We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have…
The reality of evil and its incompatibility with good cleave the opposites asunder and lead inexorably to the crucifixion and suspension of everything that lives. Since ‘the soul is by nature Christian’ this result is bound to come as infallibly as it did in the life of Jesus: we all have to be ‘crucified…
The Tablet of Shamash, 900 B.C. Carl Jung, on the symbolism of the Cross It seems to have been one of the most original intuitions of man that the right form to express the source of mana would be the cross…. It is an absolute irrational fact to me that vital energy should have anything…
C.G. Jung, On the meaning of the crucifixion Nobody who finds himself on the road to wholeness can escape that characteristic suspension which is the meaning of crucifixion. For he will infallibly run into things that thwart and “cross” him: First, the thing he has no wish to be (the shadow): Second, the thing he…
The Incantation in the Red Book Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning. And behold it. And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze. Christmas has come. The God is in the egg. I have prepared a rug for my God, an expensive red rug from the land of…
C.G. Jung on The Symbolic Life You see, man is in need of a symbolic life – badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational, or irrational things . . . but we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere except where we participate in the ritual…
Jung talks about Pisces, The Fishes, and the Fish Above all it is the connections with the Age of the Fishes which are attested by the fish symbol, either contemporaneously with the gospels themselves (“fishers of men”, fishermen as the first disciples, miracle of loaves and fishes) or immediately afterwards in the post-apostolic…
C.G. Jung: “‘Fishes and snakes are favourite symbols for describing psychic happenings or experiences that suddenly dart out of the unconscious.” Paul Klee The Golden Fish C.G. Jung on Fish Symbolism The serpent is an equivalent of the fish. The consensus of opinion interpreted the Redeemer equally as a fish and a serpent; he is…
C.G. Jung: The Principle of Understanding Dreams Symbolically It is a well-known fact that one of the principles of analytic psychology is that the dream images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, that they are not to be taken literally just as they are presented in sleep, but that behind them a…