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…

[The Soul is a Living and Self-Existing Being.]

“The spirit of the depths forced me to say this and at the same time to undergo it against myself since I had not expected it then.

I still labored misguidedly under the spirit of this time, and thought differently about the human soul.

I thought and spoke much of the soul.

I knew many learned words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object.

I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul.

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being.

I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

From this we learn how the spirit of the depths…

From “Alchemy,” Louise-Marie von Franz, pp. 169-170:

“It is a strange thing, if we look at it naively, that in alchemy the end product is something which in the order of nature we look upon as very low, namely a stone, something whose quality is just to be there. A stone neither eats nor drinks nor sleeps, it just remains there for all eternity. If you kick it, then it stays where you kicked it and does not move. But in alchemy this despised thing is the symbol of the goal. We have to go deep into the mystical language of the East and of alchemy and of certain other Christian mystiques to get an idea of what this means.

If through fighting and meeting the unconscious one has suffered long enough, a kind of objective personality is established; a nucleus forms in the person which is at peace, quiet…

The “Great and Puzzling Problem” of Symbols

In this letter to Smith Ely Jelliffe (1866-1945), an American physician, teacher, medical editor, and pioneering psychotherapist, Jung discusses schizophrenic patients and includes examples of drawings they produced.

The images contain what Jung termed “Bruchlinien,” breaking lines that split the pictures, apparently indicative of the patients” mental states. Jung here wonders whether “unconscious symbolization has a meaning or aim at all or whether it is merely reactivated stuff, i.e., relics of the past.”

However, in the Red Book Jung wrote that “if one accepts a symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one did not previously know . . . .Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols.”

Image: Letter from Carl G. Jung to Smith Ely Jelliffe, October 16, 1932. Smith Ely Jelliffe Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of…

Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen, you are the star of the East.
Amen, you are the jfower that blooms over everything.
Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest.
Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water.
Amen, you are the beginning and the end. ~Carl Jung; Red Book.

126 In “Dreams,” Jung noted on January 3, 19I7: “In Lib. nov. snake image III incent” [stimulus to snake image III in Liber NOvus] (p. I). This notation appears to refer to
this image.
127 Image legend: “brahmallaspati.” Julius Eggling notes that “Brihaspati or Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer or worship, takes the place of Agni, as the representative of the priestly dignity … In Rig-Veda X, 68,9 … Brihaspati is said to have found (avindat) the dawn, the sky and the fire (agni), and to have chased away the darkness…