by C. G. Jung
When we began to build at Bollingen in 1923, my eldest daughter came to see the spot, and exclaimed, “What, you’re building here? There are corpses about!” Naturally I thought, “Ridiculous! Nothing of the sort!” But when we were constructing the annex four years later, we did come upon a skeleton. It lay at a depth of seven feet in the ground. An old rifle bullet was imbedded in the elbow. From various indications it seemed evident that the body had been thrown into the grave in an advanced state of decay. It belonged to one of the many dozens of French soldiers who were drowned in the Linth in 1799 and were later washed up on the shores of the Upper Lake. These men were drowned when the Austrians blew up the bridge of Grynau which the French were storming. A photograph of the open grave with the skeleton and the date of its discovery—August 22, 1927—is preserved at the Tower.
I arranged a regular burial on my property, and fired a gun three times over the soldier’s grave. Then I set up a gravestone with an inscription for him. My daughter had sensed the presence of the dead body. Her power to sense such things is something she inherits from my grandmother on my mother’s side.
In the winter of 1955-56 I chiseled the names of my paternal ancestors on three stone tablets and placed them in the courtyard of the Tower. I painted the ceiling with motifs from my own and my wife’s arms, and from those of my sons-in-law. The Jung family originally had a phoenix for its arms, the bird obviously being connected with “young,” “youth,” “rejuvenation.” My grandfather changed the elements of the arms, probably out of a spirit of resistance toward his father. He was an ardent Freemason and Grand Master of the Swiss lodge. This had a good deal to do with the changes he made in the armorial bearings. I mention this point, in itself of no consequence, because it belongs in the historical nexus of my thinking and my life.
In keeping with this revision of my grandfather’s, my coat of arms no longer contains the original phoenix. Instead there is a cross azure in chief dexter and in base sinister a blue bunch of grapes in a field d’or; separating these is an estoile d’or in a fess azure.3 The symbolism of these arms is Masonic, or Rosierucian. Just as cross and rose represent the Rosicrucian problem of opposites (“per crucem ad rosam”), that is, the Christian and Dionysian elements, so cross and grapes are symbols of the heavenly and the chthonic spirit. The uniting symbol is the gold star, the aurum philosophorum.
The Rosicrucians derived from Hermetic or alchemical philosophy. One of their founders was Michael Maier (1568-1622), a well-known alchemist and younger contemporary of the relatively unknown but more important Gerardus Dorneus (end of the sixteenth century), whose treatises fill the first volume of the Theatrum Chemicum of 1602. The two men lived in Frankfurt, which seems to have been a center of alchemical philosophy at the time. In any case, as Count Palatine and court physician to Rudolph II, Michael Maier was something of a local celebrity. In neighboring Mainz at that time lived Dr. med. et. jur. Carl Jung (died 1654), of whom nothing else is known, since the family tree breaks off with my great-great-grandfather who lived at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This was Sigmund Jung, a civis Moguntinus, citizen of Mainz. The hiatus is due to the fact that the municipal archives of Mainz were burned in the course of a siege during the War of the Spanish Succession. It is a safe surmise that this evidently learned Dr. Carl Jung was familiar with the writings of the two alchemists, for the pharmacology of the day was still very much under the influence of Paracelsus. Dorneus was an outspoken Paracelsist and even composed a voluminous commentary on the Paracelsan treatise, De Vita Longa. He also, more than all the other alchemists, dealt with the process of individuation. In view of the fact that a large part of my life work has revolved around the study of the problem of opposites, and especially their alchemical symbolism, all this is not without a certain interest.
When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause of disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account.
Like anyone who is capable of some introspection, I had early taken it for granted that the split in my personality was my own purely personal affair and responsibility. Faust, to be sure, had made the problem somewhat easier for me by confessing, “Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast”; but he had thrown no light on the cause of this dichotomy. His insight seemed, in a sense, directed straight at me. In the days when I first read Faust I could not remotely guess the extent to which Goethe’s strange heroic myth was a collective experience and that it prophetically anticipated the fate of the Germans. Therefore I felt personally implicated, and when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of Philemon and Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had helped commit the murder of the two old people. This strange idea alarmed me, and I regarded it as my responsibility to atone for this crime, or to prevent its repetition.
My false conclusion was further supported by a bit of odd information that I picked up during those early years. I heard that it had been bruited about that my grandfather Jung had been an illegitimate son of Goethe’s.4 This annoying story made an impression upon me insofar as it at once corroborated and seemed to explain my curious reactions to Faust. It is true that I did not believe in reincarnation, but I was instinctively familiar with that concept which the Indians call karma. Since in those days I had no idea of the existence of the unconscious, I could not have had any psychological understanding of my reactions. I also did not know—no more than, even today, it is generally known—that the future is unconsciously prepared long in advance and therefore can be guessed by clairvoyants. Thus, when the news arrived of the crowning of Kaiser Wilhelm I at Versailles, Jakob Burckhardt exclaimed, “That is the doom of Germany.” The archetypes of Wagner were already knocking at the gates, and along with them came the Dionysian experience of Nietzsche—which might better be ascribed to the god of ecstasy, Wotan. The hubris of the Wilhelmine era alienated Europe and paved the way for the disaster of 1914.
In my youth (around 1890) I was unconsciously caught up by this spirit of the age, and had no methods at hand for extricating myself from it. Faust struck a chord in me and pierced me through in a way that I could not but regard as personal. Most of all, it awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness. Faust, the inept, purblind philosopher, encounters the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow, Mephistopheles, who in spite of his negating disposition represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar who hovers on the brink of suicide. My own inner contradictions appeared here in dramatized form; Goethe had written virtually a basic outline and pattern of my own conflicts and solutions. The dichotomy of Faust-Mephistopheles came together within myself into a single person, and I was that person. In other words, I was directly struck, and recognized that this was my fate. Hence, all the crises of the drama affected me personally; at one point I had passionately to agree, at a
nother to oppose. No solution could be a matter of indifference to me. Later I consciously linked my work to what Faust had passed over: respect for the eternal rights of man, recognition of “the ancient,” and the continuity of culture and intellectual history.5
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is canceled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.
Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly timesaving innovations.
In this book I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking. It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being. If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present—in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it. Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.
In the Tower at Bollingen it is as if one lived in many centuries simultaneously. The place will outlive me, and in its location and style it points backward to things of long ago. There is very little about it to suggest the present. If a man of the sixteenth century were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamp and the matches would be new to him; otherwise, he would know his way about without difficulty. There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestors’ souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on.
1 Title of an old Chinese woodcut showing a little old man in a heroic landscape.
2 The first sentence is a fragment from Heraclitus; the second sentence alludes to the Mithras liturgy, and the last sentence to Homer (Odyssey, Book 24, verse 12).
3 Translated from the language of heraldry: a blue cross in the upper right and blue grapes in the lower left in a field of gold; a blue bar with a gold star.
4 See above, Chap. II, n. 1, pp. 35-36.
5 Jung’s attitude is shown in the inscription he placed over the gate of the Tower: Philemonis Sacrum—Fausti Poenitentia (Shrine of Philemon—Repentance of Faust). When the gate was walled up, he put the same words above the entrance to the second tower.—A. J.
• IX •
Travels
i. NORTH AFRICA
AT THE BEGINNING of 1920 a friend told me that he had a business trip to make to Tunis, and would I like to accompany him? I said yes immediately. We set out in March, going first to Algiers. Following the coast, we reached Tunis and from there Sousse, where I left my friend to his business affairs.
At last I was where I had longed to be: in a non-European country where no European language was spoken and no Christian conceptions prevailed, where a different race lived and a different historical tradition and philosophy had set its stamp upon the face of the crowd. I had often wished to be able for once to see the European from outside, his image reflected back at him by an altogether foreign milieu. To be sure, there was my ignorance of the Arabic language, which I deeply regretted; but to make up for this I was all the more attentive in observing the people and their behavior. Frequently I sat for hours in an Arab coffee house, listening to conversations of which I understood not a word. But I studied the people’s gestures, and especially their expression of emotions; I observed the subtle change in their gestures when they spoke with a European, and thus learned to see to some extent with different eyes and to know the white man outside his own environment.
What the Europeans regard as Oriental calm and apathy seemed to me a mask; behind it I sensed a restlessness, a degree of agitation, which I could not explain. Strangely, in setting foot upon Moorish soil, I found myself haunted by an impression which I myself could not understand: I kept thinking that the land smelled queer. It was the smell of blood, as though the soil were soaked with blood. This strip of land, it occurred to me, had already borne the brunt of three civilizations: Carthaginian, Roman, and Christian. What the technological age will do with Islam remains to be seen.
When I left Sousse, I traveled south to Sfax, and thence into the Sahara, to the oasis city of Tozeur. The city lies on a slight elevation, on the margin of a plateau, at whose foot lukewarm, slightly saline springs well up profusely and irrigate the oasis through a thousand little canals. Towering date palms formed a green, shady roof overhead, under which peach, apricot, and fig trees flourished, and beneath these alfalfa of an unbelievable green. Several kingfishers, shining like jewels, flitted through the foliage. In the comparative coolness of this green shade strolled figures clad in white, among them a great number of affectionate couples holding one another in close embrace—obviously homosexual friendships. I felt suddenly transported to the times of classical Greece, where this inclination formed the cement of a society of men and of the polis based on that society. It was clear that men spoke to men and women to women here. Only a few of the latter were to be seen, nunlike, heavily veiled figures. I saw a few without veils. These, my dragoman explained, were prostit
utes. On the main streets the scene was dominated by men and children.
My dragoman confirmed my impression of the prevalence of homosexuality, and of its being taken for granted, and promptly made me offers. The good fellow could have no notion of the thoughts which had struck me like a flash of lightning, suddenly illuminating my point of observation. I felt cast back many centuries to an infinitely more naïve world of adolescents who were preparing, with the aid of a slender knowledge of the Koran, to emerge from their original state of twilight consciousness, in which they had existed from time immemorial, and to become aware of their own existence, in self-defense against the forces threatening them from the North.
While I was still caught up in this dream of a static, age-old existence, I suddenly thought of my pocket watch, the symbol of the European’s accelerated tempo. This, no doubt, was the dark cloud that hung threateningly over the heads of these unsuspecting souls. They suddenly seemed to me like game who do not see the hunter but, vaguely uneasy, scent him—“him” being the god of time who will inevitably chop into the bits and pieces of days, hours, minutes, and seconds that duration which is still the closest thing to eternity.
From Tozeur I went on to the oasis of Nefta. I rode off with my dragoman early in the morning, shortly after sunrise. Our mounts were large, swift-footed mules, on which we made rapid progress. As we approached the oasis, a single rider, wholly swathed in white, came toward us. With proud bearing he rode by without offering us any greeting, mounted on a black mule whose harness was banded and studded with silver. He made an impressive, elegant figure. Here was a man who certainly possessed no pocket watch, let alone a wrist watch; for he was obviously and unself-consciously the person he had always been. He lacked that faint note of foolishness which clings to the European. The European is, to be sure, convinced that he is no longer what he was ages ago; but he does not know what he has since become. His watch tells him that since the “Middle Ages” time and its synonym, progress, have crept up on him and irrevocably taken something from him. With lightened baggage he continues his journey, with steadily increasing velocity, toward nebulous goals. He compensates for the loss of gravity and the corresponding sentiment d’incomplétitude by the illusion of his triumphs, such as steamships, railroads, airplanes, and rockets, that rob him of his duration and transport him into another reality of speeds and explosive accelerations.