Picture 4

‘”An enormous inner activity now began,” the patient told me. The nucleus with its ternary structure is presumably the female organ, stylized to look like a plant, in the act of fecundation:  the spermatozoon is penetrating the nuclear membrane. Its role is played by the mercurial serpent: the snake is black, dark, chthonic, a subterranean and ithyphallic Hermes; but it has the golden wings of l\lcrcury and conse­ quently possesses his pneumatic nature….

Since the snake evolved out of the flash of lightning or is a modulated form of it, I would like to instance a parallel where the lightning has the same illuminating, vivifying, fertilizing, transforming and healing function that in our case falls to the snake… .

 Ordinary speech makes use of the same imagery: something “strikes home” in a “flash of revelation.” The only difference is that generally the image comes first, and only afterwards the realization which enables the patient to say: “This has struck home.”

She felt the snake at first as a “terrible danger,” as something threatening the “integrity of the sphere.” At the point where the snake penetrates the nuclear membrane, fire breaks out (emotion). Her conscious mind interpreted this conflagration as a defensive reaction on the part of the sphere, and accordingly she tried to depict the attack as· having been repulsed. But this attempt failed to satisfy the “eyes,” though she showed me a pencil sketch of it. She was obviously in a dilemma: she could not accept the snake, because its sexual significance was only too clear to her without any assistance from me. I merely remarked to her “a known process which you can safely accept,” and showed her from my collection a similar picture, done by a man, of a floating sphere being penetrated from below by a black phallus-like object ….

 Miss X emphasized that what disturbed her most was the band of quicksilver in Picture 3. She felt the silvery substance ought to be “inside,” the black lines of force remaining outside to form a black snake. This would now encircle the sphere. Later she said: “I suddenly understood the whole process in a more impersonal way.”…

There­ upon she was able to accept the snake “as a necessary part of the process of growth” and finish        the picture quickly and satisfactorily. Only one thing continued to give difficulty: she had to put the snake, she said, “One hundred per cent at the top, in the middle, in order to satisfy the eyes.”

Evidently the unconscious would only be satisfied with the most important position at the top and in the middle-in direct contrast to the picture I had previously shown her. This, as I said, was done by a man and showed the menacing black symbol entering the mandala from below. For a woman, the typical danger emanating from the unconscious comes from above, from the “spiritual” sphere personified by the animus, whereas for a man it comes from the chthonic realm of the “world and woman,” i.e., the anima projected on to the world…

Miss X subsequently told me that she felt Picture 4 was the most difficult, as if it denoted the turning point of the whole process. In my view she may not have been wrong in this, be­ cause the clearly felt, ruthless setting aside of the so beloved and so important ego is no light matter. Not for nothing is this “letting go” the sine qua non of all forms of higher spiritual development, whether we call it meditation, contemplation, yoga, or spiritual exercises. But, as this case shows, relinquishing the ego is not an act of the will and not a result arbitrarily produced; it i an event, an occurrence, whose inner, compelling logic can be disguised only by willful self-deception.

In this case and at this moment the ability to “let go” is of decisive importance. But since everything passes, the moment may come when the relinquished ego must be reinstated in its functions. Letting go gives the unconscious the opportunity

Picture 5

Picture 5, Miss X said, followed naturally from Picture 4, with no difficulty. The sphere and the snake have drawn apart. The snake is sinking downwards and seems to have lost its threateningness. But the sphere has been fecundated with a vengeance: it has not only got bigger, but blossoms in the most vivid colours.89 The nucleus has divided into four; something like a segmentation has occurred. This is not due to any conscious reflection, such as might come naturally to a biologically educated person; the division of the process or of the central symbol into four has always existed, beginning with the four sons of Horus, or the four seraphim of Ezekiel, or the birth of the four Aeons from the Metra (uterus) impregnated by the pneuma in Barbelo-Gnosis, or the cross formed by the lightning (snake) in Bohme’s system,and ending with the tetrameria of the Opus  alchymicum and its components (the four elements, qualities, stages, etc.).

In  each case the  quaternity  forms a unity; here it is the green circle at the centre of the four. The four are undifferentiated, and each of them forms a vortex, apparently turning to the left. I think I am not mistaken in regarding it as probable that, in general, a leftward movement indicates movement towards the unconscious, while a rightward (clockwise) movement goes towards consciousness. The one is “sinister,” the other “right,” “rightful,” “correct.” In Tibet, the leftward-moving swastika is a sign of the Bon religion, of black magic. Stupas and chortens must therefore be circumambulated clockwise. The leftward-spinning eddies spin into the unconscious; the rightward-spinning ones spin out of the unconscious chaos. The rightward-moving swastika in Tibet is therefore a Buddhist emblem.

For our patient the process appeared to mean, first and foremost, a differentiation of consciousness. From the treasures of her psychological knowledge she interpreted the four as the four orienting functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition. She noticed, however, that the four were all alike, whereas the four functions are all unlike. This raised no question for her, but it did for me. What are these four if they are not the four functional aspects of consciousness? I doubted whether this could be a sufficient interpretation of them. They seemed to be much more than that, and that is probably the reason why they are not different but identical. They do not form four functions, different by definition, but they might well represent the a priori possibility for the formation of the four functions. In this picture we have the quaternity, the archetypal four, which is capable of numerous interpretations, as history shows and as I have demonstrated elsewhere. It illustrates the coming to consciousness of an unconscious content; hence it frequently occurs in cosmogonic myths. What is the precise significance of the fact that the four eddies are apparently turning to the left, when the division of the mandala into four denotes a process of becoming conscious, is a point about which I would rather not speculate. I lack the necessary material. Blue means air or pneuma, and the left­ ward movement an intensification of the unconscious influence. Possibly this should be taken as a pneumatic compensation for the strongly emphasized reel colour, which signifies affectivity.

The mandala itself is bright red, but the four eddies have in the main a cool, greenish-blue colour, which the patient associated with “water.” This might hang together with the leftward movement, since water is a favourite symbol for the unconscious. The green of the circle in the middle signifies life in the chthonic sense. It is the “benedicta viriditas” of the alchemists. The problematical thing about this picture is the fact that the black snake is outside the totality of the symbolic circle. In order to make the totality actual, it ought really to be inside. But if we remember the unfavourable significance of the snake, we shall understand why its assimilation into the symbol of psychic wholeness presents certain difficulties. If our conjecture about the leftward movement of the four eddies is correct. this would denote a trend towards the deep and dark side of the spirit, by means of which the black snake could be assimilated.

The snake, like the devil in Christian theology, represents the shadow, and one which goes far beyond anything personal and could therefore best be compared with a principle, such as. the principle of evil. It is the colossal shadow thrown by man, of which our age had to have such a devastating experience. It is no easy matter to fit this shadow into our cosmos. The view that we can simply turn our back on evil and in this way eschew it belongs to the long list of antiquated naiveties. This is sheer ostrich policy and does not affect the reality of evil in the slightest.

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

A Study in the Process of Individuation

Paragraphs 545-555