by C. G. Jung
9 These works are distributed mainly among volumes 4, 8, 10, and 16 of the Collected Works.
10 Both studies are included in Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW 11).
11 The more serious alchemists realized that the purpose of their work was not the transmutation of base metals into gold, but the production of an aurum non vulgi (“not the common gold”) or aurum philosophicum (“philosophical gold”). In other words, they were concerned with spiritual values and the problem of psychic transformation.—A. J.
12 English trans., under same title, in 1959 (CW 9, ii).
13 Cf. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New York and London, 1959); also in Civilization in Transition (CW 10).
14 In The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16).
15 CW 14.
16 After the death of Mrs. Jung in 1955, Dr. Marie-Louise von Franz took up the work on the Grail and brought it to safe harbor in 1958. Cf. Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz: The Grail Legend, trans. by Andrea Dykes, New York and London, 1930).—A. J.
17 In C. G. Jung and W. Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (New York and London, 1954); also in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW 8).
18 The essays in this book are mostly contained in volumes 8, 9 (i), and 11 of the Collected Works.
• VIII •
The Tower
GRADUALLY, through my scientific work, I was able to put my fantasies and the contents of the unconscious on a solid footing. Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me; something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the “Tower,” the house which I built for myself at Bollingen.
It was settled from the start that I would build near the water. I had always been curiously drawn by the scenic charm of the upper lake of Zürich, and so in 1922 I bought some land in Bollingen. It is situated in the area of St. Meinrad and is old church land, having formerly belonged to the monastery of St. Gall.
At first I did not plan a proper house, but merely a kind of primitive one-story dwelling. It was to be a round structure with a hearth in the center and bunks along the walls. I more or less had in mind an African hut where the fire, ringed by a few stones, burns in the middle, and the whole life of the family revolves around this center. Primitive huts concretize an idea of wholeness, a familial wholeness in which all sorts of small domestic animals likewise participate. But I altered the plan even during the first stages of building, for I felt it was too primitive. I realized it would have to be a regular two-story house, not a mere hut crouched on the ground. So in 1923 the first round house was built, and when it was finished I saw that it had become a suitable dwelling tower.
The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this tower was intense from the start. It represented for me the maternal hearth. But I became increasingly aware that it did not yet express everything that needed saying, that something was still lacking. And so, four years later, in 1927, the central structure was added, with a tower-like annex.
After some time had passed—again the interval was four years—I once more had a feeling of incompleteness. The building still seemed too primitive to me, and so in 1931 the tower-like annex was extended. I wanted a room in this tower where I could exist for myself alone. I had in mind what I had seen in Indian houses, in which there is usually an area—though it may be only a corner of a room separated off by a curtain—to which the inhabitants can withdraw. There they meditate for perhaps a quarter or half an hour, or do Yoga exercises. Such an area of retirement is essential in India, where people live crowded very close together.
In my retiring room I am by myself. I keep the key with me all the time; no one else is allowed in there except with my permission. In the course of the years I have done paintings on the walls, and so have expressed all those things which have carried me out of time into seclusion, out of the present into timelessness. Thus the second tower became for me a place of spiritual concentration.
In 1935, the desire arose in me for a piece of fenced-in land. I needed a larger space that would stand open to the sky and to nature. And so—once again after an interval of four years—I added a courtyard and a loggia by the lake, which formed a fourth element that was separated from the unitary threeness of the house. Thus a quaternity had arisen, four different parts of the building, and, moreover, in the course of twelve years.
After my wife’s death in 1955, I felt an inner obligation to become what I myself am. To put it in the language of the Bollingen house, I suddenly realized that the small central section which crouched so low, so hidden, was myself! I could no longer hide myself behind the “maternal” and the “spiritual” towers. So, in that same year, I added an upper story to this section, which represents myself, or my ego-personality. Earlier, I would not have been able to do this; I would have regarded it as presumptuous self-emphasis. Now it signified an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. With that the building was complete. I had started the first tower in 1923, two months after the death of my mother. These two dates are meaningful because the Tower, as we shall see, is connected with the dead.
From the beginning I felt the Tower as in some way a place of maturation—a maternal womb or a maternal figure in which I could become what I was, what I am and will be. It gave me a feeling as if I were being reborn in stone. It is thus a concretization of the individuation process, a memorial aere perennius. During the building work, of course, I never considered these matters. I built the house in sections, always following the concrete needs of the moment. It might also be said that I built it in a kind of dream. Only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.
At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. Here I am, as it were, the “age-old son of the mother.” That is how alchemy puts it, very wisely, for the “old man,” the “ancient,” whom I had already experienced as a child, is personality No. 2, who has always been and always will be. He exists outside time and is the son of the maternal unconscious. In my fantasies he took the form of Philemon, and he comes to life again at Bollingen.
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world’s and the psyche’s hinterland.
I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!
In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live “in modest harmony with nature.”1 Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future. Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together.
In 1950 I made a kind of monument out of stone to express what the Tower means to me. The story of how this stone came to me is a curious one. I needed stones for building the enclosing wall for the so-called garden, and ordered them from the quarry near Bollingen. I was standing by when the mason gave all the measurements to the owner of the quarry, who wrote them down in his notebook. When the stones arrived by ship and were unloaded, it turned out that the cornerstone had altogether the wrong measurements; instead of a triangular stone, a square block had been sent: a perfect cube of much larger dimensions than had been ordered, about twenty inches thick. The mason was furious and told the barge men to take it right back with them.
But
when I saw the stone, I said, “No, that is my stone. I must have it!” For I had seen at once that it suited me perfectly and that I wanted to do something with it. Only I did not yet know what.
The first thing that occurred to me was a Latin verse by the alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova (died 1313). I chiseled this into the stone; in translation it goes:
Here stands the mean, uncomely stone,
‘Tis very cheap in price!
The more it is despised by fools,
The more loved by the wise.
This verse refers to the alchemist’s stone, the lapis, which is despised and rejected.
Soon something else emerged. I began to see on the front face, in the natural structure of the stone, a small circle, a sort of eye, which looked at me. I chiseled it into the stone, and in the center made a tiny homunculus. This corresponds to the “little doll” (pupilla)—yourself—which you see in the pupil of another’s eye; a kind of Kabir, or the Telesphoros of Asklepios. Ancient statues show him wearing a hooded cloak and carrying a lantern. At the same time he is a pointer of the way. I dedicated a few words to him which came into my mind while I was working. The inscription is in Greek; the translation goes:
Time is a child—playing like a child—playing a board game—the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams.2
These words came to me—one after the other—while I worked on the stone.
On the third face, the one facing the lake, I let the stone itself speak, as it were, in a Latin inscription. These sayings are more or less quotations from alchemy. This is the translation:
I am an orphan, alone; nevertheless I am found everywhere. I am one, but opposed to myself. I am youth and old man at one and the same time. I have known neither father nor mother, because I have had to be fetched out of the deep like a fish, or fell like a white stone from heaven. In woods and mountains I roam, but I am hidden in the innermost soul of man. I am mortal for everyone, yet I am not touched by the cycle of aeons.
In conclusion, under the saying of Arnaldus de Villanova, I set down in Latin the words “In remembrance of his seventy-fifth birthday C. G. Jung made and placed this here as a thanks offering, in the year 1950.”
When the stone was finished, I looked at it again and again, wondering about it and asking myself what lay behind my impulse to carve it.
The stone stands outside the Tower, and is like an explanation of it. It is a manifestation of the occupant, but one which remains incomprehensible to others. Do you know what I wanted to chisel into the back face of the stone? “Le cri de Merlin!” For what the stone expressed reminded me of Merlin’s life in the forest, after he had vanished from the world. Men still hear his cries, so the legend runs, but they cannot understand or interpret them.
Merlin represents an attempt by the medieval unconscious to create a parallel figure to Parsifal. Parsifal is a Christian hero, and Merlin, son of the devil and a pure virgin, is his dark brother. In the twelfth century, when the legend arose, there were as yet no premises by which his intrinsic meaning could be understood. Hence he ended in exile, and hence “le cri de Merlin” which still sounded from the forest after his death. This cry that no one could understand implies that he lives on in unredeemed form. His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad. It might be said that the secret of Merlin was carried on by alchemy, primarily in the figure of Mercurius. Then Merlin was taken up again in my psychology of the unconscious and—remains uncomprehended to this day! That is because most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious. Again and again I have had to learn how hard this is for people.
I was in Bollingen just as the first tower was being finished. This was the winter of 1923-24. As far as I can recall, there was no snow on the ground; perhaps it was early spring. I had been alone perhaps for a week, perhaps longer. An indescribable stillness prevailed.
One evening—I can still remember it precisely—I was sitting by the fireplace and had put a big kettle on the fire to make hot water for washing up. The water began to boil and the kettle to sing. It sounded like many voices, or stringed instruments, or even like a whole orchestra. It was just like polyphonic music, which in reality I cannot abide, though in this case it seemed to me peculiarly interesting. It was as though there were one orchestra inside the Tower and another one outside. Now one dominated, now the other, as though they were responding to each other.
I sat and listened, fascinated. For far more than an hour I listened to the concert, to this natural melody. It was soft music, containing, as well, all the discords of nature. And that was right, for nature is not only harmonious; she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic. The music was that way too: an outpouring of sounds, having the quality of water and of wind—so strange that it is simply impossible to describe it.
On another such still night when I was alone in Bollingen (it was in the late winter or early spring of 1924) I awoke to the sound of soft footsteps going around the Tower. Distant music sounded, coming closer and closer, and then I heard voices laughing and talking. I thought, “Who can be prowling around? What is this all about? There is only the little footpath along the lake, and scarcely anybody ever walks on it!” While I was thinking these things I became wide awake, and went to the window. I opened the shutters—all was still. There was no one in sight, nothing to be heard—no wind—nothing—nothing at all.
“This is really strange,” I thought. I was certain that the footsteps, the laughter and talk, had been real. But apparently I had only been dreaming. I returned to bed and mulled over the way we can deceive ourselves after all, and what might have been the cause of such a strange dream. In the midst of this, I fell asleep again—and at once the same dream began: once more I heard footsteps, talk, laughter, music. At the same time I had a visual image of several hundred dark-clad figures, possibly peasant boys in their Sunday clothes, who had come down from the mountains and were pouring in around the Tower, on both sides, with a great deal of loud trampling, laughing, singing, and playing of accordions. Irritably, I thought, “This is really the limit! I thought it was a dream and now it turns out to be reality!” At this point, I woke up. Once again I jumped up, opened the window and shutters, and found everything just the same as before: a deathly still moonlit night. Then I thought: “Why, this is simply a case of haunting!”
Naturally I asked myself what it meant when a dream was so insistent on its reality and at the same time on my being awake. Usually we experience that only when we see a ghost. Being awake means perceiving reality. The dream therefore represented a situation equivalent to reality, in which it created a kind of wakened state. In this sort of dream, as opposed to ordinary dreams, the unconscious seems bent on conveying a powerful impression of reality to the dreamer, an impression which is emphasized by repetition. The sources of such realities are known to be physical sensations on the one hand, and archetypal figures on the other.
That night everything was so completely real, or at least seemed to be so, that I could scarcely sort out the two realities. Nor could I make anything of the dream itself. What was the meaning of these music-making peasant boys passing by in a long procession? It seemed to me they had come out of curiosity, in order to look at the Tower.
Never again did I experience or dream anything similar, and I cannot recall ever having heard of a parallel to it. It was only much later that I found an explanation. This was when I came across the seventeenth-century Lucerne chronicle by Rennward Cysat. He tells the following story: On a high pasture of Mount Pilatus, which is particularly notorious for spooks—it is said that Wotan to this day practices his magic arts there—Cysat, while climbing the mountain, was disturbed one night by a procession of men who poured past his hut on both sides, playing music and singing—precisely what I had experienced at the Tower.
The next morning Cys
at asked the herdsman with whom he had spent that night what could have been the meaning of it. The man had a ready explanation: those must be the departed folk—sälig Lüt, in Swiss dialect; the phrase also means blessed folk—namely, Wotan’s army of departed souls. These, he said, were in the habit of walking abroad and showing themselves.
It may be suggested that this is a phenomenon of solitude, the outward emptiness and silence being compensated by the image of a crowd of people. This would put it in the same class with the hallucinations of hermits, which are likewise compensatory. But do we know what realities such stories may be founded on? It is also possible that I had been so sensitized by the solitude that I was able to perceive the procession of “departed folk” who passed by.
The explanation of this experience as a psychic compensation never entirely satisfied me, and to say that it was a hallucination seemed to me to beg the question. I felt obliged to consider the possibility of its reality, especially in view of the seventeenth-century account which had come my way.
It would seem most likely to have been a synchronistic phenomenon. Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or visions very often have some correspondence in external reality. There actually existed, as I discovered, a real parallel to my experience. In the Middle Ages just such gatherings of young men took place. These were the Reisläufer (mercenaries) who usually assembled in spring, marched from Central Switzerland to Locarno, met at the Casa di Ferro in Minusio and then marched on together to Milan. In Italy they served as soldiers, fighting for foreign princes. My vision, therefore, might have been one of these gatherings which took place regularly each spring when the young men, with singing and jollity, bade farewell to their native land.