SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
the Immaculate Mother even to this day? Because it is still comforting and speaks without words or noisy sermons to the comfortless, saying, "I too have become a mother"-through the "Idea spontaneously creating its own object." I believe there would be reason enough for a sleepless night if those adolescent fantasies once got hold of this idea-the consequences would indeed be incalculable. 
	77 	Everything psychic has a lower and a higher meaning, as in 
the profound saying of late classical mysticism: "Heaven above, Heaven below, stars above, stars below, all that is above also is below, know this and rejoice." 16 Here we lay our finger on the secret symbolical significance of everything psychic. We would be doing less than justice to the intellectual originality of our author if we were content to trace back the excitement of that sleepless night simply and solely to the sexual problem in its narrower sense. That would be only one half of the meaning, and the lower half at that. The other half is ideal creation as a substitute for real creation. 
	78 	\i\i'ith personalities who are obviously capable of intellectual 
effort, the prospect of spiritual fruitfulness is something worthy of their highest aspirations, and for many people it is actually a vital necessity. This other side of the fantasy also explains the excitement, for we are concerned here with a thought that contains a presentiment of the future-one of those thoughts which, to quote Maeterlinck,17 spring from the "inconscient superieur," from the "prospective potency" of a subliminal synthesis.18 I have had occasion to observe, in the course of my daily profes- 
16 ovpavos ctVW, oL'pavos Kc:lrW, (1(JTpa avw, acrrpa kaTw, '!rav Touro avw, 7rav TOVTO Karw, TOUTO Xa/3e Kal EVrvXE<·-An old paraphrase of the Tabula smaragdina of Bermes, and of the text mentioned by Athanasius Kircher (Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Part 2, p. 414). I have quoted the latter text in my "Psychology of the Transference," p. 189. 
17 Wisdom and Destiny. 
18 This time I shall hardly escape the charge of mysticism. But perhaps the facts should be considered further: there is no doubt that the unconscious contains psychological combinations which do not reach the threshold of consciousness. Analysis dissolves these combinations back into their historical determinants. It works backwards, like the science of history. Just as a large part of the past is so remote as to be beyond the reach of historical knowledge, so too the greater part of these unconscious determinants is unreachable. History, however, knows nothing either of that which is hidden in the past or of that which is hidden in the future. Both might be reached with some degree of probability, the first as a postulate, the second as a political prognosis. Thus, in so far as tomorrow is al- 
5° 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
sional work (though this is an experience about whose certainty I must express myself with all the caution which the complexity of the material enjoins), that in certain cases of long-standing neurosis a dream, often of visionary clarity, occurs about the time of the onset of the illness or shortly before, which imprints itself indelibly on the mind and, when analysed, reveals to the patient a hidden meaning that anticipates the subsequent events of his life.19 I am inclined to attribute a similar meaning to the excitement of that restless night, because the later events, so far as Miss Miller consciously or unconsciously reveals them to us, are entirely of a nature to confirm our supposition that we must take that moment as foreshadowing a future life-aim. 
	79 	Miss Miller ends her string of associations with the following 
comment: 
It [the dream] seems to me to result from a mixture in my mind of Paradise Lost, Job, and The Creation, with notions like the "Idea spontaneously creating its own object," the "Gift of Love," "Chaos," 
	and "Cosmos." 	- 
	So 	Thus, like little bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, frag- 
ments of philosophy, aesthetics, and religion are blended together in her mind, so she tells us- 
ready contained in today, and all the threads of the future are already laid down, a deeper knowledge of the present might render possible a moderately far-sighted prognosis of the future. If we apply this reasoning to the realm of the psychic we necessarily come to the same result. Just as memories that have long since fallen below the threshold are still accessible to the unconscious, so also are certain very fine subliminal combinations that point forward, and these are of the greatest significance for future events in so far as the latter are conditioned by our psychology. But no more than the science of history bothers itself with future combinations of events, which are rather the object of political science, can the forward-pointing psychological combinations be the object of analysis; they would be much more the object of a refined psychological syntheticism that knew how to follow the natural currents of libido. This we cannot do, or only badly; but it happens easily enough in the unconscious, and it seems as if from time to time, under certain conditions, im-portant fragments of-th-is-work come to light, at least in dreams, thus accounting for the prophetic significance of dreams long claimed by superstition. Dreams are very often anticipations of future alterations of consciousness, as I have explained in my writings on psychic energy and dreams. [Ober psychische Energetik und das Wesen der Traume; to be trans. in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyshe, Coil. Works, Vol. S.-EDITORS.] 
19 Dreams seem to remain spontaneously in the memory for just so long as the) correctly sum up the psychological situation of the individual. 
51 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
under the stimulation of the voyage and of countries fleetingly seen, coupled with the vast silence and impalpable charm of the sea -to produce this beautiful dream. There was only this and nothing more. "Only this, and nothing morel" 
	81 	With these words Miss Miller shows us politely but em- 
phatically out. Her parting words of negation make one curious to know exactly what position they are intended to negate. "There was only this and nothing more" must refer to "the impalpable charm of the sea"; so presumably the handsome young officer who sang so melodiously during the watches of the night is long since forgotten, and nobody is to know, least of all the dreamer, that he was a star of the morning who heralded the dawning of a new day.20 One should, however, avoid pacifying oneself or the reader with soothing phrases like "There was only this," for something might easily give them the lie the next moment. This is what happens to Miss Miller, who immediately adds, "Only this, and nothing more!" but without giving the source. The quotation comes from Poe's poem "The Raven," and the operative stanza runs: 
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber doorOnly this, and nothing more." 
	82 	A spectral raven knocks nightly at his door and reminds the 
poet of his irrevocably lost "Lenore." The raven's name is "Nevermore," and he croaks his horrible "Nevermore" as a refrain to every verse. Old memories come back tormentingly, 
20 Row collective the elements in such an experience are can be seen from the following love-song. Of its many variants, I quote a modern Greek version from Epirus (Zeitschrift des Vereins fUr Volkskunde, XII, 1902, p. 159): 
o maiden, when we kissed, it was night. Who saw us?A bright star saw us, and the moon saw us, 
And it leaned down to the sea and whispered the tidings, And the sea told the rudder, and the rudder told the sailor, The sailor made a song, then the neighbours heard it, Then the priest heard it too and told it to my mother, From her my father heard it and was livid with anger, 
They nagged me and scolded me and now have forbidden me Ever to go to the door or look out of the window, 
And yet I will go to the window as if to my flowers, 
And never will I rest until my beloved is mine. 
52 

IV. TRE RYMN OF CREATION 
and each time the spectre repeats inexorably: "Nevermore." In vain the poet seeks to frighten away the dismal guest, shouting at the raven: 
"B.e that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked upstart- 
mg- 
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of the lie thy soul hath spoken I Leave my loneliness unbroken I-quit the bust above my door! 
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" 
Quoth the raven, "Nevermore!" 
	83 	The words "Only this and nothing more!," which apparently 
skip so lightly over the situation, are taken from a poem which depicts in an affecting manner the poet's despair over a lost 10ve.21 Their quotation gives the show away completely. Miss Miller evidently underestimated the impression which the night-watching singer had made upon her, and its far-reaching consequences. This under-estimation is precisely the reason why the problem was not worked out consciously and why it produced those "psychological riddles." 22 The impression goes on working in the unconscious and throws up symbolical fantasies. First it is the "morning stars [that] sang together," then Paradise Lost, then the yearning clothes itself in ecclesiastical garb, speaks darkly of "World Creation" and finally rises to a religious hymn, where :'t at last finds its way to freedom. But the hymn bears in its own peculiarities the marks of its origin: by the devious route of the father-imago relationship, the nightwatching singer becomes the Creator, the God of Sound, of Light and of Love. This is not to say that the idea of God derives from the loss of a lover and is nothing but a substitute for 
21 The atmosphere of the poem is very reminiscent of Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia, a book that anticipates the same fate that befell Miss Miller: spiritual benightedness. Cf. the significance of the raven in alchemy, where it is a synonym for the nigredo (Psychology and Alchemy, pp. 218f.). 
22 This again is decidedly reminiscent of Gerard de Nerval's attitude towards Aurelia, whose significance he refuses to admit. He would not believe that a "femme ordinaire de ce monde" could have the glamour his unconscious endowed her with. Today we know that a powerful impression of this kind is due to the projection of an archetype,-Le., that of the anima or animus. See "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious," pp. 186ff., and my "Psychological Aspects of the Rore" (195°/51 edn., pp. 239ff.). 
53 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
the human object. What is evidently in question here is the displacement of libido on to a symbolical object, with the result that the latter is turned into a sort of substitute. It is in itself a perfectly genuine experience, though, like everything else, it can be put to improper use. 
The winding path of the libido seems to be a via dolorosa; at any rate, Paradise Lost and the parallel reference to Job lead one to that conclusion. The initial hints of identification with Christian, which really points to Cyrano, prove that the long way round is a way of suffering, just as it was when mankind, after the Fall, had to bear the burden of earthly life, or when Job suffered under the power of God and Satan and became the unsuspecting plaything of two superhuman forces. Faust offers the same spectacle of a wager with God: 
MEPHISTOPHELES: What do you wager? You will lose him yet, Provided you give me permission 
To steer him gently in the course I set.23 
Compare with this the passage in Job, where Satan says: 
But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.24 
While in Job the two great forces are characterized ~imply as good and evil, the immediate problem is a definitely erotic one in Faust) where the devil is aptly characterized by the appropriate role of tempter. This aspect is lacking in Job, but at the same time Job is not conscious of the conflict within his own soul, and he never ceases to inveigh against the arguments of his friends who want to convince him of the evil in his heart. To that extent, one could say that Faust is the more conscious in that he openly admits his psychic conflicts. 
Miss Miller acts like Job: she admits nothing, and pretends that good and evil come from outside. Hence her identification with Job is significant in this respect also. But there is another, very important analogy still to be mentioned: the procreative urge-which is how love must be regarded from the natural standpoint-remains the essential attribute of the God whom Miss Miller apparently derives from the erotic impression, for 
23 Trans. by MacNeice, p. 15, modified. 
24 Job 1: 11. [Cf. these pars. with Jung, "Answer to Job."-EDlTORS.] 
54 

88 
89 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
which reason he is praised in the hymn as Creator. We see the same thing in Job. Satan is the destroyer of Job's fruitfulness, but God is the All-Fruitful: therefore, at the end of the book, he addresses a paean filled with lofty poetic beauty to his own creative power, but it is curious to note that he gives chief consideration to two highly unsympathetic representatives of the animal kingdom, Behemoth and Leviathan, both expressive of the crudest force conceivable in nature. 
Miss Miller uses the text of the Authorized Version, which, like Luther's version, is very suggestive: 
Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. 
Lo now, his strength is in his loins, 
and his force is in the navel of his belly. 
He moveth his tail like a cedar: 
the sinews of his stones <lre wrapped together. 
His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. 
He is the chief of the ways of God .... 
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? 
or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? 
Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? 
Will he make many wpplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? 
Will he make a covenant with thee? 
wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? 25 
God speaks thus in order to parade his power and omnipotence forcibly before Job's eyes. God is as Behemoth and LeVIathan: 26 the fruitfulness and abundance of Nature, the nngovernable wildness and licentiousness of Nature, the overwhelming danger of unchained power.27 \i\That was it that de. stroyed Job's earthly paradise? The unchained power of Nature. 25 Job <iO' 15-19; 41: 1-4. 
26 Cf. Scharf, "Die Gestalt des Satans im Alten Testament," in Jung, Symbolik des Geistes, pp. 288f1'. 
27 Job 41: 19-29: 
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seethinc- pot or cauldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of'his mouth. 
In his, neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into iov before him 
	55 	[continued] 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
God, so the poet gives us to understand, has simply shown his other side for once, the side we call the Devil, and let loose all the terrors of Nature upon the unfortunate Job. The God who created such monstrosities, at the very thought of which we poor weak mortals stiffen with fear, must certainly harbour within himself qualities which give one pause. This God dwells in the heart, in the unconscious.28 That is the source of our fear of the unspeakably terrible, and of the strength to withstand the terror. Man, that is to say his conscious ego, is a mere bagatelle, a feather whirled hither and thither with every gust of wind, sometimes the sacrificed and sometimes the sacrificer, and he cannot hinder either. The Book of Job shows us God at work both as creator and destroyer. Who is this God? An idea that has forced itself upon mankind in all parts of the earth and in all ages and always in similar form: an otherworldly power which has us at its mercy, which begets and kills-an image of all the necessities and inevitablenesses of life. Since, psychologically speaking, the God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in projection.29 In most of the existing religions it seems that the formative factor which creates the attributes of divinity is the 
The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in themselves; they cannot be moved. 
His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. 
When he rlliseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of breakings they purify themselves. 
The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. 
He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood. 
The arrow cannot make him flee: slings tones are turned with him into stubble. 
Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear. 
28 These expressions are all anthropomorphisms whose source is primarily psychological. 
29 This proposition has caused much offence, because people have failed to see that it is a psychological view and not a metaphysical statement. The psychic fact "God" is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype, as I later called it. It is therefore characteristic not only of all higher forms of religion, but appears spontaneously in the dreams of individuals. The archetype is, as such, an unconscious psychic image, but it has a reality independent of the attitude of the conscious mind. It is a psychic existent which should not in itself be confused with 
56 

go 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
father-imago, while in the older religions it was the mothe imago. These attributes are omnipotence, a sternly persecutin paternalism ruling through fear (Old Testament), and a lovin paternalism (New Testament). In certain pagan conceptions ( divinity the maternal element is strongly emphasized, and thel is also a wide development of the animal or theriomorphic elc ment.30 (PI. Iva.) The God-concept is not only an image, but a elemental force. The primitive power which Job's Hymn ( Creation vindicates, absolute and inexorable, unjust and supe: human, is a genuine and authentic attribute of the nature: power of instinct and fate which "leads us into life," whic makes "all the world become guilty before God" (Romans 3: l~ and against which all struggle is in vain. Nothing remains fa mankind but to work in harmony with this will. To work i harmony with the libido does not mean letting oneself dril with it, for the psychic forces have no uniform direction, bu are often directly opposed to one another. A mere letting go c oneself leads in the shortest space of time to the most hopele~ confusion. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to feel th ground-current and to know the true direction; at any rat collisions, conflicts, and mistakes are scarcely avoidable. 
As we have seen, the religious hymn unconsciously producel by Miss Miller appears in the place of the erotic problem. ] derives its material for the most part from reminiscences whic: were reactivated by the introverted libido. Had this "creation not come off, Miss Miller would inevitably have yielded to th erotic impression, either with the usual consequences, or els with a negative result which would have replaced the lost haF piness by a correspondingly strong feeling of regret. Opinion~ as we know, are deeply divided over the value of solving aJ erotic conflict like Miss Miller's in this way. It is thought to b much more beautiful and noble to let an erotic tension resolv 
the idea of a metaphysical God. The existence of the archetype neither postulau a God, nor does it deny that he exists. 
30 Theriomorphic elements are lacking in Christianity, except for remnants lik the dove, the fish, and the lamb, and the beasts representing the Evangelist! The raven and the lion symbolized definite degrees of initiation in the Mithrai mysteries. Since Dionysus was represented, among other things, as a bull, hi female worshippers wore horns, as though they were cows. (I owe this informatiOl to Professor Kerenyi. The female worshippers of the bear goddess Artemis wer called aPKTo" 'bears.' Cf. pI. Lb.) 
57 

92 
11 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
itself unnoticed into the sublime feelings of religious poetry, in which perhaps other people can find joy and consolation, and that it is a kind of unjustified fanaticism for truth to complain about the unconsciousness of such a solution. I would not like to decide this question one way or the other, but would prefer to find out the meaning and purpose of the apparently devious path followed by the libido, and of the apparent self-deception, in the case of a so-called unnatural and unconscious solution. There are no "purposeless" psychic processes; that is to say, it is a hypothesis of the greatest heuristic value that the psyche is essentially purposive and directed. 
That the root-cause of the poem has been shown to be the love-episode is an explanation that does not amount to very much at present, for the question of purpose still remains to be settled. Only the discovery of the purpose can provide a satisfactory answer to psychological questions. Were there not a secret purposiveness bound up with the supposedly devious path of the libido or with the supposed repression) it is certain that such a process could not take place so easily, so naturally, and so spontaneously. Also, it would hardly occur so frequently in this form, or in some other like it. There is no doubt that this transformation of libido moves in the same direction as, broadly speaking, the cultural modification, conversion, or displacement of natural drives. It must be a well-trodden path which is so habitual that we hardly notice the conversion ourselves, if at all. Between the normal psychic transformation of instinctual drives and the present case there is, however, a certain difference: we cannot rid ourselves of the suspicion that the critical experience-the singer-was assiduously overlooked; in other words, that there was a certain amount of "repression." This latter term should really be used only when it is a voluntary act of which one cannot help being conscious. Nervous persons can successfully hide voluntary decisions of this kind from themselves up to a point, so that it looks as if the act of repression were completely unconscious. The context 31 of associations provided by the author herself is so impressive that she must have felt this background in a fairly lively fashion, and must therefore have transformed the situation through a more or less conscious act of repression. 
31 See my "The Nature of Dreams" (Swiss edn., p. 237). 
58 

93 
94 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
Repression, however, is an illegitimate way of evading the 
conflict, for it means pretending to oneself that it does not exist. 
What then becomes of the repressed conflict? Clearly, it continues to exist, even though not conscious to the subject. As we have seen already, the repression leads to regressive reactivation of an earlier relationship or type of relatedness, in this case the reactivation of the father-imago. "Constellated" (i.e., activated) unconscious contents are, so far as we know, always projected; that is, they are either discovered in external objects, or are said to exist outside one's own psyche. A repressed conflict and its affective tone must reappear somewhere. The projection caused by repression is not something that the individual consciously does or makes; it follows automatically and, as such, is not recognized unless there are quite special conditions which enforce its withdrawal. 
The "advantage" of projection consists in the fact that one has apparently got rid of the painful conflict once and for all. Somebody else or external circumstances now have the responsibility. In the present case, the reactivated father-imago gives rise to a hymn addressed to the deity in his specifically paternal aspect-hence the emphasis on the Father of all things, Creator, etc. The deity thus takes the place of the human singer; and earthly love is replaced by the heavenly. Although it cannot be proved from the material available, it is nevertheless highly improbable that Miss Miller was so unaware of the conflicting nature of the situation that the apparently effortless transformation of the erotic impression into feelings of religious exaltation cannot be explained as an act of repression. If this view is correct, then the picture of the father-god is a projection and the procedure responsible for this a self-deceiving manoeuvre undertaken for the illegitimate purpose of making a real difficulty unreal) that is, of juggling it out of existence. 
If, however, a product like the hymn came into being without an act of repression, i.e., unconsciously and spontaneously, then we are confronted with an entirely natural and automatic process of transformation. In that case the creator-god who emerges from the father-imago is no longer a product of repression or a substitute, buca natural and inevitable phenomenon. Natural transformations of this kind, without any semi-conscious elements of conflict, are to be found in all gennine acts 
59 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
of creation, artistic or otherwise. But to the degree that they are causally connected with an act of repression they are coloured by complexes which neurotically distort them and stamp them as ersatz products. With a little experience it would not be difficult to determine their origin by their character, and to see how far their genealogy is the result of repression. Just as in natural birth no repression is needed to bring or "project" a living creature into the world, so artistic and spiritual creation is a natural process even when the figure projected is divine. This is far from being always a religious, philosophical, or even a denominational question, but is a universal phenomenon which forms the basis of all our ideas I)f God, and these are so old that one cannot tell whether they are derived from a fatherimago, or vice versa. (The same must be said of the mother- 
imago as well.) 
The God-image thrown up by a spontaneous act of creation 
is a living figure, a being that exists in its own right and therefore confronts its ostensible creator autonomously. As proof of this it may be mentioned that the relation between the creator and the created is a dialectical one, and that, as experience shows, man has often been the person who is addressed. From this the naive-minded person concludes, rightly or wrongly, that the figure produced exists in and for itself, and he is inclined to assume that it was not he who fashioned it, but that it fashioned itself in him-a possibility which no amount of criticism can disprove, since the genesis of this figure is a natural process with a teleological orientation in which the cause anticipates the goal. As it is a natural process, it cannot be decided whether the God-image is created or whether it creates itself. The naive intellect cannot help taking its autonomy into account and putting the dialectical relationship to practical use. It does this by calling upon the divine presence in all difficult or dangerous situations, for the purpose of unloading all its unbearable difficulties upon the Almighty and expecting help from that quarter.32 In the psychological sense this means that complexes weighing on the soul are consciously transferred to the God-image. This, it should be noted, is the direct opposite of an act of repression, where the complexes are handed over to an unconscious authority, inasmuch as one prefers to forget them. 32 Cf. I Peter 4: 7; and Philemon, vv. 4 and 6. 
60 

IV. THE iIYMN OF CREATION 
But in any religious discipline it is of the highest importance that one should remain conscious of one's difficulties-in other words, of one's sins. An excellent means to this end is the mutual confession of sin (lames 5: 16), which effectively prevents one from becoming unconscious.33 These measures aim at keeping the conflicts conscious, and that is also a sine qua non of the psychotherapeutic procedure. Just as medical treatment appoints the person of the doctor to take over the conflicts of his patients, so Christian practice appoints the Saviour, "in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins." 34 He is the deliverer and redeemer of our guilt, a God who stands above sin, who "committed no sin, no guile was found on his lips," 35 who "himself bore our sins in his body on the tree." 36 "So Christ was once sacrificed to take away the sins of many." 37 This God is characterized as being himself innocent and a self-sacrificer. The conscious projection at which Christian education aims therefore brings a double psychic benefit: firstly, one keeps oneself conscious of the conflict ("sin") of two yP.utually opposing tendencies, thus preventing a known suffering from turning into an unknown one, which is far more tormenting, by being repressed and forgotten; and secondly, one lightens one's burden by surrendering it to God, to whom all solutions are known. But, as we have said, the divine figure is in the first place a psychic image, a complex of archetypal ideas which faith equates with a metaphysical entity. Science has no competence to pass judgment on this equation: on the contrary, it must pursue its explanations without resorting to any such hypostasis. It can only establish that instead of an objective human being there appears an apparently subjective figure, i.e., a complex of ideas. This complex, as experience has shown, possesses a certain functional autonomy and has proved itself to be a psychic existent. That is what psychological experience is primarily concerned with, and to that extent this experience can be an object of science. Science can only establish the existence of psychic factors, and provided that we do not overstep these limits with 
33 Cf. I John 1 : 8: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us" (RSV; also nn. 34-36). 
34 Ephesians 1; 7 and Colossians 1: 14. Isaiah 53: 4: "Surely he has borne our 
	griefs and carried our sorrows." 	35 I Peter 2 : 22. 
	36 I Peter 2 : 24- 	37 Hebrews 9 : 28 (ZB). 
61 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
professions of faith, in all so-called metaphysical problems we find ourselves confronted exclusively with psychic existents. These, in accordance with their nature, are intimately interwoven with the individual personality and are therefore subject to all manner of variations, unlike the postulates of faith whose uniformity and permanence are guaranteed by tradition and by institutional religion. The epistemological boundaries set by the scientific standpoint make it inevitable that the religious figure appears essentially as a psychic factor which can only be separated theoretically from the individual psyche. And the more it is so separated, the more it loses its plasticity and concreteness, since it owes its explicit form and vitality precisely to its intimate connection with the individual psyche. The scientific approach makes the divine figure, which faith posits as being the supreme certainty, into a variable and hardly definable quantity, although it cannot cast doubt on its actuality (in the psychological sense). Science therefore puts, in place of the certainty of faith, the uncertainty of human knowledge. The resultant change of attitude is not without serious consequences for the individual: his conscious mind sees itself isolated in a world of psychic factors, and only the utmost caution and conscientiousness can prevent him from assimilating them and from identifying them with himself. This danger is all the greater because, in his immediate experience of dr-eams, visions, etc., the religious figures show a marked tendency to appear in the most varied forms; they often clothe themselves so convincingly in the stuff of the individual psyche that it remains a moot point whether they are not in the last resort produced by the subject himself. That is an illusion of the conscious mind, but a very common one.3S In reality all inner experience springs from the unconscious, over which we have no control. But the unconscious is nature) which never deceives: only we deceive ourselves. Thus, inasmuch as the scientific approach disregards metaphysics, basing itself entirely on verifiable experience, it plunges us straight into the uncertainty which is conditioned by the variability of everything psychic. It emphasizes outright the subjectivity of religious experience, thereby offering an open 
38 As I have shown above, it is not always an illusion, for the subject himself can be the main source of these figures, as is particularly the case in neuroses and psychoses. 
62 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
threat to the solidarity of faith. This long-felt and ever-present danger is countered by the institution of the Christian community, whose psychological significance is best expressed in the command in the Epistle of James: "Confess your sins to one another." 39 Again, it is emphasized as being especially important to preserve the community through mutual love; the Pauline commands leave no doubts on this score: 
Through love be servants of one another.40 Let brotherly love continue.41 
And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together. ... 42 
	96 	Fellowship in the Christian community appears to be a con- 
dition of salvation, or however one chooses to describe the desired state. The First Epistle of John expresses similar views: 
He who loves his brother abides in the light. ... But he who hates his brother is in the darkness .... 43 
No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in US.44 
	97 	We have already referred to the mutual confession of sin and 
the transference of psychic difficulties to the divine figure. Between it and man there thus arises an intimate bond. Yet man should be bound through love not to God alone, but also to his fellows. The latter relation, indeed, seems to be just as essential as the former. If God dwells in us only when we love our brother, we might be led to suppose that love is even more important than God. This is not so absurd when we consider the words of Hugh of St. Victor: 
You have great power, 0 Love; you alone could draw God down from heaven to earth. 0 how strong is your bond with which even God could be bound .... You brought him bound with your bonds, you brought him wounded with your arrows, ... you wounded him who was invulnerable, you bound him who was invincible, you drew down him who was immovable, the Eternal you made mortal. ... 0 Love, how great is your victory! 45 
:\9 James 5: 16. And Galatians 6: 2: "Bear one another's burdens." (RSV; and 
	nn·40-44·) 	40 Galatians 5: 13. 	41 Hebrews 13: 1. 
	42 Hebrews lO: 24f. 	43 I John 2: lOf. 	44 I John 4: 12. 
45 "Magnam ergo vim habes, c.aritas, tu sola Deum trahere potuisti de caelo ad terras. 0 quam forte est vinculum tuum, quo et Deus ligari potuit. ... Adduxisti ilium vinculis tuis alligatum, adduxisti ilium sagittis tuis vulneratum ..•. Vul- 
63 

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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
Accordingly, love would seem to be no trifling thing: it is God himself.46 But, on the other hand, "love" is an extreme example of anthropomorphism and, together with hunger, the immemorial psychic driving-force of humanity. It is, psychologically considered, a function of relationship on the one hand and a feeling-toned psychic condition on the other, which, as we have seen, practically coincides with the God-image. There can be no doubt that love has an instinctual determinant; it is an activity peculiar to mankind, and, if the language of religion defines God as "love," there is always the great danger of confusing the love which works in man with the workings of God. This is an obvious instance of the above-mentioned fact that the archetype is inextricably interwoven with the individual psyche, so that the greatest care is needed to differentiate the collective type, at least conceptually, from the personal psyche. In practice, however, this differentiation is not without danger if human "love" is thought of as the prerequisite for the divine presence (I John 4: 12). 
No doubt this presents those who would like to keep the man-to-God relationship free from psychology with no small problem. But for the psychologist the situation is not so complicated. "Love," in his experience, proves to be the power of fate par excellence, whether it manifests itself as base concuPiscentia or as the most spiritual affection. It is one of the mightiest movers of humanity. If it is conceived as "divine," this designation falls to it with absolute right, since the mightiest force in the psyche has always been described as "God." Whether we believe in God or not, whether we marvel or curse, the word "God" is always on our lips. Anything psychically powerful is invariably called "God." At the same time "God" is set over against man and expressly set apart from him. But love is common to both. It belongs to man in so far as he is its master, and to the daemon if ever he becomes its object or its victim. This means, psychologically, that the libido, regarded as the force of desire and aspiration, as psychic energy in the widest sense, 
nerasti impassibilem, ligasti insuperabilem, traxisti incommutabilem, aeternum fecisti mortalem .... 0 caritas quanta est victoria tua!"-De laude caritatis, cols. 974f. 
46 I John 4: 16: "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (RSV). 
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100 
101 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
stands in part at the disposal of the ego, and in part confronts the ego autonomously, sometimes influencing it so powerfully that it is either put in a position of unwilling constraint, or else' discovers in the libido itself a new and unexpected source of strength. Since the relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind is not merely mechanical or complementary, but rather compensatory, taking its cue from the anfractuosities of the conscious attitude, the intelligent character of this unconscious activity can hardly be denied. Experiences like these make it immediately understandable why the God-image is so often 
regarded as a personal being. 
Now, since a man's sPiritual vocation in the widest sense has 
been thrust upon him to an increasing degree by the unconscious,47 this naturally gave rise to the view that the God-image was a spirit who required man's spirit. This is not an invention of Christianity or of philosophy, but a common human experience to which even the atheist bears witness. (The important thing is what he talks about, not whether he agrees with it or not.) The other definition of God therefore asserts: "God is spirit." 48 The pneumatic God-image has been further attenuated as the Logos, and this gives the "love of God" that peculiarly abstract quality which is also apparent in the idea of "Christian love." 
It is this "spiritual love," which is actually far more appropriate to the God-image than to man, that is supposed to hold the human community together: 
Welcome one another, therefore, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.49 
It is obvious that, since Christ "welcomed" men with "divine" love, men's love for one another should also have, and indeed can have, a "spiritual" and "divine" quality. However, it is not so obvious from the psychological point of view, since, as a rule, the energy of an archetype is not at the disposal of the conscious mind. Hence the specifically human forms of love are! very rightly, not regarded as either "spiritual" or "divine." The energy of an archetype communicates itself to the ego only 
47 One cannot of one's own free will choose and desire something that one does not know. Hence a spiritual goal cannot consciously be striven for if it does not 
	yet exist. 	48 John 4: 24 (RSV). 	49 Romans 15: 7 (RSV). 
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66 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
when the latter has been influenced or gripped by an autonomous action of the archetype. From this psychological fact onc would have to conclude that the man who practises a spiritual form of love has already been gripped by something akin to a donum gratiaeJ for he could hardly be expected to be capable of usurping, on his own resources, a divine action such as that love is. But by virtue of the donum amoris he becomes capable of taking God's place in this respect. It is a psychological fact that an archetype can seize hold of the ego and even compel it to act as it-the archetype-wills. A man can then take on archetypal dimensions and exercise corresponding effects; he can appear in the place of God, so that it is not only possible, but quite sensible, for other men to act towards him as they act towards God. \Ve know that, in the Catholic Church, this possibility has become an institution whose psychological efficacy cannot be doubted. From this intimate relationship there arises a community of an archetypal order which is distinguished from all other communities by the fact that its aim or purpose is not immanent in mankind and not directed to utilitarian ends, but is a transcendental symbol whose nature corresponds to the peculiarity of the ruling archetype. 
The closer relations between men thus made possible by such a community produce a psychological intimacy which touches on the personal instinctual sphere of "human" love and therefore harbours certain dangers. Above all, the power and sex instincts are inevitably constellated. Intimacy creates various short-cuts between people and is only too likely to lead to the very thing from which Christianity seeks to deliver them, namely to those all-too-human attractions and their necessary consequences, which had already been the bane of the highly civilized man at the beginning of our Christian era. Religious experience in antiquity was frequently conceived as bodily union with the deity,50 and certain cults were saturated with sexuality of every 
50 Cf. Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, p. 20: "To the various forms in which primitive peoples have envisaged the supreme religious sacrament, union with God, there necessarily belongs that of sexual union, through which man takes into himself the innermost essence and power of a god, his semen. What is at first a wholly sensual idea becomes, independently in different par'ts of the world, a sacred act, where the god is represented by a human deputy or by his symbol the phallus." Further material in Dieterich, Eine Mithrasliturgie, 
pp.12lff. 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
kind. Sexuality was all too close to the relations of people with one another. The moral degeneracy of the first centuries of the Christian era produced a moral reaction which then, in the second and third centuries, after germinating in the darkness of the lowest strata of society, expressed itself at its purest in the two mutually antagonistic religions, Christianity and Mithraism These religions strove after precisely that higher form of social intercourse symbolized by a projected ("incarnate") idea (the Logos), whereby all the strongest impulses of man-which formerly had flung him from one passion to another and seemed to the ancients like the compulsion of evil stars, Heimarmene,51 or like what we psychologists would call the compulsion of libido 52-could be made available for the maintenance of so51 Cf. the prayers in the so-called Mithras liturgy (published in 1910 by Dieterich, ibid.). There we find such characteristic passages as: rii< o.p8pw7r!p1/< p.ov "'VXlK~< ~VPa.f.LfW'i ijp E')'W 7raAl.V /JfTa7rapa'Anp.Y;o}J.aL p.era T~Y EVHTTWUa'll Kat Ka'TE1rEl-yoUo-o.v }J.E 7rLKPUP o.Vo.YK1/P o.XPEOK07r1/rOp (my human soul-force, which I shall recover again undimin, ished after the present bitter necessity that presses upon me), and fVEKo. rii< Ko.TE7rELYOUrJ1/< Ko.l 7rlKpaS o.7ro.po.Lr7)rOV o.Po.YK1/< (because of the bitter inexorable necessity that oppresses me). The speech of the high priest of Isis (Apuleius, The Golden Ass, XI, IS) reveals a similar train of thought. The young philosopher Lucius was changed into an ass, that ever-rutting animal hateful to Isis. Later he was re· leased from the spell and initiated into the mysteries. (Cf. pI. VI.) During his disenchantment, the priest says: "On the slippery path of your lusty youth you fell a prey to servile pleasures, and 'won a sinister reward for your ill-fated curi· osity .... But hostile fortune has no power over those who have devoted their lives to serve the honour and majesty of our goddess .... Now, you are safe, and under the protection of that fortune which is not blind, but can see." In his prayer to Isis, Queen of Heaven, Lucius says (XI, 25): " ... thy saving hand, wherewith thou unweavest even the inextricably tangled web of fate, and assuagest the tempests of fortune, and restrainest the baleful orbits of the stars." Altogether, the purpose of the mysteries (pI. IV b) was to break the "compulsion of the stars" by magic power. 
The power of fate makes itself felt unpleasantly only when everything goes against our will, that is to say, when we are no longer in harmony with our· selves. The ancients, accordingly, brought Elp.o.pp.<v1/ into relation with the "primal light" or "primal fire," the Stoic conception of the ultimate cause, or all-pervading warmth which produced everything and is therefore fate. (Cf. Cumont, The Mysteries ot Mithra, p. 114.) This warmth, as will be shown later, is a libido-image (cf. fig. 4). Another conception of Ananke (Necessity), according to Zoroaster's book rrEpl <I>UcrEW< ("On Nature"), is air, which in the form of wind is again connected with the fertilizing agent. 
52 SchiIler says in Piccolomini;- 11, 6: "The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast." "A man's fortunes are the fruits of his character," says Emenon, in his essay "Fate," in The Conduct at Lite (Works, VI, p. 41). 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
ciety. As one example among many others, I would cite St. Augustine's description of the fate of Alypius, in his Confesswns: 
But at Carthage the maelstrom of ill morals-and especially the passion for idle spectacles-had sucked him in, his special madness being for gladiatorial shows .... As a result of what he had heard me say, he wrenched himself out of the deep pit in which he had chosen to be plunged and in the darkness of whose pleasures he had been so woefully blinded. He braced his mind and shook it till all the filth of the Games fell away from it and he ,went no more .... 
In pursuit of the worldly career whose necessity his parents were always dinning into his ears, he had gone before me to Rome to study Law; and there he had been, incredibly, carried away again by an incredible passion for gladiatorial shows. He had turned from such things and utterly detested them. But it happened one day that he met some friends and fellow students coming from dinner: and though he flatly refused and vigorously resisted, they used friendly violence and forced him along with them to the amphitheatre on a day of these cruel and murderous Games. He protested: "Even if you drag my body to the place, can you force me to turn my mind and my eyes on the show? Though there, I shall not be there, and so I shall defeat both you and it." 
Hearing this his companions led him on all the faster, wishing to discover whether he could do as he had said. When they had reached the Arena and had got such seats as they could, the whole place was in a frenzy of hideous delight. He closed up the door of his eyes and forbade his mind to pay attention to things so evil. If only he could have stopped his ears tool For at a certain critical point in the fight, the vast roar of the whole audience beat upon him. His curiosity got the better of him, and thinking that he would be able to treat the sight with scorn-whatever the sight might behe opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in the soul than the man he had opened his eyes to see suffered in the body. He fell more miserably than the gladiator whose fall had set the crowd to that roar-a roar which had entered his ears and unlocked his eyes, so that his soul was stricken and beaten down. But in truth the reason was that its courage had so far been only audaciousness, and it was weak because it had relied upon itself when it should have trusted only in You. Seeing the blood he drank deep of the savagery. He did not turn away but fixed his gaze upon the sight. He drank in all the frenzy, with no thought of what had happened to him. revelled in the wickedness of the contest, and was drunk with lust for 
68 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
blood. He was no longer the man who had come there but one of the crowd to which he had come, a fit companion for those who had brought him. 
vVhat more need I say? He continued to gaze, shouted, grew hot. and when he departed took with him a madness by which he was goaded to come back again, not only with those who at first took him there, but even more than they and leading on others.53 
	103 	One can take it as certain that man's domestication cost him 
the heaviest sacrifices. An age which created the Stoic ideal must doubtless have known why and against what it was set up. The age of Nero provides an effective foil for the celebrated passage from the forty-first letter of Seneca to Lucilius: 
We push one another into vice. And how can a man be recalled to salvation, when he has none to restrain him, and all mankind to urge him on? ... 
If you see a man who is unterrified in the midst of dangers, untouched by desires, happy in adversity, peaceful amid the storm, who looks down upon men from a higher plane, and views the gods on a footing of equality, will not a feeling of reverence for him steal over you? Will you not say: "This quality is too great and too lofty to be regarded as resembling this petty body in which it dwells. A divine power has descended upon that man." When a soul rises superior to other souls, when it is under control, when it passes through every experience as if it were of small account, when it smiles at our fears and at our prayers, it is stirred by a force from heaven. A thing like this cannot stand upright unless it be propped by the divine. Therefore, a greater part of it abides in that place from whence it came down to earth. Just as the rays of the sun do indeed touch the earth but still abide at the source from which they are sent, even so the great and hallowed soul, which has come down in order that we may have a nearer knowledge of divinity, does indeed associate with us, but still cleaves to its origin; on that source it depends, thither it turns its gaze and strives to go, and it concerns itself with our doings only as a being superior to ourselves.54 
	1°4 	The men of that age were ripe for identification with the 
word made flesh, for the founding of a community united by 
118 The Confessions of St. Augustine, VI, 7-8, trans. by Sheed, pp. 88-g1, slightly modified. 
54 Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, trans. by Gummere, I, pp. 278f., 274£. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
an idea, ~~ in the name of which they could love one another and call each other brothers.56 The old idea of a J.lEiTLTl1S, of a mediator in whose name new ways of love would be opened, became a fact, and with that human society took an immense stride forward. This was not the result of any speculative, sophisticated philosophy, but of an elementary need in the great masses of humanity vegetating in spiritual darkness. They were evidently driven to it by the profoundest inner necessities, for humanity does not thrive in a state of licentiousness. 57 The meaning of these cults-Christianity and Mithraism-is clear: moral subjugation of the animal instincts.~8 The spread of both these religions betrays something of that feeling of redemption which animated their first adherents, and which we can scarcely appreciate today. We can hardly realize the whirlwinds of brutality and unchained libido that roared through the streets of Imperial Rome. But we would know that feeling again if 
5~ The ascent to the "idea" is described in Augustine, Confessions, Book X, ch. 6ff. The beginning of ch. 8 reads: "I shall mount beyond this power of my nature, still rising by degrees towards Him who made me. And so I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory." (Trans. by Sheed, p. 172.) 
56 The followers of Mithras also called themselves brothers. In philosophical language, Mithras was the Logos emanated by God (Cumont, Mysteries, p. 140). 57 Augustine, who was close to that period of transition not only in time but intellectually too, writes in his Confessions (Book VI, ch. 16; Sheed trans., pp. 99-100): "And I put the question, supposing we were immortals and could live in perpetual enjoyment of the body without any fear of loss, why should we not then be happy, or what else should we seek? I did not realize that it belonged to the very heart of my wretchedness to be so drowned and blinded in it that I could not conceive the light of honour, and of beauty loved for its own sake, which the eye of the flesh does not see but only the innermost soul. I was so blind that I never came to ask myself what was the source of the pleasure I found in discussing these ideas (worthless as they were) with friends, and of my inability to be happy without friends, even in the sense of happiness which I then held, no matter how great the abundance of carnal pleasure. For truly I loved my friends for their own sake, and I knew that I was in turn loved by them. 0 tortuous waysl Woe to my soul with its rash hope of finding something better if it forsook Thee! My soul turned and turned again, on back and sides and belly, and the bed was always hard. For thou alone art her rest." 
58 Both religions teach a distinctly ascetic morality and a morality of action. The latter is particularly true of Mithraism. Cumont (p. 147) says that Mithraism owed its success to the value of its morality, "which above all things favoured action." The followers of Mithras formed a "sacred army" in the fight against evil (p. 148), and among them were virgines, 'nuns', and continentes, 'ascetics' (p. 165)' 
7° 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
ever we understood, clearly and in all its consequences, what is happening under our very eyes. The civilized man of today seems very far from that. He has merely become neurotic. For us the needs of the Christian community have gone by the board; we no longer understand their meaning. We do not even know against what it is meant to protect US.59 For enlightened people, the need for religion is next door to neurosis.60 It must be admitted that the Christian emphasis on spirit inevitably leads to an unbearable depreciation of man's physical side, and thus produces a sort of optimistic caricature of human nature. He gets too good and too spiritual a picture of himself, and becomes too naIve and optimistic. In two world wars the abyss has opened out again and taught us the most frightful lesson that can be imagined. We now know what human beings are capable of, and what lies in store for us if ever again the mass psyche gets the upper hand. Mass psychology is egoism raised to an inconceivable power, for its goal is immanent and not transcendent. 
	105 	Let us now turn back to the question from which we started, 
namely, whether or not Miss Miller has created anything of value with her poem, If we bear in mind the psychological and moral conditions under which Christianity came to birth, in an age when the crudest brutality was an everyday spectacle, we can understand the religious convulsion of the whole personality and the value of a religion that protected people living in the Roman sphere of culture from the visible onslaughts of wickedness. It was not difficult for those people to remain conscious of 
59 I have intentionally let these sentences stand from the earlier editions, as they typify the false fin de siixle sense of security. Since then we have experienced abominations of desolation of which Rome never dreamed. As regards the social condition's in the Roman Empire I would refer the reader to P6hlmann (Geschichte des antiken Kommunismus und Sozialismus) and Biicher (Die Aufstiinde der unfreien Arbeiter I43-I29 B.C.). The fact that an incredibly large proportion of the people languished in the black misery of slavery is no doubt one of the main causes of the singular melancholy that reigned all through the time of the Caesars. It was not in the long run possible for those who wallowed in pleasure not to be infected, through the mysterious working of the unconscious, by the deep sadness and still deeper wretchedness of their brothers. As a result, the former were driven to orgiastic frenzy, while the latter, the better of them, fell into the strange Weltschmerz and world-weariness typical of the intellect uals of that age. 
60 Unfortunately Freud, too, has made himself guilty of this error. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
sin, for they saw it every day spread out before their eyes. Miss Miller not only underestimates her "sins," but the connection between the "bitter inexorable necessity" and her religious product has altogether escaped her. The poem thus loses the living value of a religious work of art. It seems to be not much more than a sentimental rehash of an erotic experience, slyly working itself out on the fringe of consciousness and having about the same ethical value as a dream, which is also none of our doing. 
To the degree that the modern mind is passionately concerned with anything and everything rather than religion, religion and its prime object-original sin-have mostly vanished into the unconscious. That is why, today, nobody believes in either. People accuse psychology of dealing in squalid fantasies, and yet even a cursory glance at ancient religions and the history of morals should be sufficient to convince them of the demons hidden in the human soul. This disbelief in the devilishness of human nature goes hand in hand with the blank incomprehension of religion and its meaning. The unconscious conversion of instinctual impulses into religious activity is ethically worthless, and often no more than an hysterical outburst, even though its products may be aesthetically valuable. Ethical decision is possible only when one is conscious of the conflict in all its aspects. The same is true of the religious attitude: it must be fully conscious of itself and of its foundations if it is to signify anything more than unconscious imitation.61 
Through centuries of educational training, Christianity subdued the animal instincts of antiquity and of the ensuing ages of barbarism to the point where a large amount of instinctual energy could be set free for the building of civilization. The effect of this training showed itself, to begin with, in a fundamental change of attitude, namely in the alienation from reality, the otherworldliness of the early Christian centuries. It was an age that strove after inwardness and spiritual abstraction. 
61 A theologian, who accuses me of being anti-Christian, has completely overlooked the fact that Christ never said "Unless ye remain as little children," but, most emphatically, "Unless ye become as little children." His accusation is proof of a remarkable dulness of religious sensibility. One cannot, after all, ignore the whole drama of rebirth in novam infantiaml 
72. 

108 
109 
110 

IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
Nature was abhorrent to man. One has only to think of the passage in St. Augustine quoted by Jacob Burckhardt: 
And men go forth, and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and turn away from themselves.62 
But it was not only the aesthetic beauty of the world that distracted their senses and lured them away from concentrating on a spiritual and supramundane goal. There were also daemonic or magical influences emanating from nature herself. 
The foremost authority on the Mithraic cult, Franz Cumont, describes the classical feeling for nature as follows: 
The gods were everywhere, and they mingled in all the events of daily life. The fire that cooked the food and warmed the bodies of the faithful, the water that allayed their thirst and cleansed them, the very air they breathed, and the light that shone for them, all were objects of their adoration. Perhaps no other religion has ever offered to its votaries, in so high a degree as Mithraism, opportunities for prayer and motives for veneration. When the initiate betook himself in the evening to the sacred grotto concealed in the solitude of the forest, at every step new sensations awakened in his heart some mystical emotion. The stars that shone in the sky, the wind that whispered in the foliage, the spring or brook that hastened murmuring to the valley, even the earth which he trod under his feet, were in his eyes divine, and all surrounding nature evoked in him a worshipful fear of the infinite forces that swayed the universe.63 
This religious oneness with nature is beautifully described by Seneca: 
When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly intertwining branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this domed cavern then strike you as with the presence of a deity? Or when you see a cave penetrating into the rock at the foot of an overhanging mountain, not made by human hands, but hollowed out to a great depth by nature, is not your soul suffused with a religious fear? We worship the sources of great rivers, we erect altars at the place where a sudden rush of water bursts from the bowels of the earth, warm springs we adore, and 
62 Confessions, X, 8, cited in Burckhardt, The Renaissance in Italy, p. 181. 
63 Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, p. 149, modified. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
certain pools we hold sacred on account of their sombre darkness or their immense depth.64 
	III 	Sharply contrasting with this ancient nature worship is the 
Christian aversion from the world, as described in the most poignant language in the Confessions of St. Augustine: 
What do I love when I love my God? Not the beauty of any bodily thing, not the graciousness of the times, nor the splendour of the light that rejoices the eye, nor the sweet melodies of richly varied songs; not the fragrance of flowers and sweet-smelling ointments and spices, not manna and honey, nor the fair limbs whose embraces are pleasant to the flesh. None of these do I love when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, and a kind of melody, and a kind of fragrance, and a kind of savour, and a kind of embracement when I love my God, who is the light and the melody and the fragrance and the savour and the embracement of my inner man; where that light shines into my soul which no space can contain, that melody sounds which no time takes away, that fragrance smells which no wind scatters, that savour tastes which no gluttony diminishes, and that embracement is enjoyed which no satiety can put apart. That is what I love when I love my God.65 
	112 	The world and its beauty had to be shunned, not only be- 
cause of their vanity and transitoriness, but because love of created nature soon makes man its slave. As St. Augustine says (X, 6): " ... they love these things too much and become subject to them, and subjects cannot judge." 66 One would certainly think it possible to love something, to have a positive attitude towards it, without supinely succumbing to it and losing one's power of rational judgment. But Augustine knew his contemporaries, and knew furthermore how much godliness and godlike power dwelt in the beauty of the world. 
Since you alone govern the universe, and without you nothing rises into the bright realm of light, and nothing joyous or lovely can come to be .... 67 
64 [Cf. Gummere trans., pp. 272-75.] 
65 Confessions, X, 6. trans. based on Sheed, p. 170. 66 Trans. by Sheed. p. 171. 
67 Lueretius, De rerum natura, I, 21-24 [cf. Rouse trans., pp. 4-5]: 
"Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas, Nee sine te quiequam dias in lllminis oras 
Exoritllr. neque fit laetum neqlle amabile quicquam." 
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n ANT n N r 0 K A A J 
Fig. 1. The Mother of All Living 
From the Hypnerotomaehia Poliphili, Venice, I499 
Thus Lucretius extols "alma Venus" as the ruling principle of nature. To such a daimonion man falls an abject victim unless he can categorically reject its seductive influence at the outset. It is not merely a question of sensuality and of aesthetic corruption, but-and this is the point-of paganism and natureworship. (Fig. 1.) Because gods dwell in created things, man 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
falls to worshipping them, and for that reason he must turn away from them utterly lest he be overwhelmed. In this respect the fate of Alypius is extremely instructive. If the flight from the world is successful, man can then build up an inner, spiritual world which stands firm against the onslaught of sense-impressions. The struggle with the world of the senses brought to birth a type of thinking independent of external factors. Man won for himself that sovereignty of the idea which was able to withstand the aesthetic impact, so that thought was no longer fettered by the emotional effect of sense-impressions, but could assert itself and even rise, later, to reflection and observation. Man was now in a position to enter into a new and independent relationship with nature, to go on building upon the foundations which the classical spirit had laid,68 and to take up once more the natural link which the Christian retreat from the world had let fall. On this newly-won spiritual level there was forged an alliance with the world and nature which, unlike the old attitude, did not collapse before the magic of external objects, but could regard them in the steady light of reflection. Nevertheless, the attention lavished upon natural objects was infused with something of the old religious piety, and something of the old religious ethic communicated itself to scientific truthfulness and honesty. Although at the time of the Renaissance the antique feeling for nature visibly broke through in art 69 and in natural philosophy,1° and for a while thrust the Christian principle into the background, the newly-won rational and intellectual stability of the human mind nevertheless managed to hold its own and allowed it to penetrate further and further into depths of nature that earlier ages had hardly suspected. The more successful the penetration and advance of the new scientific spirit proved to be, the more the latter-as is usually the case with the victor-became the prisoner of the world it had conquered. At the beginning of the present centurya Christian writer could still regard the modern spirit as a sort of second incarnation of the Logos. "The deeper comprehension of the spirit of nature in modern painting and poetry," 
68 Cf. Kerenyi, "Die Gottin Natur," pp. 50ff. 69 Cf. Hartlaub, Giorgiones Geheimnis. 
70 Particularly in alchemy. See my "Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon" (Swiss edn., pp. 109, 132ff., 16gff.). 
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IV. THE HYMN OF CREATION 
writes Kalthoff, "the living intuition which science is no longer willing to dispense with even in its most arduous endeavours, demonstrate how the Logos of Greek philosophy, which gave to the early Christ-ideal its cosmic position, is divesting itself of its transcendental character and entering upon a new incarnation." 71 It did not take us long to realize that it was less a question of the incarnation of the Logos than of the descent of the Anthropos or Nous into the dark embrace of Physis. The world had not only been deprived of its gods, but had lost its soul. Through the shifting of interest from the inner to the outer world our knowledge of nature was increased a thousandfold in comparison with earlier ages, but knowledge and experience of the inner world were correspondingly reduced. The religious interest, which ought normally to be the greatest and most decisive factor, turned away from the inner world, and the great figures of dogma dwindled to strange and incomprehensible vestiges, a prey to every sort of criticism. Even modern psychology has the greatest difficulty in vindicating the human soul's right to existence, and in making it credible that the soul is a mode of being with properties that can be investigated, and therefore a suitable object for scientific study; that it is not something attached to an outside, but has an autonomous inside, too, and a life of its own; that it is not just an ego-consciousness, but an existent which in all essentials can only be inferred indirectly. To people who think otherwise, the myths and dogmas of the Church are bound to appear as a collection of absurd and impossible statements. Modern t:ationalism is a process of sham enlightenment and even prides itself morally on its iconoclastic tendencies. Most people are satisfied with the not very intelligent view that the whole purpose of dogma is to state a flat impossibility. That it could be the symbolic expression of a definite idea with a definite content is something that occurs to hardly anybody. For how can one possibly know what that idea really is! And what "I" do not know simply does not exist. Therefore, for this enlightened stupidity, there is no nonconscious psyche. 
Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness. We have still to discover that such contents are real, that they are 71 Kalthoff, The Rise of Christianity, p. 200 (trans. modified). 
77 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
agents with which it is not only possible but absolutely necessary for us to come to terms.72 While making this discovery, we shall not fail to understand what dogma is about, what it formulates, and the reason for its existence.73 
72 See my "Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious," pp. 21sff. 
73 When I wrote this book, these things were stilI completely dark to me, and I knew no other counsel but to quote to myself the following passage from the 41 st letter of Seneca to Lucilius (Gummere trans., pp. 272-73): "You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if ... you persist in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. This is what I mean, Lucilius; a holy spirit indwells within us, one who works our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. As we treat this spirit, so we are treated by it. Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God helps him to rise? He it is that gives noble and upright counsel. In each good man 'a god doth dwell, but what god we know not: •• 

v 
THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
	115 	Shortly after the events described above, Miss Miller trav- 
elled from Geneva to Paris. She says: 
My fatigue on the train was such that I hardly slept an hour. It was horribly hot in the ladies' compartment. 
	116 	At four o'clock in the morning she noticed a moth fluttering 
round the light in the carriage. She then tried to go to sleep again. Suddenly the following poem sprang into her mind: 
The Moth to the Sun 
I longed for thee when first I crawled to consciousness. My dreams were all of thee when in the chrysalis I lay. Oft myriads of my kind beat out their lives 
Against some feeble spark once caught from thee. 
And one hour more-and my poor life is gone; 
Yet my last effort, as my first desire, shall be 
But to approach thy glory; then, having gained 
One raptured glance, I'll die content, 
For I, the source of beauty, warmth, and life Have in his perfect splendor once beheld I 

	117 	Before we go into the material which Miss Miller offers for 
an understanding of the poem, we will again cast a glance over the psychological situation in which the poem arose. Some weeks or months appear to have elapsed since the last direct manifestation of the unconscious. About this period we have no information; we know nothing of her moods and fantasies during the interval. If any conclusion is to be drawn from this silence, it is that nothing of real importance has happened during the time between the two poems, and that the new poem is another ver- 
		0' 	balized . fragment reflecting the unconscious working out of 
	78 	r 	79 

80 
SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
the complex that had been going on for months. It is highly probable that it is concerned with the same conflict as before.! The earlier product, the Hymn of Creation, bears, however, little resemblance to the present poem. This has a truly hopeless and melancholy character: moth and sun, two things that never meet. But, we must ask, is a moth really expected to reach the sun? We all know the proverbial saying about the moth that flies into the flame and burns its wings, but we know of no legend about a moth that strives towards the sun. Evidently there is a condensation here of two things that do not really belong together: firstly the moth which flies round the light till it burns its wings; secondly the image of a tiny ephemeral being, the May-fly perhaps, which in pathetic contrast to the eternity of the stars longs for the imperishable light. This image is reminiscent of Faust, where he says: 
Mark, now, the glimmering in the leafy glades Of dwellings gilded by the setting sun. 
Now slants the fiery god towards the west, Hasting away, but seeking in his round 
New life afar: I long to join his quest, 
On tireless wings uplifted from the ground. Then should I see, in deathless evening light, The world in cradled stillness at my feet ... And now at length the sun-god seems to sink, Yet stirs my heart with new-awakened might, The streams of quenchless light I long to drink, Before me day and, far behind, the night, 
The heavens above me, and the waves below: 
A lovely dream, but gone with set of sun. Ah me, the pinions by the spirit won 
Bring us no flight that mortal clay can know.2 
	18 	A little later, Faust sees the "black dog scampering through 
corn and stubble"-the poodle who is the devil himself, the Tempter in whose hellish fires Faust will soon singe his wings. Believing that he was expressing his great longing for the beauty 
1 Complexes are usually of great stability even though their outward manifestations change kaleidoscopically. Experimental researches have entirely convinced me of this fact. See my "Studies in Word Association." 
2 Trans. by Wayne, pp. 66-67· 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
of sun and earth, he "turned away from himself" and fell into the hands of the Evil One. 
Spurn this terrestrial sun, Leave, resolute, its loveliness,3 
Faust had said to himself but a little while before, in true recognition of his danger-for the worship of Nature and her beauties leads the medieval Christian to pagan thoughts which stand in antagonistic relationship to his conscious religion, just 
Mithraism was once the threatening rival of Christianity.4 
	119 	Faust's longing became his ruin. His longing for the other 
world brought in its train a loathing of life, so that he was on the brink of self-destruction.5 And his equally importunate longing for the beauties of this world plunged him into renewed ruin, doubt and wretchedness, which culminated in the tragedy of Gretchen's death. His mistake was that he made the WOl:st of both worlds by blindly following the urge of his libido, like a man overcome by strong and violent passions. Faust's conflict is a reflection of the collective conflict at the beginning of the Christian era, but in him, curiously enough, it takes the opposite course. The fearful powers of seduction against which the Christian had to defend himself with his absolute hope in a world to come can be seen from the example of Alypius, to which we have already referred. That civilization was foredoomed, because humanity itself revolted against it. We know that, even before the spread of Christianity, mankind was seized 
3 Ibid., p. 54, modified. 
4 As the reader will be aware, the last notoriously unsuccessful attempt to conquer Christianity with a nature religion was made by ]ulian the Apostate. 
5 This solution of the problem had its parallel in the flight from the world during the first few centuries after Christ (cities of the anchorites in the desert). The Desert Fathers mortified themselves through spirituality in order to escape the extreme brutality of the decadent Roman civilization. Asceticism occurs whenever the animal instincts are so strong that they need to be violently exterminated. Chamberlain (Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) saw asceticism as a biological suicide caused by the enormous amount of racial interbreeding among the Mediterranean peoples at that time. I believe that miscegenation makes rather for a coarsened joie de vivre. To all appearances the ascetics were ethical people who, disgusted with the melancholy of the age which was merely an expression of the disruption of the individual, put an end to their lives in order to mortify an attitude that was itself obsolete. 
81 

120 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
by wild, eschatological hopes of redemption. This mood may well be reflected in Virgil's eclogue: 
Now has come the last age foretold in the song of the Cumaean Sibyl; the great cycle of centuries begins anew. Now the Virgin 6 returns, and the reign of Saturn is restored. Now a new generation comes down from high heaven. Only do thou, chaste Lucina, favour the birth of the child, through whom the iron brood shall cease to be, and a golden race arise throughout the world. Thine own Apollo now is king .... Under thy governance any lingering traces of our guilt shall be wiped out, and the earth shall be freed from its perpetual fear. He shall have the gift of divine life, shall see heroes cart.. sort with gods and shall himself be seen mingling with them; he shall rule over a world to which his father's virtues have brought peace.7 
For many, the cult of asceticism that followed the wholesale expansion of Christianity denoted a new adventure: monasticism and the life of the anchorite. Faust takes the opposite road; for him the ascetic ideal is sheer death. He struggles for liberation and wins life by binding himself over to evil, thereby bringing about the death of what he loves most: Gretchen. He tears himself away from his grief and sacrifices his life in unceasing work, thus saving many lives.s His double mission as saviour and destroyer had been hinted at from the beginning: 
W AGNER: With what emotion must your noble soul Receive the acclamations of the crowd! ... 
F AUST: SO, with a nostrum of this hellish sort, 
We made these hilIs and valleys our resort, And ravaged there more deadly than the pest. These hands have ministered the deadly bane 
6 !llK-q, Justice, daughter of Zeus and Themis, who after the Golden Age forsook the degenerate earth. 
7 Bucolica, Eclogue IV. Trans. based on Fairclough, I, pp. 28-31. (Cf. Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes.) Thanks to this eclogue, Virgil was later honoured as a quasiChristian poet. To this position he also owes his function as psychopomp in Dante. 
	8 	"Below the hills a marshy plain 
Is poisoning all that we have won; This pestilential swamp to drain Would crown the work I have begun, 
Give many millions room to live." [Cf. MacNeice trans., p. 287.] 
82 

121 
122 
123 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH To thousands who have perished; I remain To hear cool murderers extolled and bless'd.9 
What makes Goethe's Faust so profoundly significant is that it formulates a problem that had been brewing for centuries, just as OediPus did for the Greek sphere of culture: how to extricate ourselves from between the Scylla of world-renunciation and the Charybdis of its acceptance. 
The hopeful note struck in the hymn to the Creator-God cannot long be sustained by our author. It is a pose that promises, but does not fulfil. The old longing will come back again, for a peculiar feature of all complexes that are simply left to work themselves out in the unconscious is that they lose nothing of their original affectivity, though their outward manifestations can change almost endlessly. One can therefore take the first poem as an unconscious attempt to solve the conflict by adopting a religious attitude, in much the same way as in earlier centuries people decided their conscious conflicts by the criterion of religion. This attempt fails. There now follows a second attempt, which is decidedly more worldly in tone, and unequivocal in meaning: "one raptured glance," and then-to die. From the supramundane sphere of religion her gaze turns, as in Faust/o to "this terrestrial sun." And already there is mingled in it something with another meaning-the moth that flutters round the light until it burns its wings. 
We now pass to what Miss Miller says about the poem: 
This little poem made a profound impression on me. I could not at first find a sufficiently clear and direct explanation of it. But a few days afterwards, having again taken up a philosophical article that I had read in Berlin the previous winter, which had delighted me extremely, and reading it aloud to a friend, I came upon these words: 
"The same passionate longing of the moth for the star, of man for God .... " I had completely forgotten them, but it seemed to me quite obvious that these were the words that had reappeared in my 9 Trans. by Wayne. pp. 64-65. modified. 
10 "FAUST: I long to join his quest 
On tireless wings uplifted from the ground. Then should I see, in deathless evening light, The world in cradled stillness at my feet .... Yet stirs my heart with ne.w-awakened might, 
The streams of quenchless light I long to drink .... " (Trans. by Wayne, p. 66.) 
83 

128 
SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
hypnagogic poem. Moreover, a play entitled The Moth and the Flamep which I saw a few years ago, also came back to me as another possible source of my poem. You see how often the word moth has been impressed upon me! 
The profound impression the poem made on the author means that it expresses a correspondingly intense psychic content. In the "passionate longing" we meet the profound yearning of the moth for the star, and of man for God-in other words, the moth is Miss Miller herself. Her final remark that the word "moth" had often been impressed upon her shows how often she had noticed the "moth" as being a suitable name for herself. Her longing for God resembles the longing of the moth for the "star." The reader will remember that this word has already occurred in the earlier material: "When the morning stars sang together," with reference to the ship's officer singing in the night-watch. The passionate longing for God is like that longing for the singing morning star. We pointed out in the previous chapter that this analogy was only to be expected-si parvis com- 
ponere magna solebam. 
	5 	It is, if you like, shameful and degrading that the more 
exalted longings of humanity, which alone make us what we are, should be so directly connected with an all-too-human passion. One is therefore inclined, despite the undeniability of the facts, to dispute the connection. What? A helmsman with bronzed skin and black mustachios, and the loftiest ideas of religion? Impossible! We do not doubt the incommensurability of these two objects, but one thing at least they have in common: both are the object of a passionate desire, and it remains to be seen whether the nature of the object alters the quality of the libido, or whether it is the same desire in both cases, i.e., the same emotional process. It is not at all certain psychologically-to use a banal comparison-whethe.r appetite as such has anything to do with the quality of the object desired. Outwardly, of course, it is of some importance which object is desired, but inwardly it is at least as important to know what kind of desire it is. Desire can be instinctual, compulsive, uninhibited, uncontrolled, greedy, irrational, sensual, etc., or it may be rational, considered, controlled, co-ordinated, adapted, ethical, reflective, and so on. 11 [For a note on this play, see Appendix, pp. 456f.-EnITORS.] 
84 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
As regards its psychological evaluation the how is more important than the what-si duo taciunt idem, non est idem. 
	126 	The quality of the desire is important because it endows its 
object with the moral and aesthetic qualities of goodness and beauty, and thus influences our relations with our fellow men and the world in a decisive way. Nature is beautiful because I love it, and good is everything that my feeling regards as good. Values are chiefly created by the quality of one's subjective reactions. This is not to deny the existence of "objective" values altogether; only, their validity depends upon the consensus of opinion. In the erotic sphere, it is abundantly evident how little the object counts, and how much the subjective reaction. 
	127 	Apparently Miss Miller did not think much of the officer, 
which is understandable enough from the human point of view -though it did not prevent the relationship from having a deep and lasting effect which even dragged in the Deity. The moods apparently produced by such dissimilar objects can hardly spring from them in reality, but must spring from the subjective experience of love. So when Miss Miller praises God or the sun, she really means her love, the instinct most deeply rooted in human nature. 
The reader will remember the chain of associations we adduced in the previous chapter: the singer-the God of Sound -the singing morning star-the Creator-the God of Light-of the sun-of fi.re-of love. With the changing of the erotic impression from positive to negative there is a predominance of light symbols for the object. In the second poem, where the longing comes out into the open, the object is the terrestrial sun. The libido having turned away from the concrete object, its object has become a psychic one, namely God. Psychologically, however, God is the name for a complex of ideas grouped round a powerful feeling; the feeling-tone is what really gives the complex its characteristic efficacy,12 for it represents an emotional tension which can be formulated in terms of energy. The light and fire attributes depict the intensity of the feeling-tone and are therefore expressions for the psychic el1ergy which manifests itself as libido. If one worships God, sun, or fire (cf. fig. 4), one is worshipping intensity and power, in other words the phe12 Cf. my "Psychology of Dementia Praecox" and my "Review of the Complex Theory." 
85 

131 
129 
130 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
nomenon of psychic energy as such, the libido. Every force and every phenomenon is a special form of energy. Form is both an image and a mode of manifestation. It expresses two things: the energy which takes shape in it, and the medium in which that energy appears. On the one hand one can say that energy creates its own image, and on the other hand that the character of the medium forces it into a definite form. One man will derive the idea of God from the sun, another will maintain that it is the numinous feelings it arouses which give the sun its godlike significance. The former, by attitude and temperament, believes more in the causal nexus of the environment, the latter more in the spontaneity of psychic experience. I fear it is the old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. For all that, I incline to the view that in this particular case the psychoenergic phenomenon not only takes precedence, but explains far more than the hypothesis of the causal primacy of the environment. 
I am therefore of the opinion that, in general, psychic energy or libido creates the God-image by making use of archetypal patterns, and that man in consequence worships the psychic force active within him as something divine. (PI. va.) We thus arrive at the objectionable conclusion that, from the psychological point of view, the God-image is a real but subjective phenomenon. As Seneca says: "God is near you, he is with you, he is within you," or, as in the First Epistle of John, "He who does not love does not know God; for God is love," and "If we love one another, God abides in us." 13 
To anyone who understands libido merely as the psychic energy over which he has conscious control, the religious relationship, as we have defined it, is bound to appear as a ridiculous game of hide-and-seek with oneself. But it is rather a question of the energy which belongs to the archetype, to the unconscious, and which is therefore not his to dispose of. This "game with oneself" is anything but ridiculous; on the contrary, it is extremely important. To carry a god around in yourself means a great deal; it is a guarantee of happiness, of power, and 
13 I John 4: 8 and 12 (RSV). "Caritas" in the Vulgate corresponds to a'Ya'lT17' This New Testament word derives, like a'Ya7rTJ<T'~ (love, affection), from a'Ya7riiv, 'to love, esteem, praise, approve, etc.' 'A'Ya'lT17 is, therefore, an unmistakably psychic function. 
86 

132 
133 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
even of omnipotence, in so far as these are attributes of divinity. To carry a god within oneself is practically the same as being God oneself. In Christianity, despite the weeding out of the most grossly sensual ideas and symbols, we can still find traces of this psychology. The idea of "becoming a god" is even more obvious in the pagan mystery cults, where the neophyte, after initiation, is himself lifted up to divine status: at the conclusion of the consecration rites in the syncretistic Isis mysteries 14 he was crowned with a crown of palm leaves, set up on a pedestal, and worshipped as Helios. (PI. VI.) In a magic papyrus, published by Dieterich as a Mithraic liturgy, there is a i~po~ A/yyO~ in which the neophyte says: "I am a star wandering together with you and shining up from the depths." 16 
In his religious ecstasy the neophyte makes himself the equal of the stars, just as the saint in the Middle Ages put himself, through the stigmata, on a level with Christ. St. Francis of Assisi carried the relationship even further by speaking of his brother the sun and his sister the moon.16 
Hippolytus insists on the future deification of the believer: 
"You have become God, you will be a companion of God and co-heir in Christ." He says of the deification: "That is the 'Know thyself.' " 17 Even Jesus proved his divine Sonship to the Jews by appealing to Psalm 82: 6: "I have said, Ye are gods" (John 10: 34). 
This idea of becoming a god is age-old. The old belief relegates it to the time after death, but the mystery cults bring it about in this world. An ancient Egyptian text represents it, very beautifully, as the triumphal song of the ascending soul: 
I am the god Atum, I who alone was. I am the god Ra at his first appearing. 
14 Apuleius, The Golden Ass, XI: "In my right hand I carried a torch blazing with flames; my head was garlanded with a fair crown of white palm, with the leaves standing out like rays. Thus I was adorned like the sun and set up as an image." 
15 Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, pp. 8-g. ('E'Yw .LjJ.' <TVjJ.7rAaVO~ VjJ.I.V a<Trr,p Kal be ToD (3aOou~ civItAajJ.7rwv.) 
16 In the same way, the Sassanid kings styled themselves "brothers of the sun and moon." In ancient Egypt the soul of every Pharaoh was a split-off from the Horus-sun. 
17 Elenchos, X, 34, 4· (rE'Yovas 'Yap (J.os la-lllJ~ OjJ.,ATJT-qS (JEOD Ital <TV'YKATJPOVO}J.Os XP'<T'roD./ ToVr' la-n TO 'YvM, er.aUTOV.) 
87 

SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
I am the great god who created himself, 
The lord of the gods, to whom no other god is equal. 
I was yesterday and know tomorrow; the battle-ground of the gods was made when I spoke. 
I know the name of that great god who dwells there. 
I am the god Min at his coming forth, whose feathers I place upon my head.18 
I am in my country, I come into my city. I am daily together with my father Atum. 
My impurity is driven out, and the sin which was in me is trodden under foot. 
I washed myself in the two great pools which are in Heracleopolis, in which the sacrifices of men are purified for that great god who dwells there. 
I go on my way, where I wash my head in the water of the righteous. 
I reach this land of the glorified and enter in at the splendid portal. 
You who stand before me, reach me your hands, it is I, I am become one of you. I am daily together with my father Atum.19 
	134 	When man becomes God, his importance and power are 
enormously increased.20 That seems to have been its main purpose: to strengthen the individual against his all-too-human weakness and insecurity in personal life. But the strengthening of his power-consciousness is only the outward effect of his becoming God; far more important are the deeper lying processes in the realm of feeling. For whoever introverts libido, i.e., withdraws it from the external object, suffers the necessary consequences of introversion: the libido which is turned inwards, into 
18 Cf. the coronation rite mentioned above. Feathers symbolize power. The feather crown = crown of sun rays, halo. Crowning is in itself an identification with the sun. For instance the spiked crown appeared on Roman coins from the time when the Caesars were identified with the Sol invictus. Solis invicti comes: 'companion of the unconquerable sun.' The halo means the same thing; it is an image of the sun, as is the tonsure. The priests of Isis had smooth-shaven heads that shone like stars (Apuleius). 
19 "The Coming Forth by Day from the Underworld," in Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 343 (trans. modified). 
20 The text of the Mithraic liturgy reads: 'E')'w E',J1.' uVJ1.7r}.avos vJ1.iv aUTr,p Kal •• TaU /30.(Jous aVaAaJ1.7rw •... TaVTa uou .17roVTOS .V(JEWS 0 oiu.os O,7rAw(Jr,uETa, (I am a star wan· dering with you and shining up from the depths .... When you have said this, the disc of the sun will immediately unfold). Through his prayer, the celebrant has the divine power to make the sun come out. 
88 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
the subject, reverts to the individual past and digs up from the treasure-house of memory those images glimpsed long ago, which bring back the time when the world was a full and rounded whole. First and foremost are the memories of childhood, among them the imagos of father and mother. These are unique and imperishable, and in adult life not many difficulties are needed to reawaken those memories and make them active. The regressive reactivation of the father- and mother-imagos plays an important role in religion. The benefits of religion are equivalent, in their effects, to the parental care lavished upon the child, and religious feelings are rooted in unconscious memories of certain tender emotions in early infancy-memories of archetypal intuitions, as expressed in the above hymn: 
I am in my country, I come into my city. I am daily together with my father Atum.21 
	135 	The visible father of the world is the sun, the heavenly fire, 
for which reason father, God, sun, and fire are mythologically synonymous. The well-known fact that in worshipping the sun's strength we pay homage to the great generative force of Nature is the plainest possible evidence-if evidence were still neededthat in God we honour the energy of the archetype. This symbolism is expressed very plastically in the third logos of the Dieterich papyrus: after the second prayer, stars float down towards the neophyte from the disc of the sun-"five-pointed, in great numbers and filling the whole air." "When the sun's disc has opened, you will see an immense circle, and fiery doors which are closed." The neophyte then utters the following prayer: 
Give ear to me, hear me, Lord, who hast fastened the fiery bolts of heaven with thy spirit, double-bodied, fire-ruler, creator of light, firebreathing, fiery-hearted, shining spirit, rejoicing in fire, beautiful light, Lord of light, fiery-bodied, giver of light, sower of fire, confounding with fire, living light, whirling fire, mover of light, hurler 
21 Cf. the sayings in John: "I and the Father are one" (10 : 30). "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (14 : 9). "Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me" (14: I I). "I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father" (16: 28). "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God" (20: 17). (All RSV.) 
89 

9 
.8 
SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
of thunderbolts, glorious light, multiplier of light, holder of fiery light, conqueror of the stars, etc.22 
	6 	The invocation is an almost inexhaustible catalogue of light 
and fire attributes, and for sheer extravagance can only be compared with the endless vociferations about "love" in Christian mysticism. Among the many texts which might be used as an example I select this passage from the writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-77): 
o Lord, love me excessively and love me often and long; the oftener you love me, so much the purer dq I become; the more excessively you love me, the more beautiful I become; the longer you love me, the more holy do I become here upon earth. 
	,7 	God answers: 
That I love you often I have from my nature, for I myself am love. That I love you excessively I have from my desire, for I too desire that men love me excessively. That I love you long I have from my everlastingness, for I am without end.23 
Religious regression makes use of the parental imago, but only as a symbol-that is to say, it clothes the archetype in the image of the parents, just as it bodies forth the archetype's energy by making use of sensuous ideas like fire, light, heat,24 fecundity, generative power, and so on. In mysticism the inwardly perceived vision of the Divine is often nothing but sun or light, and is rarely, if ever, personified. (Fig. 2.) For example, there is this significant passage in the Mithraic liturgy: "The path of the visible gods will appear through the disc of the sun, 
who is God my father." 25 
Hildegard of Bingen (1100-1178) expresses herself as follows: 
22 'E1l"aKOVUOv )Wv, liKoV<1oV !'OV "VPLE 0 uvvo~uaf 1l"VEv!'aTL TO. 1l"VpLVa KAiilJpa TOV ovpavov, oLuw!,aro~, 1l"Vpl7rOAE, q,WTOf KTlura ••• 1l"Vpl1l"VOE, 1l"VplIJV!,E, 1l"VEv!,aT6cpw~, 1l"VPLxapij, KaAAlq,Wf, cpwrOKpaTWp, 1l"VpLuw!'aTE, cpwToo6ra, 1l"vpLu1l"6pE, 1l"VPlKA6.E, cpwr6(JLE, 1l"vpLil,va, ci>''';TOKLvijTa, KEpaVVOKA6vE, cpwTO~ KAim, av~ulcpw~, 'V1l"VpLuXl'Julq,w~, aurpooa!,a, KTA. 23 From Buber, Ekstatische Konfessionen, p. 66. 
24 Renan, Dialogues, p. 168, says: "Avant que la religion fl'lt arrivee a proclamer que Dieu doit ~tre mis dans l'absolu et l'ideal, c'est·a-dire hors du monde, un seul culte mt raisonnable et scientifique, ce mt le culte du soleil." 
25 Dieterich, p. 6: 'H OE 7ropEla rw. OPW}l.fVWV (JEW. Iho. TOV olu"ov, 1l"aTpOf )Wv, BEOV q,av~uETa'. 
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140 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
But the light I see is not local, but is everywhere, and brighter far than the cloud which supports the sun. I can in no way know the form of this light, just as I cannot see the sun's disc entire. But in this light I see at times, though not often, another light which is called by me the living light, but when and in what manner I see 
Fig. 2. The Eye of God frontispiece to ]akob B6hme, Seraphinisch Blumengiirtlein, Amsterdam, I700 
this I do not know how to say. And when I see it all weariness and need is lifted from me, and all at once I feel like a simple girl and not like an old woman.26 
Symeon, the "New Theologian" (970-1040), says: 
My tongue lacks words, and what happens in me my spirit sees clearly but does not explain. It sees the Invisible, that emptiness of all forms, simple throughout, not complex, and in extent infinite. For it sees no beginning, and it sees no end, and is entirely uncon26 In Pitra, Analecta sacra, VIII, p. 333. Cited from Buber, pp. 51f. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
scious of any middle, and does not know what to call that which it sees. Something complete appears, it seems to me, not indeed with the thing itself, but through a kind of particiPation. For you enkindle fire from fire, and you receive the whole fire; but this thing remains undiminished and undivided as before. Similarly, that which is imparted separates itself from the first, and spreads like something corporeal into many lights. But this is something spiritual, immeasurable, indivisible, and inexhaustible. For it is not separated when it becomes many, but remains undivided, and is in me, and rises in my poor heart like a sun or circular disc of the sun, like light, for it is a light.27 

Fig. 3. The Voyage of the Sun: The Western Goddess in the Barge of Evening gives the Sun-disc to the Eastern Goddess in the Barge of Morning 
Late Egyptian 
	P 	That the thing perceived as an inner light, as the sun of the 
other world, is an emotional component of the psyche, is clear from Symeon's words: 
And questing after it, my spirit sought to comprehend the splendour it had seen, but found it not as a creature and could not get away from created things, that it might embrace that uncreated and uncomprehended splendour. Nevertheless it wandered everywhere and strove to behold it. It searched through the air, it wandered over the heavens, it crossed the abysses, it searched, so it seemed, to the ends of the world.28 But in all that it found nothing, for all was 
27 "Love-songs to God," in Buber, p. 40. There is a related symbolism in Carlyle ("Heroes and Hero Worship," p. 280): "The great fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made; he is great by that, first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth, and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him." One could take any amount of examples from literature. For instance, S. FriedHinder says, in ]ugend (1910), p. 823: "Her longing demands only 
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V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
the purest from the beloved. Like the sun, she burns to ashes with the flame of her immense vitality anything that does not desire to be light. This sun-like eye of love," etc. 
28 This image contains the psychological root of the "heavenly wanderings of the soul," an idea that is very old. It is an image of the wandering sun (fig. 3), which from its rising to its setting travels over the world. This comparison has been indelibly imprinted on man's imagination, as is clear from the poem "Grief" of Mathilde von Wesendonck (1828-1902): 
The sun, every evening weeping, Reddens its beautiful eyes for you; When early death seizes you, Bathing in the mirror of the sea. 
Still in its old splendour 
The glory rises from the dark world; You awaken anew in the morning Like a proud conqueror. 
Ah, why then should I lament, When my heart, so heavy, sees you? Must the sun itself despair? 
Must the sun set? 
And does death alone bear life? Do griefs alone give joys? 
0, how grateful I am that 
Such pains have given me naturel 
There is another parallel in a poem by Ricarda Huch (1864-1947): 
As the earth, separating from the sun, Withdraws in quick flight into the stormy night, Starring the naked body with cold snow, Deafened, it takes away the summer joy. 
And sinking deeper in the shadows of winter, Suddenly draws close to that which it f1ees, 
Sees itself warmly embraced with rosy light Leaning against the lost consort. 
Thus I went, suffering the punishment of exile, Away from your countenance, into the ancient place. Unprotected, turning to the desolate north, 
Always retreating deeper into the sleep of death; 
And then would I awake on your heart, 
:Blinded by the splendour of the dawn. 
[Both poems as trans. in the Hinkle edn. (1916).] 
The heavenly journey is a special instance of the journeys of the hero, a motH that was continued as the peregrinatio in alchemy. The earliest appearance 01 this motif is probably the heavenly journey of Plato (?) in the Harranite treatise "Platonis liber quartorum" (Theatrum chemicum, V, p. 145). See also my Psychology and Alchemy, p. 355. 
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44 
The whistling and clicking with the tongue are archaic devices for attracting the theriomorphic deity. Roaring has a similar significance: "You are to look up at him and give forth a long roar, as with a horn, using all your breath and pressing your sides, then kiss the amulet" etc.32 "My soul roars with the 
SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION: ONE 
created. And I lamented and was sorrowful, and my heart burned, and I lived as one distraught in mind. But it came as it was wont, and descending like a luminous cloud, seemed to envelop my whole head, so that I cried out dismayed. But flying away again it left me alone. And when I wearily sought it, I realized suddenly that it was within me, and in the midst of my heart it shone like the light of a 
spherical sun.29 
In Nietzsche's "Glory and Eternity" we meet with essentially 
the same symboli,m: 
Hush! 
I see vastness! 
And of vasty things One should not speak- 
Sa"Ye in vast wordsl Well then: 
Grandiloquize, charmed wisdom mine! 
Look up: 
There roll the star-strewn seas, Night, stillness, deathly silent roar! BellOld, a sign: 
Slowly, from endless space. 
A glittering constellation floats towards me.M 
It is not surprising that Nietzsche's great solitude should have called awake certain images which the old cults had exalted as religious ideas. In the visions of the Mithraic liturgy we move among ideas of a very similar kind, which can now be understood without difficulty as ecstatic libido-symbols: 
But after you have said the second prayer, where silence is twice commanded, then whistle twice and click twice with the tongue, and immediately you will see stars coming down from the disc of the sun, five-pointed, in large numbers and filling the whole air. But say once again Silence! Silencel 31 
42 29 Buber, p. 45· 
81 Dieterich. pp. Sf.30 Werke, VIII, p. 427. 32 Ibid., p. 13. 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
voice of a hungry lion," says Mechthild of Magdeburg. '.'As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 0 God" (Psalm 42 : 1). As so often happens, the ceremony has dwindled to a mere figure of speech. Schizophrenia, however, infuses new life into the old usage, as in the case of the "bellowing miracle" 33 described by Schreber, who in this way gave God, sadly uninformed about the affairs of humanity, notice of his existence. 
	145 	Silence is commanded, then the vision of light is revealed. 
The similarity between the situation of the neophyte and Nietzsche's poetic vision is very striking. N ietzsche says "constellation"; but constellations, as we know, are mainly theriomorphic or anthropomorphic. The papyrus has aaTEpa5 1l'EVTaOaKTVAta[OV5 (literally, 'five-fingered stars,' similar to the 'rosy-fingered Dawn'), which is a pure anthropomorphic image. Hence, if one looked long enough, one would expect that a living being would form itself out of the fiery image, a "constellation" in the form of a man or animal-for libido-symbols do not stop at sun, light, and fire, but have a whole range of other expressions at their disposal. I leave N ietzsche to speak for himself: 
The Beacon 
Here, where the island grew amid the seas, Like a high-towering sacrificial rock, 
Here under the darkling heavens Zarathustra lights his mountain-fires. 
This flame with its grey-white belly 
Hisses its desire into the chilI distances, Stretching its neck to ever purer heightsA snake upreared in impatience: 
This emblem I set up before me. This flame is my own soul, Insatiable for new distances, 
Sending upwards its blaze of silent heat. 
To all the lonely I now throw my fishing-rod: 
Give answer to the flame's impatience, Let me, the fisher on high mountains, Catch my seventh, last solitude! 34 
	8S Memoirs, pp. 4. 162ft 	34 From Ecce Homo, trans. based on A. M. Ludovici's. 
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Fig. 4. Germanic sun-idol From the Sachsisch Chronicon, 1596 
	146 	Here the libido turns into fire, flame, and a snake. The 
Egyptian symbol of the "living sun-disc"-a disc with the two intertwined Uraeus serpents (pI. vn)-is a combination of both these libido analogies. And the sun-disc with its fructifying warmth is analogous to the fructifying warmth of love. The comparison of libido with sun and fire is essentially a "comparison by analogy." There is also a "causative" element in it, because 
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V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
sun and fire, as beneficent forces, are objects of human love (for instance the sun-hero Mithras is called the "well-beloved"). In Nietzsche's poem the comparison is also a causative one, but this time in the opposite sense: the snake comparison is unmistakably phallic. The phallus is the source of life and libido, the creator and worker of miracles, and as such it was worshipped everywhere. We have, therefore, three ways of symbolizing the libido: 
1.	Comparison by analogy: as sun and fire (fig. 4). 
2. Causative Comparisons: (a) with objects. The libido is characterized by its object, e.g., the health-giving sun. (b) with the subject. The libido is characterized by its instrument or by something analogous to it, e.g., the phallus or its analogue, the snake. 
	'47 	To these three fundamental forms of comparison the:re must 
be added a fourth: the functional comparison, where the "tertium comparationis" is activity. For instance, the libido is fertile like the bull, dangerous like the lion or boar (becauloie of the fury of its passion), and lustful like the ever-rutting ass, and so on. These comparisons represent so many possible ways of symbolization, and for this. reason all the infinitely varied symbols, so far as they are libido-images, can be reduced to a common denominator-the libido and its properties. This psychological simplification is in accord with the historical attempts of civilization to unify and simplify, in a higher synthesis, the infinite number of gods. We come across this attempt even in ancient Egypt, where the boundless polytheism of local demon-worship finally made simplification necessary. The various local gods, such as Amon of Thebes, Horus of the East, Horus of Edfu, Khnum of Elephantine, Atum of Heliopolis, etc., were all identified with the sun-god, Ra.35 In the hymns to the sun, the composite deity Amon-Ra-Harmachis-Atum was invoked as "the only god, in truth, the living one." 36 Amenophis IV (XVIIIth Dynasty) went the furthest in this direction: he replaced all former gods by the. "great living disc of the sun," whose official title was: "Lord of the Two Horizons, exulting on the horizon in his name: Glittering Splendour, which is in the sun-disc." "In fact," adds Erman,37 "it was not a sun-god who was adored, but 
35 Even the water-god Sob1\., who appeared as a crocodHe, was identified with Ra. 
	36 Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 261. 	37 Ibid., p. 262. 
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SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMA nON: ONE 
the material sun itself, which, by the hands of his beams,s8 bestowed upon living beings that 'eternal life' which was in him." (Fig. 5; cf. also fig. 7 and pI. lb.) 
	148 	Amenophis IV achieved, by his reforms, a psychologically 
valuable work or interpretation. He united all the bull,39 ram,40 crocodile,41 and pile-dwelling 42 gods into the sun-disc, and 

Fig. 5. The life-giving Sun: Amenophis IV on his throne 
Relief, Egypt 
made it clear that their various attributes were compatible with those of the sun.43 A similar fate overtook Hellenic and Roman polytheism as a result of the syncretistic strivings of later cen38 Cf. the "five-fingered stars" mentioned above. 
89 The Apis-bull as manifestation of Ptah. 
	40 Amon. 	41 Sobk of the Fayum. 
42 The god of Dedu, in the Delta, who was worshipped as a wooden post. 
43 This reformation was initiated with a great deal of fanaticism but soon collapsed. 
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149 

V. THE SONG OF THE MOTH 
turies. An excellent illustration of this is the beautiful prayer of Lucius to the Queen of Heaven (the moon): 
Queen of heaven, whether thou be named Ceres, bountiful mother of earthly fruits, or heavenly Venus, or Phoebus' sister, or Pros erpina, who strikest terror with midnight ululations ... , thou that with soft feminine brightness dost illume the walls of all cities .... 44 
These attempts to reunite the basic archetypes after polytheism had multiplied them into countless variants and personified them as separate gods prove that such analogies must forcibly have obtruded themselves at a fairly early date. Herodotus is full of references of this kind, not to mention the various systems known to the Greco-Roman world. But the striving for unity is opposed by a possibly even stronger tendency to create multiplicity, so that even in strictly monotheistic religions like Christianity the polytheistic tendency cannot be suppressed. The deity is divided into three parts, and on top of that come all the heavenly hierarchies. These two tendencies are in constant warfare: sometimes there is only one God with countless attributes, sometimes there are many gods, who are simply called by different names in different places, and who personify one or the other attribute of their respective archetype, as we have seen in the case of the Egyptian gods. This brings us back to Nietzsche's poem "The Beacon." The flame was there used as a libido-image, theriomorphically represented (fig. 6) as a snake (and at the same time as an image of the soul: 45 "This flame is 
44 Apuleius, XI, 2. ("Regina eoeli, sive tu Ceres, alma frugum parens, seu tu eoelestis Venus ... seu Phoebi soror ... seu noeturnis ululatibus horrenda Proserpina ... ista luee feminea eonlustrans cuncta moenia.") It is worth noting that the Humanists too (I am thinking of a passage in Mutianus Rufus) developed the same syncretism and maintained that there were really only two gods in antiquity, a masculine and a feminine. 
45 The light or fire-substance was ascribed not only to divinity but also to the soul, as for instance in the system of Mani, and again with the Greeks, who thought of it as a fiery breath of air. The Holy Ghost of the New Testament appeared to the apostles in the form of flames, because the pneuma was believed to be fiery (cf. Dieterich, p. 116). The Iranian conception of Hvareno was similar: it signified the "Grace of Heaven" through which the monarch mled. This "Grace" was understood as a sort of fire or shining glory, something very substantial (cf. Cumont, Mysteries; p. 94). We come across ideas of the same type in Kemer's Seeress of Prevorst. 
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