Memories, Dreams, Reflections

by C. G. Jung

  The old man said that this was the true religion of all peoples, that all Kevirondos, all Buganda, all tribes for as far as the eye could see from the mountain and endlessly farther, worshiped adhísta—that is, the sun at the moment of rising. Only then was the sun mungu, God. The first delicate golden crescent of the new moon in the purple of the western sky was also God. But only at that time; otherwise not.

  Evidently, the meaning of the Elgonyi ceremony was that an offering was being made to the sun divinity at the moment of its rising. If the gift was spittle, it was the substance which in the view of primitives contains the personal mana, the power of healing, magic, and life. If it was breath, then it was roho—Arabic, ruch, Hebrew, ruach, Greek, pneuma—wind and spirit. The act was therefore saying: I offer to God my living soul. It was a wordless, acted-out prayer which might equally well be rendered: “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

  Besides adhísta the Elgonyi—we were further informed—also venerate ayík, the spirit who dwells in the earth and is a sheitan (devil). He is the creator of fear, a cold wind who lies in wait for the nocturnal traveler. The old man whistled a kind of Loki motif to convey vividly how the ayík creeps through the tall, mysterious grass of the bush.

  In general the people asseverated that the Creator had made everything good and beautiful. He was beyond good and evil. He was m’zuri, that is, beautiful, and everything he did was m’zuri.

  When I asked: “But what about the wicked animals who kill your cattle?” they said, “The lion is good and beautiful.” “And your horrible diseases?” They said, “You lie in the sun and it is good.”

  I was impressed by this optimism. But at six o’clock in the evening this optimism was suddenly over, as I soon discovered. From sunset on, it was a different world—the dark world of ayík, of evil, danger, fear. The optimistic philosophy gave way to fear of ghosts and magical practices intended to secure protection from evil. Without any inner contradiction the optimism returned at dawn.

  It was a profoundly stirring experience for me to find, at the sources of the Nile, this reminder of the ancient Egyptian conception of the two acolytes of Osiris, Horus and Set. Here, evidently, was a primordial African experience that had flowed down to the coasts of the Mediterranean along with the sacred waters of the Nile: adhísta, the rising sun, the principle of light like Horus; ayík, the principle of darkness, the breeder of fear. In the simple rites performed for the dead, the laibon’s words and his sprinkling of milk unite the opposites; he simultaneously sacrifices to these two principles, which are of equal power and significance since the time of their dominance, the rule of day and of night, each visibly lasts for twelve hours. The important thing, however, is the moment when, with the typical suddenness of the tropics, the first ray of light shoots forth like an arrow and night passes into life-filled light.

  The sunrise in these latitudes was a phenomenon that overwhelmed me anew every day. The drama of it lay less in the splendor of the sun’s shooting up over the horizon than in what happened afterward. I formed the habit of taking my camp stool and sitting under an umbrella acacia just before dawn. Before me, at the bottom of the little valley, lay a dark, almost black-green strip of jungle, with the rim of the plateau on the opposite side of the valley towering above it. At first, the contrasts between light and darkness would be extremely sharp. Then objects would assume contour and emerge into the light which seemed to fill the valley with a compact brightness. The horizon above became radiantly white. Gradually the swelling light seemed to penetrate into the very structure of objects, which became illuminated from within until at last they shone translucently, like bits of colored glass. Everything turned to flaming crystal. The cry of the bell bird rang around the horizon. At such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or rather, in a timeless ecstasy.

  Near my observation point was a high cliff inhabited by big baboons. Every morning they sat quietly, almost motionless, on the ridge of the cliff facing the sun, whereas throughout the rest of the day they ranged noisily through the forest, screeching and chattering. Like me, they seemed to be waiting for the sunrise. They reminded me of the great baboons of the temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt, which perform the gesture of adoration. They tell the same story: for untold ages men have worshiped the great god who redeems the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in the heavens.

  At that time I understood that within the soul from its primordial beginnings there has been a desire for light and an irrepressible urge to rise out of the primal darkness. When the great night comes, everything takes on a note of deep dejection, and every soul is seized by an inexpressible longing for light. That is the pent-up feeling that can be detected in the eyes of primitives, and also in the eyes of animals. There is a sadness in animals’ eyes, and we never know whether that sadness is bound up with the soul of the animal or is a poignant message which speaks to us out of that still unconscious existence. That sadness also reflects the mood of Africa, the experience of its solitudes. It is a maternal mystery, this primordial darkness. That is why the sun’s birth in the morning strikes the natives as so overwhelmingly meaningful. The moment in which light comes is God. That moment brings redemption, release. To say that the sun is God is to blur and forget the archetypal experience of that moment. “We are glad that the night when the spirits are abroad is over now,” the natives will say—but that is already a rationalization. In reality a darkness altogether different from natural night broods over the land. It is the psychic primal night which is the same today as it has been for countless millions of years. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

  Our blissful stay on Mt. Elgon neared its end. With heavy hearts we struck our tents, promising ourselves that we would return. I could not have brought myself to think that this would be the first and the last time I would experience this unlooked-for glory. Since then, gold has been discovered near Kakamegas, mining has begun, the Mau-Mau movement has arisen among those innocent and friendly natives, and we too have known a rude awakening from the dream of civilization.

  We trekked along the southern slope of Mt. Elgon. Gradually the character of the landscape changed. Higher mountains, covered with dense jungle, verged on the plain. The color of the inhabitants grew blacker; their bodies became clumsier and more massive, lacking the grace of the Masai. We were entering the territory of the Bugishu, where we stayed some time in the resthouse of Bunambale. It is situated at a high altitude, and we had a splendid view of the broad Nile valley. From there we went on to Mbala, where we were met by two Ford trucks that took us to Jinja, on Lake Victoria. We loaded our baggage onto a train of the narrow-gauge railroad; once every two weeks it went to Lake Kioga. A paddle-wheel steamer whose boiler was fired by wood picked us up and after a number of incidents brought us to Masindi Port. There we transferred to a truck and so reached Masindi Town, which is situated on the plateau that separates Lake Kioga from Albert Nyanza.

  In a village on the way from Lake Albert to Rejâf in the Sudan we had a very exciting experience. The local chief, a tall, still quite young man, appeared with his retinue. These were the blackest Negroes I had ever seen. There was something about the group which was not exactly reassuring. The mamur1 of Nimule had given us three askaris as an escort, but I saw that they as well as our own boys did not feel at all easy. After all, they had only three cartridges each for their rifles. Their presence, consequently, was a merely symbolic gesture on the part of the government.

  When the chief proposed that he give a n’goma (dance) in the evening, I assented gladly. I hoped that the frolic would bring their better nature to the fore. Night had fallen and we were all longing for sleep when we heard drums and horn blasts. Soon some sixty men appeared, martially equipped with flashing lances, clubs, and swords. They were followed at some distance by the women and children; even the infants were present, carried on their mothers’ backs. This
was obviously to be a grand social occasion. In spite of the heat, which still hovered around ninety-three degrees, a big fire was kindled, and women and children formed a circle around it. The men formed an outer ring around them, as I had once observed a nervous herd of elephants do. I did not know whether I ought to feel pleased or anxious about this mass display. I looked around for our boys and the government soldiers—they had vanished completely from the camp! As a gesture of good will, I distributed cigarettes, matches, and safety pins. The men’s chorus began to sing, vigorous, bellicose melodies, not unharmonious, and at the same time began to swing their legs. The women and children tripped around the fire; the men danced toward it, waving their weapons, then drew back again, and then advanced anew, amid savage singing, drumming, and trumpeting.

  It was a wild and stirring scene, bathed in the glow of the fire and magical moonlight. My English friend and I sprang to our feet and mingled with the dancers. I swung my rhinoceros whip, the only weapon I had, and danced with them. By their beaming faces I could see that they approved of our taking part. Their zeal redoubled; the whole company stamped, sang, shouted, sweating profusely. Gradually the rhythm of the dance and the drumming accelerated.

  In dances such as these, accompanied by such music, the natives easily fall into a virtual state of possession. That was the case now. As eleven o’clock approached, their excitement began to get out of bounds, and suddenly the whole affair took on a highly curious aspect. The dancers were being transformed into a wild horde, and I became worried about how it would end. I signed to the chief that it was time to stop, and that he and his people ought to go to sleep. But he kept wanting “just another one.”

  I remembered that a countryman of mine, one of the Sarasin cousins, on an exploratory expedition in Celebes had been struck by a stray spear in the course of such a n’goma. And so, disregarding the chief’s pleas, I called the people together, distributed cigarettes, and then made the gesture of sleeping. Then I swung my rhinoceros whip threateningly, but at the same time laughing, and for lack of any better language I swore at them loudly in Swiss German that this was enough and they must go home to bed and sleep now. It was apparent to the people that I was to some extent pretending my anger, but that seems to have struck just the right note. General laughter arose; capering, they scattered in all directions and vanished into the night. For a long time we heard their jovial howls and drumming in the distance. At last silence fell, and we dropped into the sleep of exhaustion.

  Our trek came to an end in Rejâf on the Nile. There we stowed our gear onto a paddle-wheel steamer which just succeeded in docking at Rejâf; the water level was almost too low for it. By this time I was feeling burdened by all that I had experienced. A thousand thoughts were whirling around me, and it became painfully clear to me that my capacity to digest new impressions was quickly approaching its limits. The thing to do was to go over all my observations and experiences and discover their inner connections. I had written down everything worth noting.

  During the entire trip my dreams stubbornly followed the tactic of ignoring Africa. They drew exclusively upon scenes from home, and thus seemed to say that they considered—if it is permissible to personify the unconscious processes to this extent—the African journey not as something real, but rather as a symptomatic or symbolic act. Even the most impressive events of the trip were rigorously excluded from my dreams. Only once during the entire expedition did I dream of a Negro. His face appeared curiously familiar to me, but I had to reflect a long time before I could determine where I had met him before. Finally it came to me: he had been my barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee! An American Negro. In the dream he was holding a tremendous, red-hot curling iron to my head, intending to make my hair kinky—that is, to give me Negro hair. I could already feel the painful heat, and awoke with a sense of terror.

  I took this dream as a warning from the unconscious; it was saying that the primitive was a danger to me. At that time I was obviously all too close to “going black.” I was suffering an attack of sandfly fever which probably reduced my psychic resistance. In order to represent a Negro threatening me, my unconscious had invoked a twelve-year-old memory of my Negro barber in America, just in order to avoid any reminder of the present.

  This curious behavior of my dreams corresponds, incidentally, to a phenomenon which was noted during the First World War. Soldiers in the field dreamt far less of the war than of their homes. Military psychiatrists considered it a basic principle that a man should be pulled out of the front lines when he started dreaming too much of war scenes, for that meant he no longer possessed any psychic defenses against the impressions from outside.

  Parallel to my involvement with this demanding African environment, an interior line was being successfully secured within my dreams. The dreams dealt with my personal problems. The only thing I could conclude from this was that my European personality must under all circumstances be preserved intact.

  To my astonishment, the suspicion dawned on me that I had undertaken my African adventure with the secret purpose of escaping from Europe and its complex of problems, even at the risk of remaining in Africa, as so many before me had done, and as so many were doing at this very time. The trip revealed itself as less an investigation of primitive psychology (“Bugishu Psychological Expedition,” B.P.E., black letters on the chop boxes!) than a probing into the rather embarrassing question: What is going to happen to Jung the psychologist in the wilds of Africa? This was a question I had constantly sought to evade, in spite of my intellectual intention to study the European’s reaction to primitive conditions. It became clear to me that this study had been not so much an objective scientific project as an intensely personal one, and that any attempt to go deeper into it touched every possible sore spot in my own psychology. I had to admit to myself that it was scarcely the Wembley Exhibition which had begotten my decision to travel, but rather the fact that the atmosphere had become too highly charged for me in Europe.

  Amid such thoughts I glided on the peaceful waters of the Nile toward the north—toward Europe, toward the future. The voyage ended at Khartoum. There Egypt began. And thus I fulfilled my desire and my plan to approach this cultural realm not from the west, from the direction of Europe and Greece, but from the south, from the sources of the Nile. I was less interested in the complex Asiatic elements in Egyptian culture than in the Hamitic contribution. By following the geographical course of the Nile, and hence the stream of time, I could find out something about that for myself. My greatest illumination in this respect had been my discovery of the Horus principle among the Elgonyi. That whole episode, and all that it meant, was dramatically called to mind again when I saw the sculptured cynocephali (dog-faced baboons) of Abu Simbel, the southern gate of Egypt.

  The myth of Horus is the age-old story of the newly risen divine light. It is a myth which must have been told after human culture—that is, consciousness—had for the first time released men from the darkness of prehistoric times. Thus the journey from the heart of Africa to Egypt became, for me, a kind of drama of the birth of light. That drama was intimately connected with me, with my psychology. I realized this, but felt incapable of formulating it in words. I had not known in advance what Africa would give me; but here lay the satisfying answer, the fulfilling experience. It was worth more to me than any ethnological yield would have been, any collection of weapons, ornaments, pottery, or hunting trophies. I had wanted to know how Africa would affect me, and I had found out.

  iv. INDIA2

  My journey to India, in 1938, was not taken on my own initiative. It arose out of an invitation from the British Government of India to take part in the celebrations connected with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the University of Calcutta.

  By that time I had read a great deal about Indian philosophy and religious history, and was deeply convinced of the value of Oriental wisdom. But I had to travel in order to form my own conclusions, and remained within myself like a homunculus in the retort. India aff
ected me like a dream, for I was and remained in search of myself, of the truth peculiar to myself.

  The journey formed an intermezzo in the intensive study of alchemical philosophy on which I was engaged at the time. This had so strong a grip upon me that I took along the first volume of the Theatrum Chemicum of 1602, which contains the principal writings of Gerardus Dorneus. In the course of the voyage I studied the book from beginning to end. Thus it was that this material belonging to the fundamental strata of European thought was constantly counterpointed by my impressions of a foreign mentality and culture. Both had emerged from original psychic experiences of the unconscious, and therefore had produced the same, similar, or at least comparable insights.

  India gave me my first direct experience of an alien, highly differentiated culture. Altogether different elements had ruled my Central African journey; culture had not predominated. As for North Africa, I had never had the opportunity there to talk with a person capable of putting his culture into words. In India, however, I had the chance to speak with representatives of the Indian mentality, and to compare it with the European. I had searching talks with S. Subramanya Iyer, the guru of the Maharajah of Mysore, whose guest I was for some time; also with many others, whose names unfortunately have escaped me. On the other hand, I studiously avoided all so-called “holy men.” I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself—out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.