinal nervous system but are as though lodged in the deeper-lying sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. In this connection I remember the dream of a patient who had the greatest difficulty in conceiving the idea of the supraordinate totality of the psyche and felt the utmost resistance to it. He had picked up the idea from one of my books but, characteristically enough, was unable to distinguish between the ego and the self, and, because of his hereditary taint, was threatened with a pathological inflation. In this situation he dreamt that he was rummaging about in the attic of his house, looking for something. In one of the attic windows he discovered a beautiful cobweb, with a large garden-spider sitting in the centre. It was of a blue colour, and its body sparkled like a diamond. 
	672 	The dreamer was deeply impressed by this dream, and it was, 
in fact, an impressive commentary on his identification with the self-all the more dangerous in view of his heredity. In such cases there is a real weakness of the ego, which cannot therefore afford any suggestion of taking second place, as that would fatally emphasize its littleness and has to be avoided at all costs. Illusions, however, are inimical to life, because they are unhealthy and sooner or later trip you up. The dream therefore attempts a kind of corrective, which, like the Delphic oracle, turns out to be ambivalent. It says in effect: "What is troubling you in the head (attic) is, though you may not know it, a rare jewel. It is like an animal that is strange to you, forming symbolically the centre of many concentric circles, reminiscent of the centre of a large or small world, like the eye of God in medieval pictures of the universe." Confronted with this, a healthy mind would fight against identification with the centre, because of the danger of paranoiac God-likeness. Anyone who gets into this spider's net is wrapped round like a cocoon and robbed of his own life. He is isolated from his fellows, so that they can no longer reach him, nor he them. He lives in the loneliness of the world creator, who is everything and has nothing outside himself. If, on top of all this, you have had an insane father, there is the danger that you will begin to "spin" your- 
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self, and for this reason the spider has a sinister aspect that should not be overlooked. 
	673 	The round metallic spider of our dreamer probaPly has a 
similar meaning. It has obviously devoured a number of human beings already, or their souls, and might well be a danger to earth dwellers. That is why the prayer, which recognizes the spider as a "divine" being, requests it to lead the souls "downwards" and "keep them safe below," because they are not yet departed spirits but living earthly creatures. As such they are meant to fulfil their earthly existence with conviction and not allow themselves any spiritual inflation, otherwise they will end up in the belly of the spider. In other words, they should not set the ego in the highest place and make it the ultimate authority, but should ever be mindful of the fact that it is not sole master in its own house and is surrounded on all sides by the factor we call the unconscious. What this is in itself we do not know. We know only its paradoxical manifestations. It is our business to understand Nature, and it is no good getting impatient with her because she is so "complicated" and awkward. Not so very long ago there were medical authorities who did not "believe" in bacteria and consequently allowed twenty thousand young women to die of easily avoidable puerperal fever in Germany alone. The psychic catastrophes caused by the mental inertia of "experts" do not appear in any statistics, and from this it is concluded that they are non-existent. 
	674 	The exhortation to remain below on earth is immediately 
followed by the- paradoxical request: "Carry us up to the height!" One might think of the saying in Faust: "Then to the depths! I could as well say height: It's all the same," were it not that the dreamer has clearly separated the two processes by a hiatus. This shows that it is a sequence and not a coincidentia oppositorum. Evidently a moral process is envisaged, a katabasis and anabasis: the seven steps downwards and the seven steps upwards, the immersion in the krater followed by the ascent to the "heavenly generation" in the transformation mysteries.14 The Mass, too, begins with the "Confiteor ... quia peccavi nimis." Apparently one has to be "led" downwards, because it is not easy for people to descend from their heights and remain below. 
14 [Cf. "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass," pp. 210, 233, etc.-EDITORS.] 
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In the first place a loss of social prestige is feared, and in the second a loss of moral self-esteem when they have to admit their own darkness. Hence they avoid self-criticism to an amazing degree, preach to others, and know nothing of themselves. They are happy to possess no self-knowledge, because then nothing disturbs the rosy glow of illusions. "Below" means the bed-rock of reality, which despite all self-deceptions is there right enough. To get down to this and remain there seems to be a matter of pressing importance if it is assumed that people today are living above their proper level. An inference of such general scope is permitted by the dream, which shows the problem in terms of a human group and therefore characterizes it as a collective problem. Actually the dream has the whole of humanity in view, for the spider flies as near as possible to the windows of a building where "international decisions" are being taken. It tries to "influence" the meeting and point the way that leads to the "inner world," the way to self-knowledge. The dream expects that this will make peace possible. Accordingly the spider plays the role of a saviour who warns and brings a healing message. 
	675 	At the end the dreamer discovers that she is insufficiently 
clothed. This very common dream-motif usually indicates lack of adaptation or relative unconsciousness of the situation in which one finds oneself. This reminder of one's own fallibility and negligence is particularly appropriate at a time when other people are being enlightened, for in such cases there is always a lurking danger of inflation. 
	676 	The admonition to "remain below" has in our day given rise 
to theological apprehensions in various quarters. It is feared that this kind of psychology will result in a loosening of moral standards. Psychology, however, gives us a clearer knowledge not only of evil but also of good, and the danger of succumbing to the former is considerably less than when you remain unconscious of it. Nor is psychology always needed if you want to know evil. No one who goes through the world with open eyes can ignore it; moreover he is not so likely to fall into a pit as the blind man. Just as the investigation of the unconscious is suspected by theologians of Gnosticism, so an inquiry into the ethical problems it raises is accused of antinomianism and libertinism. No one in his right senses would suppose that, after a thorough confession of sin accompanied by repentance, he will 
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never sin again. It is a thousand to one that he will sin again the very next minute. Deeper psychological insight shows, in fact, that one cannot live at all without sinning "in thought, word, and deed." Only an exceedingly na'ive and unconscious person could imagine that he is in a position to avoid sin. Psychology can no longer afford childish illusions of this kind; it must ensue the truth and declare that unconsciousness is not only no excuse but is actually one of the most heinous sins. Human law may exempt it from punishment, but Nature avenges herself the more mercilessly, for it is nothing to her whether a man is conscious of his sin or not. We even learn from the parable of the unjust steward that the Lord praised his servant who kept a false account because he had "done wisely," not to speak of the (expurgated) passage at Luke 6, where Christ says to the defiler of the Sabbath: "Man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou art accursed, and a transgressor of the law." 
	677 	Increased knowledge of the unconscious brings a deeper ex- 
perience of life and greater consciousness, and therefore confronts us with apparently new situations that require ethical decision. These situations have, of course, always existed, but they were not clearly grasped, either intellectually or morally, and were often left in a not unintentional half light. In this way one provides oneself with an alibi and can get out of an ethical decision. But, with deeper self-knowledge, one is often confronted with the most difficult problems of all, namely conflicts of duty, which simply cannot be decided by any moral precepts, neither those of the decalogue nor of other authorities. This is where ethical decisions really begin, for the mere observance of a codified "Thou shalt not" is not in any sense an ethical decision, but merely an act of obedience and, in certain circumstances, a convenient loophole that has nothing to do with ethics. In my long life I have never encountered a situation that made a denial of ethical principles easier for me or raised the slightest doubt in this regard; on the contrary, the ethical problem was sharpened with increasing experience and insight, and the moral responsibility became more acute. It has become clear to me that, in contrast to the general view, unconsciousness is no excuse but is far rather a transgression in the literal sense of the word. Although there are, as mentioned above, allusions to. 
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this problem in the gospels, the Church has for understandable reasons not taken it up, but left the Gnostics to tackle it more seriously. As a result, Christians rely on the doctrine of the privatio boni and always think they know what is good and what is evil, thus substituting the moral code for the truly ethical decision, which is a free one. Morality consequently degenerates into legalistic behaviour, and the felix culpa remains stuck in the Garden of Eden. We are surprised at the decay of ethics in our century, and we contrast the standstill in this field with the progress of science and technology. But nobody is worried by the fact that a real ethos has disappeared behind a mass of moral precepts. An ethos, however, is a difficult thing that cannot be formulated and codified; it is one of those creative irrationalities upon which any true progress is based. It demands the whole man and not just a differentiated func- 
tion. 
	678 	The differentiated function undoubtedly depends on man, 
on his diligence, patience, perseverance, his striving for power, and his native gifts. With the aid of these things he gets on in the world and "develops." From this he has learnt that development and progress depend on man's own endeavours, his will and ability. But that is only one side of the picture. The other side shows man as he is and as he finds himself to be. Here he can alter nothing, because he is dependent on factors outside his control. Here he is not the doer, but a product that does not know how to change itself. He does not know how he came to be the unique individual he is, and he has only the scantiest knowledge of himself. Until recently he even thought that his psyche consisted of what he knew of himself and was a product of the cerebral cortex. The discovery of unconscious psychic processes more than fifty years ago is still far from being common knowledge and its implications are still not recognized. Modern man still does not realize that he is entirely dependent on the co-operation of the unconscious, which can actually cut short the very next sentence he proposes to speak. He is unaware that he is continuously sustained by something, while all the time he regards himself exclusively as the doer. He depends on and is sustained by an entity he does not know, but of which he has intimations that "occurred" to-or, as we can more fitly say, revealed themselves to-Iong-forgotten forbears in the grey 
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dawn of history. Whence did they come? Obviously from the unconscious processes, from that so-called unconscious which still precedes consciousness in every new human life, as the mother precedes the child. The unconscious depicts itself in dreams and visions, as it always did, holding before us images which, unlike the fragmented functions of consciousness, emphasize facts that relate to the unknown whole man, and only apparently to the function which interests us to the exclusion of all else. Although dreams usually speak the language of our particular specialism-canis panem somniat) piscator pisces-they refer to the whole, or at the very least to what man also is, namely the utterly dependent creature he finds himself to be. 
	679 	In his striving for freedom man feels an almost instinctive 
aversion to this kind of knowledge, for he fears, not without reason, its paralysing effect. He may admit that this dependence on unknown powers exists-no matter what they are called -but he turns away from them as speedily as possible, as from a threatening obstacle. So long as everything appears to go well, this attitude may even be an advantage; but things do not always turn out for the best, particularly today, when despite euphoria and optimism we feel a tremor running through the foundations of our world. Our dreamer is certainly not the only person to feel afraid. Accordingly the dream depicts a collective need and utters a collective warning that we should descend to earth and not rise up again unless the spider carries up those who have remained below. For when functionalism dominates consciousness, it is the unconscious that contains the compensatory symbol of wholeness. This is represented by the flying spider, which alone is capable of carrying up the one-sidedness and £ragmentariness of the conscious mind. There is no development upwards unless it is facilitated by the unconscious. The conscious will alone cannot compel this creative act, and in order to illustrate this the dream chooses the symbol of prayer. Since according to the Pauline view we do not rightly know what we should pray for, the prayer is no more than a "groaning in travail" (Rom. 8: 22) which expresses our impotence. This enjoins on us an attitude that compensates the superstitious belief in man's will and ability. At the same time the spider image denotes a regression of religious ideas to the theriomorphic symbol of supreme power, a reversion to the long forgotten stage 
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where a monkey or a hare personifies the redeemer. Today the Christian Lamb of God or the Dove of the Holy Ghost has, at most, the value of a metaphor. As against this it must be emphasized that in dream symbolism animals refer to instinctual processes which play a vital part in animal biology. It is these processes which determine and shape the life of an animal. For his everyday life man seems to need no instincts, especially when he is convinced of the sovereign power of his will. He ignores the meaning of instinct and devalues it to the point of atrophy, not seeing how much he endangers his very existence through loss of instinct. When therefore dreams emphasize instinct they are trying to fill a perilous gap in our adaptation to life. 
Deviations from instinct show themselves in the form of affects, which in dreams are likewise expressed by animals. Hence uncontrolled affects are rightly regarded as bestial or primitive and should be avoided. But we cannot do this without repressing them, that is, without a splitting of consciousness. In reality we can never escape their power. Somewhere or other they will continue to operate even though they cannot be found in consciousness. At worst they manifest themselves in a neurosis or in an unconscious "arrangement" of inexplicable mishaps. The saint, who seems exempt from these weaknesses, pays for his immunity with suffering and abnegation of the earthly man, without which of course he would not be a saint. The lives of holy men show that the two sides cancel out. None can escape the chain of suffering that leads to sickness, old age and death. We can and should, for the sake of our humanity, "control" our affects and keep them in check, but we should know that we have to pay dearly for it. The choice of currency in which we wish to pay the tribute is-some times-even left to us. 
Remaining down below and subordinating ourselves to a theriomorphic symbol, which seems very like an insult to our human dignity, means no more than that we should remain conscious of these simple truths and never forget that in point of anatomy and psychology the earthly man, for all his high flights, is first cousin to the anthropoids. Should it be granted to him, however, to develop into something higher without crippling his nature, he is reminded that this transformation is not his to command, for he is dependent on factors he cannot influence. He must content himself with a prayerful yearning and "groan- 
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ing," in the hope that something may carry him upward, since he is not likely to make a Success of the Munchausen experiment. Through this attitude he constellates helpful and at the same time dangerous powers in the unconscious; helpful if he understands them, dangerous if he misunderstands them. Whatever names he may give to these creative powers and potentialities within him, their actuality remains unchanged. No one can stop a religious-minded person from calling them gods or daemons, or simply "God," for we know from experience that they act just like that. If certain people use the word "matter" in this connection, believing that they have said something, we must remind them that they have merely replaced an X by a Y and are no further forward than before. The only certain thing is our profound ignorance, which cannot even know whether we have come nearer to the solution of the great riddle or not. Nothing can carry us beyond an "It seems as if" except the perilous leap of faith, which we must leave to those who are gifted or graced for it. Every real or apparent step forward depends on an experience of facts, the verification of which is, as we know, one of the most difficult tasks confronting the human mind. 
DREAM 4 
While I was engaged on this paper an acquaintance from abroad unexpectedly sent me a dream he had had on May 27, 1957· Our relationship was limited to one letter each everyone or two years. He was an amateur astrologer and was interested in the question of synchronicity. He knew nothing of my preoccupation with Ufos, nor did he connect his dream in any way with the theme that interested me. His sudden and unusual decision to send me the dream comes, rather, into the category of meaningful coincidences, which statistical prejudice dismisses as irrelevant. 
This is the dream: "It was late afternoon or early evening) the sun low on the horizon. The sky was cloudy) and there was a veil of cloud over the sun which did not) however) prevent one from seeing quite clearly his disk in outline behind the cloud. Under such circumstances the sun was white. Suddenly he took on an aspect of extraordinary pallor. The whole western horizon 
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became a dreadful pale white. And the pallor-pallor is the word that I want to stress-of the orb of day became a terrifying wanness. Then a second sun appeared in the west about the same distance above the horizon) only a little more to the north. But as we gazed intently at the sky-there were a great number of peoPle spread over a wide area watching the heavens as I was -the second sun took on the distinctive form of a sphere in contrast with the sun's disk) or apparent disk. Simultaneously with the setting of the sun and the advent of night the sPhere came speeding towards the earth. 
"With the coming of the night, the whole potential of the dream was changed. Whereas words like pallor and wanness exactly describe the vanishing life, strength or potential of the sun, the sky now assumed an aspect of strength and majesty, which insPired not fear but awe. I could not say that I saw any stars, but the night sky was of that kind when thin wreaths of cloud allow an occasional star to be seen. The night certainly spoke of majesty, power and beauty. 
"When the sphere approached the earth at high velocity, I thought at first that it was JuPiter in aberration from its proper orbit, but as the sPhere came nearer, I saw that, though large, it was much too small for JuPiter. 
"And it now became possible to discern the markings on its surface which were lines of longitude or like such, but were decorative and symbolic in character rather than geograPhical or mathematical. The beauty of the sPhere, a subdued grey or opaque white) against the night sky must be emphasized. When we became aware that the sPhere must certainly make a terrific impact upon the earth, we did, of course, feel fear, but it was fear in which awe was more predominant. It was a most aweinsPiring cosmic phenomenon. As we gazed, another and yet another sPhere emerged from the horizon and sped towards the earth. Each sPhere did in turn crash much as a bomb would crash) but at such a considerable distance that I, at least, could not make out the nature of the explosion or detonation or whatever it was. I think in one case, at least, I saw a flash. These sPheres, then, were falling at intervals all around, but all of them ... well beyond the point at which they might annihilate us. There appeared to be a danger of shrapnel .... 
"Then I must have gone indoors, for I found myself talking 
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to a girl seated in a wicker chair, with an open large-paged notebook on her laP) much engrossed in her work. We were goingthe rest of us-I think in a southwesterly direction) perhaps seeking safety, and I said to the girl had she not better come with us. The danger appeared to be great and we could hardly leave her alone there. She was quite definite in her rePly. No, she would remain where she was and go on with her work. It was equally dangerous everywhere and one Place was just as safe as another. I saw at once that she had reason and common-sense on her side. 
"The dream ends by my being confronted with another girl, or) quite possibly, the same very competent and self-possessed young lady that I had left sitting in a wicker chair absorbed in her work. This time she was rather bigger and more realistic) and I could see her face, or at least that she was addressing me fairly and squarely. And she said in extraordinarily distinct tones: 'J- S-, you will live till eleven eight.' Nothing could surpass the clarity with which these eight words were articulated. Her authoritative way of enunciating them seemed to imPly that I was to be censured for not supposing that I should live till eleven eight." 
DREAMER'S COMMENTARY 
This elaborate description was followed by the dreamer's comments, which can give us a number of hints as regards interpretation. As we should expect, he sees a climax in the sudden change of Qiluod at the beginning of the dream, when the deathly, frightening pallor and wanness of the sunset changes into the sombre majesty of the night, and fear to awe. This, he said, was connected with his present preoccupation with the political future of Europe. On the basis of his astrological speculations he feared the coming of a world war in 1960-66. Be had even felt impelled to write a letter to an eminent statesman expressing his fears. Afterwards he made the (not uncommon) discovery that his previously apprehensive and agitated mood suddenly changed into one of remarkable calm and even indifference, as though the whole affair no longer concerned him. 
All the same, he could not explain to himself why the initial terror should be superseded by such a solemn and, as it were, 
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holy mood. He felt certain, however, that it was a collective and not a personal matter, and he asked himself: "Are we to suppose that by hanging on too earnestly to the daylight of civilization we lose all potential, and that as we advance into what looks a fearful night there is more prospect of strength?" It is not very easy to fit the qualifying epithet "majesty" into such an interpretation. He himself related it to the fact that "the things that come from outer space are utterly beyond our control." "We might put it in theistic language by saying that it is utterly impossible to know the counsels of God and that in eternity the night is as significant as the day. Therefore our only possible chance is to accept the rhythm of eternity as night and day, and so the inexorable majesty of the night would become a source of strength." Evidently the dream underlines this characteristic defeatism by the cosmic interlude of a stellar bombardment to which mankind is helplessly exposed. 
	686 	The dream contains no trace of sexuality if, as the dreamer 
said, we disregard the meeting with the young lady. (As if every relationship to the opposite sex was always necessarily based on sexuality!) What disturbed him was the fact that the meeting took place at night. One can carry "sex-consciousness" too far, as this remark shows. The wicker chair is not exactly inviting in this respect, and for the dreamer himself it signified an excellent condition for concentrated mental work, as indicated also by the note-book. 
	687 	As the dreamer was an ardent student of astrology the com- 
bination of the numbers eleven and eight set him a special problem. He thought of XI. 8 as the month and day of his decease. Being an elderly man of more than three score years and ten he was thoroughly justified in such reflections. His astrological calculations led him to relegate this fatal November to the year 1963, the middle of the conjectural World War. But he added cautiously that he was by no means sure. 
	688 	The dream, he said, left behind a strange feeling of content- 
ment, and of thankfulness that such an experience had been "vouchsafed" him. It was, indeed, a "big" dream, for the like of which many a man has been thankful, even if he did not understand it correctly. 
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COMMENTARY TO DREAM 4 
	689 	The dream begins with a sunset, when the sun is hidden by 
clouds so that all one can see is a disk. This would emphasize the round form, a tendency confirmed by the appearance of a second disk, Jupiter, more round bodies in large numbers, "things from outer space." For these reasons the dream comes into the category of psychic Ufo phenomena. 
	69° 	The uncanny pallor of the sun is indicative of the fear that 
spreads over the daylight world in anticipation of catastrophic events to come. These events, much in contrast to his "daylight" views, are of unearthly origin: Jupiter, the father of the gods, seems to have left his orbit and is approaching the earth. We meet this motif in Schreber's Memoirs: the extraordinary happenings going on all round him compel God to "move nearer to the earth." The unconscious "interprets" the threat as a divine intervention, which manifests itself in the appearance of smaller replicas of the great Jupiter. The dreamer does not draw the obvious conclusion about Ufos and does not seem to have been influenced in his choice of symbols by any conscious concern with them. 
	691 	Although to all appearances a cosmic catastrophe is about to 
happen, the fear changes into a positive mood of a solemn, holy, and reverent kind, as is fitting for an epiphany. For the dreamer, however, the coming of the god signalizes extreme danger: the heavenly bodiesPexplode on the earth like huge bombs, thus bearing out his fear of a world war. Remarkably enough, they do not cause the expected earthquake, and the detonations seem to be of a strange and unusual nature. No destruction takes place in the vicinity of the dreamer; the hits are so far below the horizon that all he thinks he can see is a single flash. The collision with these planetoids is therefore infinitely less dangerous than it would be in reality. The main point here seems to be fear of the possibility of a third World War, and it is this that gives the scene its terrifying aspect. It is the dreamer's own interpretation, rather than the phenomenon itself, which causes him to be so agitated. Consequently the whole affair assumes a markedly psychological aspect. 
	692 	This is immediately borne out by the meeting with the 
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young lady, who keeps her composure, imperturbably goes on with her work, and prophesies the date of his death. She does this in so solemn and impressive a manner that he even feels it necessary to emphasize the number of the words she uses, namely eight. That this number is more than mere chance is proved by the supposed date of death-the 8th of November. This double emphasis on the eight is not without significance, for eight is a double quaternity and, as an individuation symbol in mandalas, plays almost as great a role as the quaternity itself.15 For lack of association material we shall suggest only a tentative interpretation of the number eleven with the help of the traditional symbolism. Ten is the perfect unfolding of unity, and the numbers one to ten have the significance of a completed cycle. 10 + 1 = 11 therefore denotes the beginning of a new cycle. Since dream interpretation follows the principle post hoc ergo propter hoc) eleven leads to eight, the ogdoad, a totality symbol, and hence to an actualization of wholeness, as already suggested by the appearance of Ufos. 
	693 	The young lady, who seems to be unknown to the dreamer, 
may be taken as a compensating anima figure. She represents a more complete aspect of the unconscious than the shadow, since she adds to the personality its feminine traits. As a rule she appears most clearly when the conscious mind is thoroughly acquainted with its shadow, and she exerts her greatest influence as a psychological factor when the feminine qualities of the personality are not yet integrated. If these opposites are not united, wholeness is not established, and the self as their symbol is still unconscious. But when the self is constellated it appears in projection, though its true nature is hidden by the anima, who at most alludes to it, as in this dream: the anima, with her calmness and certainty, counters the agitations of the dreamer's ego consciousness, and by mentioning the number eight points to the totality, the self, which is present in the Ufo projection. 
	694 	The intuition of the enormous importance of the self as the 
organizer of the personality, and also the importance of the collective dominants or archetypes, which as so-called metaphysical principles determine the orientation of consciousness, is responsible for the solemn mood prevailing at the beginning of the 
15 Cf. the Cabiri scene in Faust; Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 148ff. 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
dream. It is a mood in keeping with the coming epiphany, though it is feared that this will unleash a world war or a cosmic catastrophe. The anima, however, seems to know better. Anyway the expected destruction remains invisible, there being no real cause for alarm in the dreamer's vicinity except his own subjective panic. The anima ignores his fear of a catastrophe and alludes instead to his own death, which we can well say is the real source of his fear. 
	695 	Very often the nearness of death forcibly brings about a per- 
fection that no effort of will and no good intentions could achieve. He is the great perfector, drawing his inexorable line under the balance-sheet of human life. In him alone is wholeness -one way or another-attained. Death is the end of the empirical man and the goal of the spiritual man, as the perspicacious Heraclitus says: "It is to Hades that they rage and celebrate their feasts." Everything that is not yet where it ought to be, that has not yet gone where it ought to have gone, fears the end, the final reckoning. We avoid as long as possible making ourselves conscious of those things which wholeness still lacks, thus preventing ourselves from becoming conscious of the self and preparing for death. The self then remains in projection. In our dream it appears as Jupiter, which in approaching the earth changes into a multitude of smaller heavenly bodies, into numberless "selves" or individual souls, and vanishes in the earth, i.e., is integrated with our world. This hints, mythologically, at an incarnation, but psychologically it is the manifestation of an unconscious process in the sphere of consciousness. 
	696 	Speaking in the language of the dream, I would advise the 
dreamer to consider the universal fear of catastrophe in the light of his own death. In this connection it is significant that the conjectured year of his death falls in the middle of the critical period 1960-66. The end of the world would therefore be his own death and hence, primarily, a personal catastrophe and a subjective end. But as the symbolism of the dream unmistakably portrays a collective situation, I think it would be better to generalize the subjective aspect of the Ufo phenomenon and assume that a collective but unacknowledged fear of death is being projected on the Ufos. After the initial optimistic speculations about the visitors from space, people have recently begun to 
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CIVILlZA nON IN TRANSITION 
discuss their possible dangerousness and the incalculable consequences of an invasion of the earth. Grounds for an unusually intense fear of death are nowadays not far to seek: they are obvious enough, the more so as all life that is senselessly wasted and misdirected means death too. This may account for the unnatural intensification of the fear of death in our time, when life has lost its deeper meaning for so many people, forcing them to exchange the life-preserving rhythm of the aeons for the dread ticking of the clock. One would therefore wish many people the compensating attitude of the anima in our dream, and would recommend them to choose a motto like that of Hans Hopfer, a native of Basel and pupil of Holbein: "Death is the last line of things. I yield to none." 16 
DREAM 5 
	697 	This dream comes from a woman with an academic educa- 
tion. It was dreamt several years ago without reference to Ufos: ((Two women were standing on the edge of the world) seeking. The older was taller but lame. The younger was shorter and had her arm under that of the taller) as if supporting her. The older one looked out with courage (I identified her in some way with X) and the younger stood beside her with strength but feared to look. Her head was bowed (I identified myself with this second figure). A bove was the crescent moon and the morning star. To the right the rising sun. An elliptical) silvery object came flying from the right. It was peoPled around its rim with figures which I think were men) cloaked figures all silvery white. The women were awed and trembled in that unearthly) cosrr.dc space) a position untenable except at the moment of vision." 
	698 	After this extremely impressive dream the dreamer immedi- 
ately seized a paint brush in order to fix the vision, as shown in PI. 1. The dream describes a typical Ufo phenomenon which, like Dream 1, contains the motif of "manning," i.e., the presence of human beings. It obviously represents a borderline situation, as the expression "on the edge of the world" shows. Out beyond is cosmic space with its planets and suns; or the beyond may be the land of the dead or the unconscious. The first possibility suggests a space-ship, the technical achievement of more 
16 "Der Tod ist die letzt Lini der Ding. leh weich kaim." 
368 

699 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
highly developed planetary beings; the second, angels of some kind or departed spirits, who come to earth in order to fetch a soul. This would refer to X, who was already in need of "support," as she was ill. Her health really did give grounds for anxiety, and in fact she died about two years after the dream. Accordingly the dreamer took it as a premonition. The third possibility, that the beyond is the unconscious, points to a personification of the latter, namely the animus in his characteristic plurality; the festive white robes of the crew suggest the idea of a marital union of opposites. This symbolism, as we know, also applies to death as a final realization of wholeness. The dreamer's view that the dream gave warning of the death of her friend may therefore be right. 
The dream, then, uses the symbol of a disk-like Ufo manned by spirits, a space-ship that comes out of the beyond to the edge of our world in order to fetch the souls of the dead. It is not clear from the vision where the ship comes from, whether from the sun or moon or elsewhere. According to the myth in the Acta Archelai) it would be from the waxing moon, which increases in size according to the number of departed souls that are scooped up from the earth to the sun in twelve buckets, and from there are emptied into the moon in a purified state. The idea that the Ufo might be a sort of Charon is certainly one that I have not met in the literature so far. This is hardly surprising, firstly because "classical" allusions of this sort are a rarity in people with a modern education, and secondly because they might lead to yery disagreeable conclusions. The apparent increase in Ufo sightings in recent years has caused disquiet in the popular mind and might easily give rise to the conclusion that, if so many space-ships appear from the beyond, a corresponding number of deaths may be expected. We know that such phenomena were interpreted like this in earlier centuries: they were portents of a "great dying," of war and pestilence, like the dark premonitions that underlie our modern fear. One ought not to assume that the great masses are so enlightened that hypotheses of this kind can no longer take root. 
The Middle Ages, antiquity, and prehistory have not died out, as the "enlightened" suppose, but live on merrily in large sections of the population. Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst and are unknown only to those whose rationalistic 
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education has alienated them from their roots,17 Quite apart from ecclesiastical symbolism, which embodies six thousand years of spiritual development and is constantly renewing itself, there are also its more disreputable relatives, magical ideas and practices which are still very much alive in spite of all education and enlightenment. One must have lived for many years in the Swiss countryside in order to become acquainted with this background, for it never appears on the surface. But once you have found the key, you stagger from one amazement to the next. Not only do you come across the primitive witch doctor in the guise of the so-called "Strudel" (wizard), you will also find blood pacts with the devil, pin-stickings and spells for drying up the milk of cattle, and regular hand-written books of magic. At the house of one of these rustic wizards I once discovered a book of this kind from the end of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Merseburg magic spell in modern High German and an incantation to Venus of unknown age. These wizards often have a large clientele from town and country. I myself have seen a collection of hundreds of letters of thanks which one of them received for successfully laying ghosts in houses and stables, for taking the curse off men and animals, and for curing all manner of ailments. For those of my readers who are unaware of these things and think I am exaggerating, I can point to the easily verifiable fact that the heyday of astrology was not in the benighted Middle Ages but is in the middle of the twentieth century, when even the newspapers do not hesitate to publish the week's horoscope. A thin layer of rootless rationalists read with satisfaction in an encyclopaedia that in the year 1723 Mr. Soand-so had horoscopes cast for his children, and yet do not know that nowadays the horoscope has almost attained the rank of a visiting card. Those who have even a nodding acquaintance with this background and are in any way affected by it obey the unwritten but strictly observed convention: "One does not speak of such things." They are only whispered about, no one admits them, for no one wants to be considered all that stupid. In reality, however, it is very different. 
	701 	I mention these things that infest the roots of our society 
chiefly on account of the symbolism of our dreams, which 17 Cf. Aniela }affe's Apparitions and Precognition, which investigates strange occurrences among modern people for their mythological content. 
37° 

.FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
sounds so incomprehensible to many people because it is based on historical and contemporary facts that are unknown to them. What would they say if I connected the dream of a quite simple person with Wotan or Baldur? They would accuse me of learned eccentricity, not knowing that in the same village there was a "wizard" who had taken the spell off the dreamer's stable, using for that purpose a book of magic that begins with the Merseburg incantation. Anyone who does not know that "Wotan's host"-enlightenment or no enlightenment-still roams about our Swiss cantons would accuse me of the greatest whimsicality if I referred the anxiety dream of a city dweller on a lonely Alp to the "blessed people" (the dead), when all the time he is surrounded by mountainfolk for whom the "Doggeli" 18 and Wotan's nightly cavalcade are a reality which they fear without admitting it, and profess to know nothing about. It needs so little to bridge the apparent abyss that yawns between the prehistoric world and the present. But we identify so much with the fleeting consciousness of the present that we forget the "timelessness" of our psychic foundations. Everything that has lasted longer, and will last longer, than the whirligig of modern political movements is regarded as fantastical nonsense that should studiously be avoided. But in that way we succumb to the greatest psychic danger that now threatens us-rootless intellectualisms which one and all reckon without their host, i.e., without the real man. Unfortunately people imagine that only the things they are conscious of affect them, and that for everything unknown there is some specialist who has long made a science out of it. This delusion is the more plausible in that nowadays it really has become impossible for one individual to assimilate the things which specialists know about and he doesn't. But since, subjectively, the most effective experiences are the most individual and therefore the most improbable, the questioner will often get no very satisfactory answer from the scientist. A typical example of this is Menzel's book on Ufos.19 The scientist's interest is too easily restricted to the common, the probable, the average, for that is after all the basis of every empirical science. Nevertheless a basis has little meaning unless something can be 
18 Swiss-German expression for the nightmare or stable spook. 19 D. H. Menzel, Flying Saucers (1953). 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
erected upon it that leaves room for the exceptional and extraordinary. 
	7°2 	In a borderline situation such as our dream depicts we may 
expect something extraordinary, or rather, what seems extraordinary to us, though in reality it has always been inherent in such situations: The ship of death approaches with a corona of departed spirits, the deceased joins their company, and the multitudinous dead take the soul with them. 
	7°3 	When archetypal ideas of this kind appear they invariably 
signify something unusual. It is not our interpretation that is far-fetched; it is merely that the dreamer's attention, caught by the many superficial aspects of the dream, has missed the main point, namely the nearness of death, which in a sense concerns her as much as her friend. We have met the motif of the "manning" of the space-ship in the dream of the metallic spider and shall meet it again in the next one. The instinctive resistance we feel for the deeper aspect of this motif may explain why it seems to play no role in the Ufo literature. We might exclaim with Faust: "Summon not the well-known throng!" But there is no need of this summons, because the fear that hangs over the world has already taken care of that. 
DREAM 6 
	704 	The following dream 20 comes from California, the classic 
Saucer country, so to speak. The dreamer is a young woman of 23. "I was standing outside with someone (a man). It was night time and we seemed to be in a square or the centre of town-a circle. We were watching the sky. All of a sudden I saw something round and fluorescent coming towards us from way in the distance. I realized it was a Flying Saucer. I thought it was a ridiculous joke. It got larger and larger as it came towards us. It was a huge round circle of light. Finally it covered the entire sky. It was so close) I could see figures walking back and forth on the walk round the shiP. There was a railing around it. I thought someone was playing a trick) then I thought it was real-I looked up behind me and saw someone with a movie projector. In back of us seemed to be a building) like a hotel. These 
20 I am indebted to Dr. H. Y. Kluger, Los Angeles, for this material. 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
peoPle were up high and projecting this image into the sky. I told everyone. Then I seemed to be in a sort of studio. There were two producers) competitors-both old men. I kept going from one to the other discussing my part in their pictures. There were many girls involved .... One of the producers was directing this Flying Saucer thing. They were both making science-fiction films and I was going to have the lead in both pictures." 
	7°5 	The dreamer, a young film actress, was undergoing psycho- 
logical treatment for a marked dissociation of personality with all the accompanying symptoms. As usual, the dissociation expressed itself in her relations with the opposite sex, that is, in a conflict between two men who corresponded to the two incompatible halves of her personality. 
COMMENTARY TO DREAM 6 
	7°6 	As in the first two dreams, the dreamer was conscious of 
Ufos, and here as there the Ufo functions as a symbol carrier. Its appearance is even expected, since the dreamer had already put herself in a "central" position for this purpose-a square or centre of the city. This gives her a central position between the opposites, equidistant from right and left, and allowing her to see or feel both sides. In the light of this "attitude" the Ufo appears to be rather like an exemplification or "projection" of it. The dream insists on the projection character of the Ufo, since it proves ~o be a cinematographic operation conducted by two rival film producers. We can easily discern in these two figures the rival objects of her dissociated love choice, and hence the underlying conflict, which should be resolved in a reconciliation of opposites. The Ufo appears here in the mediating role we have met before, but it turns out to be an intentional cinematographic effect obviously lacking any reconciling significance. If we remember the important part a film producer plays in the life of a young actress, then the changing of the two rival lovers into producers suggests that the latter have acquired for her a more exalted rank or an increase in prestige. They have, so to speak, moved into the limelight of her own drama, whereas the Ufo is very much dimmed, if it has not lost its significance altogether as a mere trick. The accent has gone over 
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L.IVILILAIIUN INIKANSITIUN 
entirely to the producers; the apparently cosmic phenomenon is nothing more than a meaningless trick staged by them, and the dreamer's interest turns wholly to her professional ambitions. This seals the outcome of the solution offered by the dream. 
	7°7 	It is not easy to see why the dream brings in the Ufo at all, 
only to dispose of it in this disappointing way. In view of the suggestive circumstances at the beginning of the dream-square, centre, circle-and the sensational significance of Ufos, obviously well known to the dreamer, this denouement is rather unexpected. It is as though the dream wanted to say: "It is not like that at all-on the contrary. It is only a film trick, a bit of science fiction. Think, rather, that you have the chief role in the two pictures." 
	7°8 	From this we can see what was the role intended for the Ufo 
and why it had to disappear from the scene. The personality of the dreamer takes up a central position on the stage, one that compensates the splitting into opposites and is therefore a means of overcoming the dissociation. For this a powerful affect is needed in order to enforce a consistent attitude. In the affect the pendulum movement of autonomous opposites ceases and a uniform state is produced. This is accomplished by the exciting appearance of the Ufo, which for a moment attracts all attention to itself. 
	7°9 	It is clear that the Ufo phenomenon in this dream is unreal 
and only a means to an end, as though one called out to a person "Look out!" That is why it is immediately devalued: it is not a genuine phenomenon at all, but a trick, and the dream action now proceeds to the personal problem of the dreamer and her conflict between two men. If this well-known and very common situation means more and lasts longer than a passing uncertainty of choice, this is usually due to the fact that the problem is not taken seriously-like Buridan's ass, which could not decide which of two bundles of hay he wanted to eat first. It was an artificial problem: in reality he was not hungry. This seems to be the case with our dreamer: she means neither the one nor the other, but herself. What she really wants is told her by the dream, which changes the lovers into producers, represents the situation as a film project, and gives her the chief role in the pictures. That is what the dreamer really intends: in the interests of her profession she wants to play the chief role, that 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
of the young lover, regardless of any partner. But evidently she cannot quite bring it off in reality, because she is still tempted to regard her partners as real, when in fact they are only playing a role in her own drama. This does not speak very well for her artistic vocation, and she is right to feel some doubt as to its seriousness for her. In contradistinction to her vacillating conscious attitude, the dream points decidedly to her profession as her true love and thus gives her the solution to her conflict. 
	710 	Any insight into the nature of the Ufo phenomenon is not 
to be expected from this dream. The Ufo is used only as a sort of alarm signal, thanks to the collective excitement occasioned by flying saucers. Interesting or even alarming as the phenomenon may be, youth has, or claims, the right to regard the problem of "him and her" as much more fascinating. In this case it is certainly right, for when one is still in the process of development the earth and its laws are of more significance than that message resounding from afar which the signs in heaven proclaim. Since youth lasts for a very long time and its peculiar state of mind is the highest that many human lives attain, this psychological limitation proves equally true of the grey-haired, whose birthdays are nothing more than nostalgic celebrations of their twentieth. At best the outcome is concentration on one's profession, any further development being regarded as a mere disturbance. Neither age nor position nor education is any protection against this psychological standstill. Human society is after all still very young, for what are three or five thousand years on a longer view! 
	7Il 	I have introduced this dream as a paradigm of the way the 
unconscious can also deal with the problem that concerns us here. I wanted to show that the symbols cannot be interpreted in a uniform manner and that their meaning depends on many different factors. Life cannot go forward except from the place where one happens to be. 
	712 	In the next chapter I shall discuss some pictures relating to 
Ufos. The painter of "The Fire Sower" (PI. n), to whom I had written that certain details seemed to be connected with the strange apparitions in the skies, sent me the following dream, which he had on September 12, 1957: 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
DREAM 7 
"I found myself) together with other peoPle) on the top of a hill) looking out over a beautiful) broad) undulating landscape teeming with lush verdure. 
"Suddenly a flying saucer floated into view) paused at eyelevel before us and lay there) clear and shining) in the sunlight. It did not look like a machine but like a deep-sea fish) round and flat) but enormously big (about thirty to forty feet in diameter). It was speckled all over with blue) grey) and white spots. Its edges undulated and quivered all the time; they acted as oars and rudders. 
"T his creature began circling round us) then all at once) as though fired from a cannon) shot straight up into the blue sky) came rushing down again with inconceivable speed) and once more circled round our hill. It was obviously doing this for our benefit. (Once when it flew quite close) it seemed to be much smaller and looked like a hammer-head shark.) 
"Now it had somehow landed in our vicinity .... An occupant got out and came straight towards me. (A semi-human woman?) The other peoPle fled and waited at a respectful distance) looking back at us. 
"The woman told me that they knew me well in that other 
world (from which she had come) and were watching how I fulfilled my task (mission?). She spoke in a stern) almost threatening tone and seemed to attach great importance to the charge 
laid upon me." 
COMMENTARY TO DREAM 7 
	713 	The occasion for the dream was the anticipation of a visit 
which the dreamer intended to pay me during the next few days. The exposition shows a positive, hopeful feeling of expectancy. The dramatic development begins with the sudden appearance of a Ufo, which has the obvious intention of showing itself as clearly as possible to the observer. On closer inspection he sees that it is not a machine but an animal of sorts, a deep-sea fish, something like a giant ray, which, as we know, sometimes makes attempts to fly. Its movements emphasize the relationship of the 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
Ufo to the observers. These overtures lead to a landing. A semihuman figure climbs out of the Ufo, thus revealing an intelligent human relationship between the Ufo and its observers. This impression is strengthened by the fact that it is a feminine figure which, because it is unknown and indefinite, belongs to the anima type. The numinosity of this archetype causes a panic reaction among the "people" present-in other words, the dreamer registers a subjective reaction of flight. The reason for this lies in the fateful significance of the anima figure: she is the Sphinx of Oedipus, a Cassandra, the messenger of the Grail, the "white lady" who gives warning of death, etc. This view is borne out by the message she conveys: she comes from another world where the dreamer is known, and where they watch attentively how he fulfils his "mission." 
	714 	The anima personifies the collective unconscious,21 the 
"realm of the Mothers," which, as experience shows, has a distinct tendency to influence the conscious conduct of life and, when this is not possible, to irrupt violently into consciousness in order to confront it with strange and seemingly incomprehensible contents. The Ufo in the dream is a content of this kind whose strangeness leaves nothing to be desired. The difficulty of integration is in this case so great that the dreamer's ordinary powers of comprehension fail him and he resorts to mythical means of explanation-star dwellers, angels, spirits, gods-even before he knows what he has seen. So great is the numinosity of these ideas that one never asks oneself whether it might not be a subjective perception of collective unconscious processes. For in the common estimation a subjective observation can only be either "true" or else, as a delusion of the senses or an hallucination, it can only be "untrue." The fact that the latter are also true phenomena with sufficient reasons of their own is apparently never taken into account, so long as no obviously pathological disturbance is present. There are, however, manifestations of the unconscious, even in normal people, which can be so "real" and impressive that the observer instinctively resists taking his perception as a delusion or hallucination. His instinct is right: one does not see only from outside 
21 When the shadow, the inferior personality, is in large measure unconscious, the unconscious is represented by a masculine figure. 
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inwards, but from inside outwards. When an inner process cannot be integrated it is often projected outside. It is, indeed, the rule that a man's consciousness projects all perceptions coming from the feminine personification of the unconscious onto an anima figure, i.e., a real woman, to whom he is as much bound as he is in reality to the contents of the unconscious. This explains the fateful quality of the anima, which is also suggested in the dream by her question: How are you fulfilling your life's task ("mission"), your raison d' etre, the meaning and purpose of your existence? This is the question of individuation, the most fateful of all questions, which was put to Oedipus in the form of the childish riddle of the Sphinx and was radically misunderstood by him. (Can one imagine an intelligent Athenian playgoer ever being taken in by the "terrible riddles" of the Sphinx?) Oedipus did not use his intelligence to see through the uncanny nature of this childishly simple and all too facile riddle, and therefore fell victim to his tragic fate, because he thought he had answered the question. It was the Sphinx itself that he ought to have answered and not its fa\ade. 
	715 	Just as Mephistopheles proves to be the "quintessence of the 
poodle," so the anima is the quintessence of the Ufo. But Mephistopheles is not the whole of Faust, and the anima too is only a part of the whole, which is obscurely alluded to in the deepsea fish, the "rotundum." Here the anima plays the role of the mediatrix between the unconscious and the conscious, a dual figure like the Sphinx, compounded of animal instinct (body) and specifically human qualities (head). In her body lie the forces that determine man's fate, in her head the power to modify them intelligently. (This basic idea is also reflected in the picture we shall reproduce later.) At this point the dream speaks a mythical language that makes use of conceptions of another world and of angelic beings who watch the doings of men. This vividly expresses the symbiosis of conscious and un- 
conscIOUS. 
	716 	Such, at any rate, would seem to be the nearest we can get 
to a satisfactory explanation. With regard to the possible metaphysical background we must honestly confess our ignorance and the impossibility of proof. The unmistakable tendency of the dream is the attempt to create a psychologem which we meet again and again in this and many other forms, regardless of 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
whether the Ufos should be understood as concrete realities or as subjective phenomena. The psychologem is a reality in its own right. It is based on a real perception which has no need of the physical reality of Ufos, because it manifested itself long before U fos were ever heard of. 
	717 	The end of the dream lays special weight on the woman's 
message, emphasizing its seriousness, even its menacing quality. The collective parallel to this is the widespread fear that the Ufos may not be harmless after all, and that communication with other planets might have unpredictable consequences. This view is supported by the fact that the suppression of certain information by the American authorities 22 cannot be relegated entirely to the realm of fable. 
	718 	The seriousness, indeed dangerousness, of the problem of 
individuation cannot be denied in an age in which the destructive effects of mass-mindedness are so dearly apparent, for individuation is the great alternative that faces our Western civilization. It is a fact that in a dictator State the individual is robbed of his freedom, and that we too are threatened by this political development and are not at all sure of the right means of defence. Hence the question arises in all urgency: are we going to let ourselves be robbed of our individual freedom, and what can we do to stop it? 
	719 	Anxiously we look round for collective measures, thereby 
reinforcing the very mass-mindedness we want to fight against. There is only one remedy for the levelling effect of all collective measures, and that is to emphasize and increase the value of the individual. A fundamental change of attitude (metanoia) is required, a real recognition of the whole man. This can only be the business of the individual and it must begin with the individual in order to be real. That is the message of our dream, a message addressed to the dreamer from the collective, instinctual foundations of humanity. Large political and social organizations must not be ends in themselves, but merely temporary expedients. Just as it was felt necessary in America to break up the great Trusts, so the destruction of huge organizations will eventually prove to be a necessity because, like a cancerous growth, they eat away man's nature as soon as they become ends 
22 Cf. Keyhoe, The Flying Saucer ConsPiracy. 
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CIVILIZA nON IN TRANSITION 
in themselves and attain autonomy. From that moment they grow beyond man and escape his control. He becomes their victim and is sacrificed to the madness of an idea that knows no master. All great organizations in which the individual no longer counts are exposed to this danger. There seems to be only one way of countering this threat to our lives, and that is the "revaluation" of the individual. 
	720 	So vitally important a measure cannot, however, be put into 
effect at will, that is, by planning and insight, because the individual human being is too small and weak. What is needed, rather, is an involuntary faith, a kind of metaphysical com· mand, which no one can manufacture artificially with his own will and understanding. It can only come about spontaneously. A dominant of this kind underlies our dream. My suggestion that certain details of the picture might be connected with the Ufo problem was sufficient to constellate in the dreamer the archetype underlying this collective phenomenon and to give him a numinous insight into the metaphysical significance of the individual. The empirical man extends beyond his con· scious boundaries, his life and fate have far more than a personal meaning. He attracts the interest of "another world"; achievements are expected of him which transcend the empirical realm and its narrow limits. The status of the individual is enhanced, and he acquires a cosmic importance. This numinous transformation is not the result of conscious intention or intellectual conviction, but is brought about by the impact of overwhelming archetypal impressions. 
	721 	An experience of this kind is not without its dangers, be- 
cause it often has an inflating effect on the individual. His ego fancies itself magnified and exalted, whereas in reality it is thrust into the background, so much so that the ego almost needs an inflation (the feeling of being one of the elect, for instance) in order not to lose the ground from under its feet, although it is precisely the inflation that lifts it off its foundations. It is not the ego that is exalted; rather, something greater than it makes its appearance: the self, a symbol that expresses the whole man. But the ego loves to think itself the whole man and therefore has the greatest difficulty in avoiding the danger of inflation. This is another reason why such experiences are shunned, indeed feared as pathological, and why the very idea 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
of the unconscious and any preoccupation with it is unwelcome. It was not so long ago that we were living in a primitive state of mind with its "perils of the soul" -loss of soul, states of possession, etc., which threatened the unity of the personality, that is, the ego. These dangers are still a long way from having been overcome in our civilized society. Though they no longer afflict the individual to the same degree, this is certainly not true of social or national groups on a large scale, as contemporary history shows only too clearly. They are psychic epidemics that destroy the individual. 
	722 	In face of this danger the only thing that helps is for the in- 
dividual to be seized by a powerful emotion which, instead of suppressing or destroying him, makes him whole. This can only happen when the unconscious man is added to the conscious one. The process of unification is only partly under the control of our will; for the rest it happens involuntarily. With the conscious mind we are able, at most, to get within reach of the unconscious process, and must then wait and see what will happen next. From the conscious standpoint the whole process looks like an adventure or a "quest," somewhat in the manner of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Esther Harding, in a detailed study,23 has shown that in spite of the difference of language and outlook Bunyan was speaking of the same inward experiences which also befall people today when they choose the "strait and narrow" path. I would recommend her book to anyone who wants to know what the individuation process really is. To the constantly reiterated question "What can I do?" I know no other answer except "Become what you have always been," namely, the wholeness which we have lost in the midst of our civilized, conscious existence, a wholeness which we always were without knowing it. Esther Harding's book speaks such a simple and universal language that any man of good will, even though he lack specialized knowledge, can get an idea of what it is all about. He will also understand why, despite the fact that his question, "What on earth can I do in the present threatening world situation, with my feeble powers?" seems so important to him, it were better for him to do nothing and to leave things as they are. To worship collective ideals and work with the big 
23 Journey into Self. 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
organizations is spectacularly meritorious, but they nevertheless dig the grave for the individual. A group is always of less value than the average run of its members, and when the group consists in the main of shirkers and good-for-nothings, what then? Then the ideals it preaches count for nothing too. Also, the right means in the hands of the wrong man work the wrong way, as a Chinese proverb informs us. 
	723 	The message which the Ufo brings to the dreamer is a time 
problem that concerns us all. The signs appear in the heavens so that everyone shall see them. They bid each of us remember his own soul and his own wholeness, because this is the answer the West should give to the danger of mass-mindedness. 
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3. UFOS IN MODERN PAINTING 
	724 	Whilst I was collecting the material for this essay, I hap- 
pened to come across the work of a painter who, profoundly disturbed by the way things are going in the world today, has given expression to the fundamental fear of our age-the catastrophic outbreak of destructive forces which everyone dreads. It is, indeed, a law of painting to give visible shape to the dominant trends of the age, and for some time now painters have taken as their subject the disintegration of forms and the "breaking of tables," creating pictures which, abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their "meaninglessness" as much as by their deliberate aloofness from the spectator. These painters have immersed themselves in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganized fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms, and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill. Just as women's fashions find every innovation, however absurd and repellent, "beautiful," so too does modern art of this kind. It is the "beauty" of chaos. That is what this art heralds and eulogizes: the gorgeous rubbish heap of our civilization. It must be admitted that such an undertaking is productive of fear, especially when allied to the political possibilities of our catastrophic age. One can well imagine that in an epoch of the "great destroyers" it is a particular satisfaction to be at least the broom that sweeps the rubbish into the corner. 
PLATE 11: The Fire Sower 
	725 	The painter in this case has summoned up the courage to 
admit the existence of a deep-rooted and universal fear and 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
express it in his art, just as other artists have dared-or were driven -to choose as their motif the conscious and unconscious will for destruction and to depict the collapse of our civilization in chaos. They did this with a passionate superiority worthy of Herostratus,1 with no fear of the consequences. Fear, however, is an admission of inferiority; it shrinks back from chaos and longs for solid, tangible reality, for the continuity of what has been, for meaning and purpose-in a word, for civilization. It is conscious that all destruction is the result of inadequacy, and that we lack something vital which could halt the onrush of chaos. It must counter the fragmentariness of our world by a striving to be healed and made whole. But since this apparently cannot be found in the present, we cannot even conceive what would make us whole. We have become sceptical, and chimerical ideas of world improvement stand low on the list. The old panaceas have finally failed and are no longer trusted, or only half-heartedly. The lack of any serviceable or even credible ruling ideas has created a situation that resembles a tabula rasa -almost anything might appear on it. The phenomenon of the Ufos may well be just such an apparition. 
	726 	More or less conscious of its analogy with a Ufo, the artist 2 
has painted a round, fiery object rotating in the heavens above the darkening city. Following a naIve impulse to personification, he has given it the suggestion of a human face, so that it became a head separated from the body to which it belongs. Like the head, the body consists of flame. It is the gigantic figure of a spectral "sower, who went forth to sow." He sows flames, and instead of water fire falls from heaven. It seems to be an invisible fire, a "fire of the Philosophers," 3 for the city takes no notice of it, nor does it start a conflagration. It falls unheeded, apparently to no purpose, like seed from the hand of the sower. Like an immaterial essence the fiery figure strides through the houses of the city-two worlds which interpenetrate yet do not touch. 
1 Herostratus, in order to make his name immortal, burned down the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, 365 B.G. 
2 He was not a Saucer addict and had not read the Ufo literature. 
3 In what follows there are a number of allusions to medieval symbolism, which may perhaps be unknown to the reader. He will find the necessary documentation in my book Psychology and Alchemy. 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
	727 	As the "Philosophers," that is, the old masters of alchemy, 
assure us, their "water" is at the same time "fire." Their Mercurius is hermaphroditus and duPlex, a comPlexio oppositorum, the messenger of the gods, the One and All. He is moreover a Hermes katachthonios (subterranean Mercurius), a spirit emanating from the earth, shining bright and burning hot, heavier than metal and lighter than air, serpent and eagle at once, poisonous and alexipharmic. He is the panacea itself and the elixir of life, but on the other hand he is a deadly danger for the ignorant. For the educated person of those days, who studied the philosophy of alchemy as part of his general equipment-it was a real religio medici-this figure of the Fire Sower would have been full of allusions, and he would have had no difficulty in assimilating it to his stock of knowledge. For us, however, it is a disconcerting oddity, and we look round in vain for anything to compare it with, because what the conscious mind thinks is so utterly different from what the unconscious is aiming at. The picture illustrates the incommensurable nature of two worlds which interpenetrate but do not touch. One could compare it to a dream that is trying to tell the dreamer that consciously he lives in a dully rational world while all the time he is confronted with the nocturnal phantom of a homo maximus. Understood as a subjective reflex, the giant figure could be taken as a kind of psychological spectre of the Brocken. In that case one would have to posit a repressed megalomania of which the artist himself is afraid. The whole thing would then be shifted onto a pathological plane and would be nothing more than a neurotic self-confession slyly insinuated into the picture. The frightening spectacle of an apocalyptic world situation would be reduced to the personal, egocentric fear which everyone feels who nurses a secret megalomania-the fear that one's imagined grandeur will come to grief on colliding with reality. The tragedy of the world would be turned into the comedy of 
a little cock of the dung-hill. We know only too well that such jokes occur all too frequently. 
	728 	So facile an argument is not sufficient to make this descent 
from the sublime to the ridiculous appear at all plausible. The significance of the figure lies not so much in its size and strangeness as in the numinosity of its unconscious symbolical background. If it were no more than a matter of personal vanity and 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
infantile self-assertion, the choice of a different symbol would have been far more appropriate-the figure of a successful and envied rival in one's own profession, for instance, suitably got up to impress, or one that increased the artist's status. But here everything points to the contrary: the figure is in every respect archetypal. It is of superhuman stature, like an archaic king or a god; it consists not of flesh and bone, but of fire; its head is round, like a luminary, or like the angel's in Revelation 10 : 1-"and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire" -or like the starry heads of the planetary gods in medieval paintings. The head is separated from the body, as if to emphasize its independence, and could be compared to the arcane substance of the alchemists, the philosophical gold, the aurum non vulgi, the "head"-element or "omega"-element, a symbol that originated with Zosimos of Panopolis (third century A.D.). The spirit is a wanderer who roams over the earth, sowing fiery grains, like those gods and god-men who wander about and do miracles, whether of destruction or of healing. Psalm 104 : 4 likens God's "ministers" to a "flaming fire"; God himself is a "consuming fire." "Fire" signifies the intensity of affect and is the symbol of the Holy Ghost, who came down in the form of tongues of fire. 
	729 	The characteristics of this fire-sowing figure are all steeped 
in tradition, some of them conscious and biblical, some of them derived from the inherited predisposition to reproduce similar but autochthonous ideas. The artist's more or less conscious allusion to the Ufo phenomenon throws light on the inner relationship between the two sets of ideas: the one interprets the other, because they both spring from the same source. Another picture by the same artist shows a motif in blue and white similar to that of Dream 2. A spring landscape, the blue sky arching above it, softened by silvery vapours. At one point the thin veil of cloud is pierced by a round opening, through which you can see the deep blue of the heavens. To either side of the opening there is a wedge of white cloud, so that the whole looks like an eye. Extremely realistic automobiles rush along on the road below. "They do not see it," the artist explained to me. In this picture the Ufo is replaced by the traditional eye of God, gazing from heaven. 
	730 	These symbolical ideas are archetypal images that are not 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
derived from recent Ufo sightings but always existed. There are historical reports of the same kind from earlier decades and centuries. Thirty years ago, before Flying Saucers were heard of, I myself came across very similar dream-visions, for instance a multitude of little suns or gold coins falling from the sky, or the figure of a boy whose clothes were made of shining golden circles, or a wanderer in a field of stars, or the rising of a sun-like object which in the course of the visions developed into a mandala. I also remember a picture that was shown to me in 1919, of a town stretching along the edge of the sea, an ordinary modern port with smoking factory chimneys, fortifications, soldiers, etc. Above it there lay a thick bank of cloud, and above this there rolled an "austere image," 4 a shining disk divided into quadrants by a cross. Here again we have two worlds separated by a bank of cloud and not touching. 
	731 	From the very beginning the Ufo reports interested me as 
being, very possibly, symbolical rumours, and since 1947 I have collected all the books I could get hold of on the subject. Ufos seemed to me to have a good deal in common with mandala symbolism, about which I first wrote in 1927, in The Secret of the Golden Flower. Though one would like to give honest eyewitnesses and radar experts the benefit of the doubt, it must nevertheless be stressed that there is an unmistakable resemblance between the Ufo phenomena and certain psychic conditions which should not be overlooked in evaluating the observations. Besides affording a possible psychological explanation the comparison sheds light on the psychic compensation of the collective fear weighing on our hearts. The meaning of the rumour is not exhausted by its being eXplained as a causal symptom; rather, it has the value and significance of a living symbol, i.e., a dynamic factor which, because of the general ignorance and lack of understanding, has to confine itself to producing a visionary rumour. The fact that there is a numinous quality about all archetypal products is responsible not only for the spread of the rumour but also for its persistence. The numinosity of the complex has the further result that it stimulates deeper reflection and more careful research, until finally someone asks: What is the meaning of such a rumour at the present 
4 Cf. Psychology and Alchemy, p. 148. 
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time? What future developments are being prepared in the unconscious of modern man? Long before Pall as Athene sprang, fully armed, from the head of All-Father Zeus, anticipatory and preparatory dreams had revolved round this theme and transmitted abortive sketches of it to the conscious mind. It depends on us whether we help coming events to birth by understanding them, and reinforce their healing effect, or whether we repress them with our prejudices, narrow-mindedness and ignorance, thus turning their ~ffect into its opposite, into poison and destruction. 
	732 	This brings me to a question I have been asked over and 
over again by my patients: What is the use of a compensation that, because of its symbolic form, is not understood by the conscious mind? Apart from those not so uncommon cases where only a little reflection is needed to understand the meaning of a dream, we can take it as a general rule that the compensation is not immediately obvious and is therefore easily overlooked. The language of the unconscious does not have the intentional clarity of conscious language; it is a condensation of numerous data, many of them subliminal, whose connection with conscious contents is not known. These data do not take the form of a directed judgment, but follow an instinctive, archaic "pattern" which, because of its mythological character, is not recognized by the reasoning mind. The reaction of the unconscious is a natural phenomenon that is not concerned to benefit or guide the personal human being, but is regulated exclusively by the demands of psychic equilibrium. Thus there are times when, as I have often seen, a dream that is not understood can still have a compensatory effect, even though as a rule conscious understanding is required on the alchemical principle "Quod natura relinquit imperfectum, ars perficit" (what nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects). Were this not so, human reflection and effort would be superfluous. For its part, the conscious mind often proves incapable of recognizing the full scope and significance of certain vital situations it has created for itself, and so challenges the unconscious to bring up the subliminal context, which, however, is written not in rational language but in an archaic one with two or more meanings. And since the metaphors it uses reach far back into the history of the human 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
mind, its interpreters will need historical knowledge in order to understand its meaning. 
	733 	This is true also of our painting: it is a picture that reveals 
its meaning only with the aid of historical amplification. The fear from which it sprang is explained by the collision of the artist's conscious world with a strange apparition that came from an unknown region of his being. This world behind, below, and above us appears to Us as the unconscious, which adds its subliminal contents to the images we consciously create. Thus there arises the figure of a homo maximus) an Anthropos and fiilius hominis of fiery nature, whose godlikeness or numinosity is proved by the fact that he immediately evokes similar figures in our minds, such as Enoch, Christ,5 or Elijah, or the visions of Daniel and Ezekiel. Since Yahweh's fire chastises\ills and consumes, the spectator is also at liberty to think of Jacob Boehme's "wrath-fire," which contains hell itself together with Lucifer. The scattered flames could therefore signify the "enthusiasm" of the Holy Ghost as well as the fire of evil passionsin other words, the extremes of emotion and affect which human nature is capable of, but which in ordinary life are prohibited, suppressed, hidden, or altogether unconscious. It is probably not without good reason that the name "Lucifer" applies to both Christ and the devil. The Temptation in Matthew 4: 3ff. describes the split between them, and the fight against the devil and his angels exemplifies the mutual opposition and at the same time the inner relationship between the two sides of a mq,ml judgment. An opposition exists only where two principles conflict with one another, but not where one is and the other not, or where there is only a one-sided dependence, such as when only good has substance but not evil. 
	734 	The fiery figure is ambiguous and therefore unites the op- 
posites. It is a "uniting symbol," a totality beyond human consciousness, making whole the fragmentariness of the merely conscious man. It is a bringer of salvation and disaster at once. What it will be, for good or ill, depends on the understanding and ethical decision of the individual. The picture is a kind of message to modern man, admonishing him to meditate on the signs that appear in the heavens and to interpret them aright. 5 "I am come to send fire on earth, and what will I, if it be already kindled?" Luke 12: 49. 
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738 
735 
736 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
The reflection of the Ufo phenomenon in the artist's fantasy has produced a picture whose basic features are similar to those already discussed in the dreams. It belongs to another dimension, to a world of gods that seems to have no connection with our reality. The picture gives one the impression of a vision, beheld by one singled out and elect, who was permitted to see what the gods do secretly on earth. The artist's interpretation of the phenomenon is at an astronomical remove from the popular view that Ufos are controlled space machines. 
PLATE Ill: The Fourth Dimension 
Like the previous painting, this too is contemporary. In order to avoid misunderstandings I must point out at once that it is painted on canvas and that the peculiar treatment of the background is not the result of the grain of wood showing through. It was the artist's intention to represent something growing or flowing. Similarly, he uses the skyline of a city to emphasize a horizontal plane cutting through the picture. Whereas ]akoby contrasts the low-lying city with the spacious night sky, Birkhauser has moved the horizontal upward, to indicate that the essence of the background also flows downward through the depths of the earth. The colour of the city is a soft dark red; the background is a light, watery, greenish blue streaked with pale yellow and vermilion. 
In this background there are fourteen more or less distinct circles. Ten of them form the eyes of shadowy faces, half animal, half human. The other four look like knots in wood or like dark objects floating about with haloes round them. From the mouth of the large face at the top there issues a stream of water that flows downward through the city. Neither touches the other: two incommensurable events are taking place on two totally different planes, one vertical, the other horizontal. Since, on the horizontal plane, there is a three-dimensional city bathed in a light that shines from the left of the picture and has nothing to do with the background, this background can only be considered as a fourth dimension. The intersecting lines of the two worlds form a cross (city and waterfall). The only discernible connection between the two is the downward glance of the eyes in the large face above the city. The pronounced nostrils 
390 

739 

FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
and abnormally wide-apart eyes show that the face is only partly human. Of the four other faces, the only unmistakably human one is at the top left. The face at the bottom left can only be made out very faintly. If we regard the face in the middle, distinguished both by its size and by the fact that the water flows from its mouth, as the main face and as the source, then the ground structure of the picture is a quincunx: 
EB + + 
+ + 
This is a symbol of the quinta essential which is identical 
with the Philosophers' Stone. It is the circle divided into four with the centre, or the divinity extended in four directions, or the four functions of consciousness with their unitary substrate, the self. Here the quaternity has a 3 + 1 structure: three animal-daemonic faces and one human one. This peculiar feature of our picture recalls the quaternity discussed by Plato in the Timaeus and experienced still earlier by Ezekiel in his vision of the four seraphim. One of them had a human face, the other three had animal faces. The motif appears again in certain representations of the sons of Horus and in the emblems of the evangelists, as well as in the four gospels (three synoptic, one "Gnostic") and in the four Persons of Christian metaphysics: the Trinity and the devil. The 3 + 1 structure is a motif that runs all through aPchemy and was attributed to Maria the Copt or ] ewess. Goethe took it up again in the Cabiri scene in Faust. The number 4 as the natural division of the circle is a symbol of wholeness in alchemical philosophy, and it should not be forgotten that the central Christian symbol is a quaternity too, which, in the form of the long cross, even has the 3 + I structure.6 
This painting, like the previous one, depicts the collision of two incommensurable worlds, vertical and horizontal, which meet only at one point: in the Sower's intention to scatter fire on the earth, and in the downward glance of the eyes. 
6 In H. G. WeIls, the "time machine" seems to have three visible rods, but the fOUrth "has ,m odd, twinkling appearance, as if it were not real." 
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740 
741 
742 

CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
Coming now to the four circles 7 that are not eyes, we note that only one of them-on the extreme left-is completely round and solid-looking. The circle on the right of the mouth is light with a dark centre; a third circle appears to be emitting a whitish vapour; a fourth circle is half hidden by the flowing water. They form a differentiated quaternity in contrast to the undifferentiated ogdoad of eyes, which, if we disregard the main face, belong to a quaternity with a 3 + 1 structure. 
It is difficult to say how much in the main face is animal and how much is human. But since it represents the "source of living water" (quintessence, aurum potabile) aqua permanens) vinum ardens) elixir vitae) ete.) and appears to have an animal component, its doubtfully human character is plain enough. One thinks of the figure "having the likeness of a human form" who appeared above the sapphire throne in Ezekiel's vision, and of Yahweh's wildness, which so often breaks through in the Old Testament. In Christian iconography the Trinity consists of three human persons (occasionally depicted as a tricephalus), while the fourth, the devil, is traditionally represented as halfanimal. Our mandala seems to be complementary to the Chris- 
tian totality. 
One further fact deserves notice: the two lower faces, though 
inverted, are not reflections of the two upper ones, but are independent entities representing a lower as opposed to an upper world. Moreover, one of the two upper faces is light, the other considerably darker, with pointed ears. In contrast to this opposition the water flows uniformly from above downward, thus forming a potential. The source lies not only above the earthly horizontal but also above the middle line of the picture, so that the upper world is characterized as the source of life. Since the three-dimensional human body is ordinarily thought of as the seat of life and strength, this is compensated by placing the source in the fourth dimension. It flows from an ideal centre. The fourth dimension is therefore only apparently symmetrical, 
7 In this connection I would like to draw attention to van Gogh's Starry Night (1889)' There the stars are painted as large shining disks, though the eye never sees them like that. Speaking of his picture, van Gogh used the expression "pantheistic frenzy," calling it the "remnant of an apocalyptic fantasy" and comparing the starry disks t6.a "group ofJiving figures who are like one of us." The painting 
is supposed to be derived from a.dream. 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
in reality it is asymmetrical-a problem that is of importance both to nuclear physics and to the psychology of the unconSCIOUS. 
The "four-dimensional" background is a "vision," in the dual sense of seeing and of something seen. It seems to be a matter of pure chance that it has turned out so and not otherwise, when the merest accident could have given it a quite different appearance. The sight of these round blobs aimlessly scattered over a wishy-washy surface, most of them serving for eyes in indistinct animal-human faces lacking any definite expression, fails to arouse our interest. The picture discourages any attempt to find access to it, for the chance products of nature, if they lack aesthetic charm, have no effect on our sensibilities. Their chancefulness makes the slightest attempt to interpret them seem like empty speculation. It needs the interest of the psychologist, so often incomprehensible to the layman, to follow up a vague instinct for order, using for this purpose the most primitive of all devices, namely counting. When there are few or no characteristics that can be compared with one another, number remains as the ordering schema. Nevertheless, the little disks or holes are distinctly round and the majority of them are eyes. It is only by chance-I must repeat this-that numbers and other patterns appear whose exact repetition would be extremely improbable. In such cases we must refrain from all statistical or experimental thinking, for a probability test of this picture would involve astronomical figures. Investigations of this kind are only possible when a very simple experiment can be repeated over and over again in the shortest time, like Rhine's tests. Our picture is a unique and complex occurrence which from the statistical point of view is entirely meaningless. But from the psychological point of view such curiosities may be meaningful, because the conscious mind is involuntarily impressed by their numinosity. We must therefore take account of them, however improbable and irrational they may appear to be, just because they are important factors in a psychological process. But I must emphasize that nothing will have been proved. 
Since psychology touches man on the practical side, it cannot be satisfied with averages, because these only give information about his general behaviour. Instead, it has to turn its 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
attention to the individual exceptions, which are murdered by statistics. The human psyche attains its true meaning not in the average but in the unique, and this does not count in a scientific procedure. Rhine's experiments have taught us, if practical experience has not already done so, that the improbable does occur, and that our picture of the world only tallies with reality when the improbable has a place in it. This point of view is anathema to the exclusively scientific attitude, despite the fact that without exceptions there would be no statistics at all. Moreover, in actual reality the exceptions are almost more important than the rule. 
	745 	This picture allows some conclusions to be drawn as to the 
nature of the objects appearing in the sky. The "sky" is not the blue vault we see, nor is it the star-filled universe; it is a strange fourth dimension containing supernatural beings as well as dark disks or round holes. The background has a fluid, watery character in striking contrast to the exclusively fiery nature of the previous picture. Fire symbolizes dynamism, passion, and emotion, whereas water with its coolness and substantiality represents the passive object, detached contemplation, hence the thirst-quenching aqua doctrinae and the rejrigerium 8 that puts out the fire, like the salamander of alchemy. 
	746 	As the old masters say: "Our water is fire"-an identity 
which, as soon as we think about it, splits into opposites, as also does the unconscious God-image. This seeming mystery is characteristic of all that is: it is so and yet not so, especially the unconscious, whose reality we can experience only in parables. In the same way a fourth dimension can be regarded only as a mathematical fiction, an intellectual sophistry, or a revelation of the unconscious, for we have no direct experience of it. 
	747 	The unconscious arrangement of the elements composing 
the picture suggests that the Ufos are subliminal contents that have become visible; that they are, in a word, archetypal figures. 
PLATE IV: Painting by Yves Tanguy 
	748 	This painting dates from the year 1927, thus anticipating by 
more than a decade the great bombings of cities. For this is 
8 The refreshing, cool water of life in paradise after the heat of purgatory. 
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FLYING SAUCERS: A MODERN MYTH 
what the picture brings to mind. As a contemporary painting is usually rather difficult to interpret, because its whole aim is to abolish meaning and form and to replace them by something strange and disconcerting, I have followed the method of showing it to as many different people as possible, in this way conducting a kind of Rorschach test. Most of them took the black and white background, which combines a minimum of intelligibility with a maximum of abstraction, to be a plane surface. This is supported by the fact that the light causes the five central forms to cast shadows. It can be seen that these shadows fall on a plane. The interpretation of this varies considerably: some thought it was a sea covered with drift ice in the Polar night, others a sea of fog at night time, others the bleak surface of a distant planet like Uranus or Neptune, and others a great city illuminated at night, situated along the edge of bays, like San Francisco or New York. The strange quincunx suspended over the "city" left most of them puzzled. Some interpreted it at once as falling bombs and explosions. The form in the middle was taken to be a sea-creature (sea-anemone, octopus, ete.) or a flower, or else a daemonic face with tangled hair (looking down to the left); others saw it as the swirling smoke of a great fire. The four figures surrounding it were understood as sea animals, puffs of smoke, fungi, or, because of the horns, as devils. The one at the top left, whose vivid yellowish-green contrasts with the dull, indeterminate tones of the others, was interpreted as poisonous smoke, a water-plant, flame, a house on fire, ete. I must admit that for me the comparison with a city at night by the sea, viewed from a considerable height as from an aeroplane, was the most convincing. The artist is said to have been a sailor originally, and would thus have had plenty of opportunities for such impressions. 
	749 	The horizon is lost in cloudy forms over which hangs a faint 
circular luminosity; to the left of this is a dimly lit cloud bank (?), shaped like a cigar. In the centre of the brightness there is, as if by accident, a barely visible spot of the same colour as the yellowish-green "flame" (top left of the quincunx). A similar, but clearly visible, spot can be seen further down (centre right), directly above the city. A faint line connects it with another yellowish-green spot, apparently a continuation of the flame. The longish second spot points towards the centre of faintly 
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discernible concentric circles that suggest rotation. It is interesting to note that the first-mentioned spot at the top of the picture is also connected with concentric circles. Unfortunately they cannot be seen in the reproduction because it is too dark; they appear only as a circular luminosity surrounding the yellowish spot, but can be felt to the touch as lightly raised lines. Probably they were scratched on with a pointed instrument. There can be no doubt about their circular nature, which is clearly apparent in the lower concentric formation. 
	75° 	These details seem to be a matter of pure chance, the impres- 
sion also given by the previous picture. Their fortuitous nature cannot be denied, but they assume a rather different aspect when submitted to a comparative procedure. As if by chance two luminous whirls with dark centres, and an equally fortuitous cigar form, appear in the night sky, together with a bright spot and a line connecting the second whirl with the flame. One can easily let one's imagination run and interpret the flame as belonging to a projectile shot out of the whirl, or, as we would now say, from a Ufo-for Ufos are said to have incendiary tendencies, among other things. Here it is sowing fire, as a distinct line connects it with the flame. There are, however, a number of other wavy lines crossing the picture, like highways or boundary lines. Have they anything to do with the phenomena in the sky? So much in this picture remains conjecture, for instance the indeterminable corporeal shapes, which, together with the "flame," form a quaternity with a 3 + 1 structure. The structure in the middle is equally difficult to interpret, but it is obviously of a different, more nebulous nature and is thereby distinguished from the others, though like them it throws a shadow. 
	751 	The description of the picture would be incomplete if I 
omitted to mention an important factor which reveals itself on closer examination: the cylindrical, phallic cloud (?) is aimed straight at the topmost luminous whirl, and this could be interpreted sexualistically as cohabitation. Similarly, from the lower whirl a little flame leaps out, which is connected in turn with the big flame on the left. The latter, in psychological terms, is the One differentiated from the Three, the one differentiated function contrasted with the three undifferentiated functions, and hence the main function (or, alternatively, the inferior 
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function). The four together form an unfolded totality symbol, the self in its empirical aspect. The name of one of the Gnostic deities is Barbelo, "god is four." According to an early Christian idea the unity of the incarnate God rests on the four pillars of the gospels (representing the 3 + 1 structure), just as the Gnostic monogenes (unigenitus) Only Begotten) stands on the tetrapeza (four-footed table). Christ is the head of the Church. As God, he is the unity of the Trinity, and as the historical Son of Man and anthropos he is the prototype of the individual inner man and at the same time the culmination, goal and totality of the empirical man. Thus we arrive at an apparently fortuitous picture of a hierosgamos taking place in the heavens, followed by the birth of a saviour and his epiphany on earth. 
	752 	The picture is distinguished by a strongly marked horizontal 
axis. The vertical axis is expressed by the quaternity, and, more dramatically, by the heavenly origin of the fire. The comparison with a bombing is not so far-fetched, since at the time the picture was painted this possibility was in the air, both as a memory of the past and as a premonition of the future. The Ufos in the sky and the remarkable happenings down below together constitute an impressive vertical, which could be interpreted as the intrusion of a different order of things. The accent lies without doubt on the quincunx, which we have dealt with above. It is a decidedly enigmatic structure, and this obviously accords with the artist's intention. He has undoubtedly succeeded in expressing the bleakness, coldness, lifelessness, the cosmic "inhumanness" and infinite desolation.of the horizontal, despite the association "city." He thus confirms the tendency of this kind of modern art to make the object unrecognizable and to cut off the sympathy and understanding of the beholder, who, rebuffed and confused, feels thrown back on himself. 
	753 	The psychological effect is very like that of the Rorschach 
test, where a purely fortuitous and irrational picture appeals to the irrational powers of the imagination and brings the observer's unconscious into play. When his extraverted interest is snubbed in this way it falls back on the "subjective factor" and increases the latter's energy charge, a phenomenon that was observed very clearly in the original association tests. The isolated stimulus word uttered by the experimenter bewilders and embarrasses the subject because it may have more than one 
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meaning. He does not quite know what to answer, and this accounts for the extraordinary variety of answers in these tests and-what is more important~forthe large number of disturbed reactions 9 which are caused by the intrusion of unconscious contents. 
	754 	The rebuffing of interest by un intelligibility results in its 
introversion and a constellation of the unconscious. Modern art has the same effect. We can therefore attribute to it a conscious or unconscious intention to turn the beholder's eyes away from the intelligible and enjoyable world of the senses and to enforce a revelation of the unconscious asa kind of substitute for the loss of human surroundings. This is also the intention of the association experiment and the Rorschach test: they are meant to supply information concerning the background of consciousness, and this they do with great success. The experimental setup of modern art is evidently the same: it faces the observer with the question "How will you react? What do you think? What kind of fantasy will come up?" In other words, modern art is less concerned with the pictures it produces than with the observer and his involuntary reactions. He peers at the colours on the canvas, his interest is aroused, but all he can discover is a product that defies human understanding. He feels disappointed, and already he is thrown back on a subjective reaction which vents itself in all sorts of exclamations. Anyone who knows how to interpret these will learn a lot about the subjective disposition of the observer but next to nothing about the painting as such. For him it is no more than a psychological test. This may sound disparaging, but only for those who regard the subjective factor merely as a source of discomfort. But if they are interested in their own psyches, they will try to submit their c6nstellated complexes to closer scrutiny. 
	755 	Since even the boldest fantasy of the creative artist-how- 
ever much it may exceed the bounds of intelligibility-is always bounded by the limits of the psyche itself, there may easily appear in his pictures unknown forms which indicate certain limiting and predetermined factors. These, in Tanguy's picture, are the quincunx, the quaternity with the 3 + 1 structure, and the "signs in the heavens," the circles and the cigar-form-in a 9 Inhibitions, faults, slips 6f the tongue, subsequent forgetting of the answers, etc. All these are "complex-indicators." 
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word, the archetypes. In its attempt to leave the world of visible and intelligible appearances and to float in the boundlessness of chaos, modern art, to a still greater degree than the psychological tests, evokes complexes which have sloughed off their usual personal aspect and appear as what they originally were, namely primordial forms of the instincts. They are of a suprapersonal, collective-unconscious nature. Personal complexes arise wherever there are conflicts with the instinctual disposition. These are the points of faulty adaptation, and their sensitiveness releases affects which tear the mask of adaptedness off the face of civilized man. This also seems to be the goal that modern art is indirectly aiming at. For all the appearance of extreme arbitrariness and boundless chaos, the loss of beauty and meaning is compensated by a strengthening of the unconscious. And since this is not chaotic but pertains to the natural order of things, it is to be expected that forms and patterns will arise which are indicative of this order. This seems to be the case in the examples we have been discussing. As though by chance there appear in the chaos of possibilities unexpected ordering principles which have the closest affinities with the timeless psychic dominants, but at the same time have conjured up a collective fantasy typical of our technological age and painted it in the skies. 
	756 	Pictures of this kind are rather rare, but not undiscoverable. 
For that matter, relatively few people have seen a Ufo, yet there can be no doubt about the existence of the rumour. It has even attracted' the attention of hard-headed military authorities, despite the fact that for sheer improbability it outdoes any. thing I have said about the meaning of the pictures. Anyone who wants to get an independent idea of the scope of the Ufo legend should read Edgar Sievers' Flying Saucers iiber Siidatrika. Though open to attack at many points, it gives one some notion of the efforts an intelligent and well-meaning person has to make in order to come to terms with the Ufos. It is undoubtedly a challenging matter that has caused the author to move heaven and hell. What he unfortunately lacks is a knowledge of the psychology of the unconscious, perhaps the most important thing here. His book sets forth all the earlier and recent attempts at explanation based on scientific and philosophical premises, but also, unfortunately, on unverifiable 
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