Marie-Louise von Franz: Nicholas von Flue Lecture, California 1957

The Dreams and Visions of St. Niklaus von der Flue By M. L. von Franz, Ph. D.

This is not a verbatim report. The lectures have been written up from notes taken at the Course, and though Frau Dr. von Franz has glanced through them briefly, it has not been possible for her to do more. I have tried to be as accurate as possible but am responsible for any errors in reporting. UGT

Lecture 1 Jung Institute May 8, 1957. On reading the title of my lecture you might wonder what a Swiss local peasant has to do with Jungian psychology, but I hope by the end of the Course, when you have studied the life of this most interesting personality, that-you will see that he is an amazing example of an individual who went through the process of individuation in a very difficult situation and in his own very lonely way. If we ask ourselves what a saint is psychologically, we naturally involuntarily look further back in history and compare the saints of the Christian Church with the medicine men priests of many primitive and semi-primitive civilizations. At a Congress of Psychotherapists and Theologians in Germany this spring a discussion arose over the problem as to whether we should once more have priest-doctors. That is a big problem. On the one hand theologians in practicing the cura animarum naturally come up against the problems of the psychotherapists, while the psychologists, on the other hand, encounter religious problems in the souls of their patients, and so the two fields intersect giving rise to certain difficulties. A theological professor at the Congress stated, for instance, that he had recommended meditation exercises to a small group and that one of the participants had had a rather dangerous break-down and had rung him up at midnight in an awful state and the poor theologian had had a terrible time. A psychotherapist said that what we really needed once more was the original type of personality of the "priest medicine-man", which aroused a storm in both fields represented. So you see, this is a very modern problem. Actually, if we go back in history we do know that in primitive societies generally the function of the religious priest and that of the psychotherapist was usually united in the one person of the medicine man or Shaman, for primitive healing is mainly psychic. In M. Eliade's book Le Shamanisme you find innumerable examples where the medicine man, called the Shaman in the circumpolar tribes, are usually individuals who of necessity and for inner reasons were forced to go into their own unconscious and meet certain tremendous experiences, thereby becoming Shamans. This type of medicine-man is especially interesting because there is a minimum of learnt tradition and no literature, so there is the maximum of undirected inner experience. Though in certain tribes the function is inherited and goes from father to son, in others people become Shamans because the spirits have called them, and the diagnosis is usually reached very early in their lives. If a young man at the time of puberty, or before, tends to isolate himself, or become melancholy, and is unable to take part in tribal

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practices, it is suspected that he should become a Shaman, and one of the older men of the tribe accepts him as an apprentice and introduces him to the known traditions. One Shaman, as a young man, was in such a situation and was told by an older man to dig a hole in the snow and sit there for over three weeks, practically without food, as the old man only brought him a cup of warm water and a very small piece of meat daily, and there he had to remain without any further instructions. After a state of inner crisis he had a vision of a beautiful woman who promised to guide him. When he told the old man this the latter said that that was what had been expected, and that the woman of the vision would teach the young man the rest. The old man had just helped him on his way and he was afterwards left to his own inner experiences. Many ethnologists say that you cannot distinguish these Shamans from pathological and hysterical people. But among them there are just as many strong and healthy persons as elsewhere, including good hunters and well adapted people, and it might be better to ask the Golds or Jughakirs their opinion, because they do know the difference and their definition seems to me better than any we can make from the outside. They say that there is a certain parallel, because pathological people are possessed by demons, but they remain possessed, while the Shaman, though also possessed, finds a way of curing himself. The one becomes a Shaman and the other is a fool for the former instead of succumbing has found a way to do something positive. There are great and small, male and female Shamans. There are small female Shamans who assist at childbirth and who help little children, but cannot deal with other problems. One young Shaman, after some initiation experiences, asked his teacher how far one could go in becoming a greater Shaman and was told that it depended partly on the will of the gods, and partly on how much he himself was willing to suffer because all progress depended on the amount of suffering which could be accepted, for each initiation meant another step in suffering. The African and Australian medicine men present the same situation. Eliade describes the same symptoms here of an individual becoming melancholy, etc., and of being "called", and of then having to deal with his inner problems. I shall return to this later, but wanted here only to point out that the idea of the priest-healer is found all over the world. If we now look at our special European historical tradition, you will see that the whole idea of saints in the Catholic Church has the same psychological roots. The worship of Catholic saints goes back to the early days of Christianity and derives directly from the worship of martyrs among the early Christians. The crowd tried to get possession of the bodies of martyrs and distribute parts of the body, with the idea that some of the healing mystery of this individual Christian might remain in them, or in their clothing, or their books, so they distributed or sold such things. They tried to get at the mana. Before the 10th century there was no official organized canonization of saints as we know it, but from then on the Church decided that indiscriminate worship, such as then existed, should be checked, and that it should not be left to the masses to choose and worship people as saints, but that this should be decided by the Vatican. Previously it had been the unconscious mana and the personality of the Christian martyrs which had had such an effect on other people that they were worshipped during their lifetime, as well as after their death. Churches were built over their tombs and relics, and miracles occurred at their graves. If we enquire where the strange tendency comes from, that out-standing impressive personalities who died for their faith were worshipped even after their death, you will

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find that it goes back to pagan antiquity. It can be traced back through Greek history and the cult of the tombs of heroes in the different Greek countries back to the Mycenaean and even to the Stone Age. In most places like Olympia, Delphi, Delos, etc., we find the tomb of a "divine hero" who was worshipped like a god. What precisely happened in these places we do not know, we only know that there was a cult with games and sport and that great sacrifices were offered and in some places oracles were established, for it was believed that the dead heroes would send dreams or give other signs for the guidance of living people. In Epidaurus, for instance, there is the tomb of Maleas where the oracles were consulted before the incubation dreams were started. Though we know so little about the Greek cult of dead heroes the interesting thing is that these heroes were, in the ordinary sense of the word, men who had performed outstanding deeds and after their death were held to be equivalent to the gods with whom they have been directly identified; here there is the idea of a human personality who, in some way, is divine, or even a god. In Olympia where there was the tomb of Pelops, there was also the tomb of the "unknown hero" and you can still see the excavated foundation of it, it is a circle within a square, a wonderful mandala. The worship of the divine man, or the unknown hero, is an archetypal idea of which you find traces all over Greece and it is this which is the foundation of the strange behavior of the early Christians who started the same thing in the worship of the martyrs and so continued the tradition. If we deal with the problem of the saints from this more psychological angle we run as you see into strange depths and a great many problems. In certain anti-Catholic Protestant literature the worship of saints in the Catholic Church is condemned as a sort of pagan polytheism. The Church actually always had some difficulty in defining a saint and in establishing the exact amount of worship due to saints. A saint may not be worshipped, but may intercede for you with God. Such rules constituted an attempt by the theologians to bring order into what had become an established practice by which people could have immediate contact with a divine figure. If we then study the different Christian saints, especially those canonized after the 10th century, about whom we have personal documents, it will be observed that the earlier saints chosen by the people are more "medicine men" personalities, while many of the officially chosen saints are rather of intellectual or "political" importance. Still the older type continued too and our St. Niklaus von der Flue belongs definitely to the former type. He was elected a saint by the simple people and only canonized much later. The conditions for canonization were that the saint must be of outstanding personality, must have shown a heroic attitude, have possessed outstanding moral and spiritual qualities, and that posthumous miracles must have taken place at the tomb. Therefore nobody could be canonized during lifetime, not even the most saintly person. As might be expected, those people chosen by the simple folk and popular tradition show more similarity with the primitive characteristics which we can study in the traditions of pagan peoples. They are closer to the archetype of the medicine man or the Shaman than those who have been canonized for their theological merit. This is a personal valuation, but this type of saint seems to me to be more interesting because he has the characteristics of being genuine and more rooted in this earthly reality and less "spiritual", in one sense of the word. I have therefore chosen to study more deeply this Swiss saint, St. Niklaus von der Flue, because it seems to me that of all the saints whose biography I know, his is one of the most genuine. Most saints, as you know,

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have had personal experiences and visions, which are worked over with the Father Confessor, since the Church does not publish them in their entirety and original form. St. Theresa of Avila, for example, worked over her visions with her Father Confessor and the human side in them has been to a great extent excluded. St. Niklaus, who was such a small local saint, had the good fortune to find a sympathetic Father Confessor in his parish so that his visions were written down as he had them, but the manuscript was lost in a Swiss monastery and has only recently turned up again. With it we have a genuine document of his inner experience and can trace the course he followed, with the visions in their original unrevised form. It is said that the Church does not very much like the visions of saints, but they emphasize the moral and ethical merits of the personality. The Church is probably as helpless as we are in the interpretation of visions and therefore some theologians prefer to ignore them. It is the tendency of our time not to take these things seriously and not to be able to understand them. Seventy years ago someone wrote to the Pope about St. Niklaus' visions, saying that they should be officially interpreted, and received a positive reply, but, so far, no interpretation and no official publication has appeared showing how the Vatican would judge the visions of such a saint. They, however, constitute a genuine picture of his inner life. As a Catholic publication, I can warmly recommend to you a book by M. B. Lavaud: La Vie Profonde de St. Niklaus von der Flue for, of Catholic biographers Lavaud goes most into the visions and his interpretations, on the whole, are very remarkable, though he brushes aside those which he does not understand. In Protestant literature, I would recommend Fritz Blanke’s Bruder Klaus von Flue. Blanke wrote from the more personal standpoint and also makes an attempt at psychological interpretation, though not very adequately, but the biography is good. (The book is obtainable from the Evangelist Bookshop, Sihlstrasse 33, Zurich, price Fcs. 6.05.) In English literature I cannot yet recommend any publication, they are all of the type of sentimental biography, benevolent and nice, but meaningless for us. As you know, Professor Jung has frequently referred to the visions of St. Niklaus, and wrote an article which appeared in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau (August 1933, No. 4) and has also written about him in his book Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins. If we apply the methods of interpretation of Jungian psychology to this material, without prejudice, i.e. if we look at the visions as at the dreams of a modern analysand, it will be discovered that there is a tremendous number of pagan motifs in them which cannot be disputed and which clearly go back to the roots of old pagan Germanic representations. Niklaus came of Germanic roots and the archetypes came up in this special form in his unconscious. This might be expected, and in itself would not be interesting, but there is another fact which fascinated me, namely that the purely pagan elements in the visions are built into the Christian images in a way which makes it impossible to interpret them only in a reductive way; you cannot say that you have there the Christian symbols with certain roots belonging to an earlier time, but you will get the impression, I hope, that in the unconscious of this saint there is a tendency to bring up pagan symbols and merge them with the Christian symbols in a way which gives both a new character so that we have to ask not "Why" he has Germanic representations, but "For what purpose." Why does the unconscious produce such a creative reorganization of inner Christian symbolism by relating it in a strange manner with pagan symbolism and what is its mysterious aim in this case, and then, I hope we shall come to interesting conclusions.

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Before I begin to interpret the visions, I want to give you a short sketch of the time and of the historical situation in the 15th century in which St. Niklaus von der Flue lived. In the inner nucleus of our Swiss country where this saint was born and lived, a peculiar struggle was taking place in the 15th century which one could describe in the following way. The Swiss, in the wars of Sempach, had freed themselves from the Austrian Habsburg rule and had substituted the first nucleus of democratic self-government. They had taken away the land from the Austrian and German nobility and had distributed it among the peasants so that instead of large estates owned by the nobility, there were small lots owned by free peasants who now, instead of growing corn, turned to breeding cattle and making cheese. This began in the 15th century and involved the need for an export market for the cheese and cattle to enable the import of other necessities, which resulted in an extension of commercial activities across the Gotthard into northern Italy towards the south over the Alps. Several attempts were made at settlement, but the Tessin is the only part which has remained Swiss, and, as you know, Mussolini claimed that that should be taken back by Italy. At the same time, the Swiss also became famous as mercenaries in other countries. This is a habit which still persists and still causes trouble, inasmuch as rather wild young Swiss run away and are mercenaries abroad and have to be put in prison when they return. The Swiss mercenaries were known as brave and loyal but cruel soldiers, and they demanded high wages. But the neglect of their own country while they served as mercenaries in Europe did not have a good repercussion on Switzerland. It also led to Swiss soldiers fighting against their own countrymen. Also the constant sojourn in strange countries often demoralized the men. They, for example, collected corpses after the battles and melted out the fat which they sold for good prices something which is not told in schools, but which is true. This demoralization brought about a difficult situation at home. Swiss citizenship was sold to rather dubious people and criminals and it was a point of honour to defend such persons against the Austrians. Ordinary criminals, later proved to have thieved or murdered, were accepted as Swiss citizens and their defense almost led to further wars. The Swiss were such good soldiers and valued so highly by fighting powers in Europe, that the demand for them had the disastrous effect that there was the possibility that this little democracy in the heart of Europe might disappear. Added to the above difficulties, was the fact that the Catholic Church was constantly involved in worldly quarrels and by that lost much of its authority. Efforts were being made to break away from the worldly rule of the Church and its jurisdiction was in jeopardy. If a monastery had a disagreement, say about a meadow, with a neighboring peasant, a neutral board gave the decision, the Church being merely one of the parties in the case. Internal quarrels within the Church had also to be settled by a Board. But often should the Church be defeated in a dispute with another country, perhaps over taxes, then it would retaliate by excommunicating that country with the result that that place had no local priest. Such situations inclined people to doubt the authority of the Church all-together. From this condition the Reformation afterwards profited, but for individuals for whom their religion was of great importance, the situation was extremely difficult. It was at this time of political and economic crisis, in the year 1417, that the little peasant boy, Niklaus von der Flue, was born in Sachseln. He had to be taken a considerable distance for baptism because, there having been a dispute about the dues for a newly appointed priest, his birthplace had been excommunicated. St. Niklaus’s father, Heinrich von der Flue, was a well-to-do peasant

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of good standing and respected by the people around him. St. Niklaus had visions from the very beginning of his life. A certain Heiny am Grund, or Haimo, a man of a good local family and at that time priest at Kriens and Stans, was St. Niklaus' Father Confessor, and it was to him that St. Niklaus went whenever he was in trouble about his inner visions. As this priest was tactful enough not to interfere but only to listen and give St. Niklaus general advice as to meditation exercises, and so to allow his inner development to take place without too much guidance, St. Niklaus had great confidence in him. The notes taken by Heiny am Grund of the visions were later of great importance when the saint was canonized. St. Niklaus says that from childhood he had a great veneration for the vocation of a priest and that when he saw one it was as though he saw an angel of God approaching. Psychologically, we can say that he projected a father figure and the image of his own future greater personality onto the priest and to Heiny he had a kind of father transference. Heiny says that St. Niklaus told him that he had visions when in his mother's womb and had seen a small star in heaven which had illuminated the whole world and that later in life in his loneliness he had often seen a similar star. He interpreted this as meaning that one day he would spread such a light in the world. Be had also seen a big stone, and the holy oil. The stone, he said, referred to the stability and strength of his own being, and that he would always stand steadfast to this. When he was born into this world he had recognized his mother and the midwife and all the other people in his surroundings at once and had remembered exactly how he had been carried to Kerns for his baptism within the first three days of his life and how there he had also seen an old man whom he did not know, though he had recognized the priest. He thus saw four things, three before his birth: the star, the stone, and the holy oil, and, at his baptism, the old man, whom nobody knew. This first vision, or visions, naturally give modern commentators great trouble since it is not known that children have visions in the mother's womb and, from a biological standpoint, this is very unlikely. Most Catholic commentators either ignore the vision or say that it must be taken symbolically. Few have the courage to say that it was a miracle. We have no other records of children's visions when in the mother's womb, but it is a rather wide-spread mythological tradition with many Red Indians and in African folk-lore there are reports of the hero having experiences in the mother's womb and being able to speak to the mother there. We could therefore say that it is a mythological though not a biological fact. I do not think that St. Niklaus invented the visions, but I have another hypothesis, for I have heard of people having dreams about things which happened before they were born. These are very impressive, archetypal dreams and in the 15th century such dreams were generally taken naively and literally as actual fact. Therefore I think it is probable that St. Niklaus had had a dream in which he had seen the star, stone and oil, and he took it as a fact, which would be quite legitimate. In Jeremiah I, 4:5, the prophet says: "...the word of the Lord came unto me, saying: Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." Here there is the idea of the announcement of the vocation before birth. St. John the Baptist also "leaped in his mother's womb" when Elisabeth, his mother, heard the salutation of the Virgin Mary, which would be a Christian parallel. We could therefore take the statement of St. Niklaus as symbolically true. It was a vocation dream, the motif of the heroic life, for the birth of the hero is announced by a star appearing in heaven.

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The four symbols of star, stone, oil, and the unknown old man also show the typical structure of the totality, with the fourth holding a different position. The first three are impersonal and the fourth has human personality. That a star announces the birth of an outstanding personality is instanced in the Bible where the star of Bethlehem announced the birth of Christ to the three wise men. In many civilizations you meet the idea that the human soul was a star before birth and becomes one again after death. The Egyptians speak of the Ba, which for them is a symbol of the nucleus of the pre-conscious individual personality. The Ba is represented either by a human-headed bird, or by a little flame, or by the picture of a star. In Egypt, after death, man becomes Ba-like, and one of the circumpolar stars which never set and are eternally visible; they represent immortality, for if you have become one of these stars you have attained immortality and circle around heaven in happiness. This is an example of the idea of the personality being a star before and after death. The Fathers of the Church say that the stars represent the saints because they surround Christ. In this Christian parallel, there is a nuance of poetical allegory, while the Egyptian still has the full meaning, for they really believed that the person was connected with a star. Children also often have this fantasy of being connected with a star. Much later, St. Niklaus had a vision that four lights like candles came from heaven and showed him where he should live, but in this first stage the star is far away in the sky. In dreams something often happens in heaven and such dreams are difficult to interpret because people say that they do not see where the symbol connects with them. It generally means that they must wait and refers to a later period in life for it cannot connect until it has entered the field of one's personal reality - in heaven it is very far away. The star announces the principle of individuation in the case of this peasant boy. Apparently from the very first he had the possibility of becoming an individual personality. The second symbol is the big stone, or rock. It is interesting to note that the name "von der Flue" means "from the rock." "Flue" is an old Germanic name and the "von" means "from" and is a local designation. In the arms of the family there is a rock with a roebuck standing on it. Klaus himself said that the stone represented the firmness and the stability of his own being, and that he would never give up his inner vocation. He actually interpreted it as we too would interpret the stone in a dream, as that part of the psyche which is incorruptible. Stone symbolism occurs frequently in alchemy and those who have read Psychology and Alchemy will know something of the tremendous meaning of the symbol of the stone. I would therefore like to remind you shortly of what Dr. Jung says in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins which has not yet been translated and in which he sums up in a few pages most of the essentials of the symbolism of the stone. He says that according to the alchemists it represents the inner, spiritual man, whom the alchemists tried to free from matter. They had the idea that within the chemical matter with which they experimented there was a divine man who had to be freed through their heating - or cooking - process. Therefore the stone, Jung says, is for the alchemist the God of the Macrocosm in matter. We are accustomed to think of matter as being dead, inorganic, without any psyche or divine element in it, and it is difficult for us to adjust our minds to this medieval attitude. But the alchemists had the idea that a part of the divinity dwelt in matter and, that everything which is responsible for the strange and mysterious behavior of matter is due to a divine soul living in it - the god does not live outside but is, so to speak, buried in matter, and it is man's task to free him. Every human being is the potential carrier, and even creator of the philosopher's stone. We could say that the stone is an image of God, and a parallel to Christ. This means that the image of Christ

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according to the alchemist's feeling is apparently too spiritual, too far away - an ideal figure which we cannot live up to for it is too far removed from our everyday existence. The alchemists also said that if Christ redeemed human beings, why did he not also redeem animals and plants? Such naive and popular reactions are rather understandable and represent the psychological criticism of the god-man (Anthropos) as too far away from our earthly existence and troubles, and from this tendency the alchemists ventured to build up another idea of Christ which gives an extension towards the lower side of man. Their image of a savior adds, as it were, feet to the figure of Christ, to the more material side. Their stone had all those qualities which the too one-sided image lacked, and still they said that somehow it was Christ. Jung says that in the alchemistic image of Mercury and the philosopher's stone the flesh has glorified itself in its own way in that it is not transformed into spirit, but, on the contrary, that there is a fixation of the spirit into material reality. The Christian idea is that our flesh is redeemed at the end of our days, being transformed into a spiritual body and lifted up to the level of the spirit. The alchemists produce another idea of salvation, namely that the spirit would be condensed or precipitated like rain into a glorified body which exists here and now and for which we do not have to wait till the end of the world, and which would help us now in this life. This idea appears in all the different fantasies of the alchemists, so that the stone can be looked upon, as Jung says, as a symbol of the inner Christ, not Christ as an established dogmatic figure, but Christ expressed in the concrete reality of a poor human individual, the god in man. The stone does not replace the image of Christ, it is rather the crowning touch to what Christ began. We could not put the symbol of the stone in opposition to the image of Christ, to which the alchemists would have objected, but could say that their idea transcends the idea of Christ by extending the idea of salvation - as though Christ had only touched humanity from above and this would go a step further into our reality and be adapted to our situation. The idea of the stone as the filius macrocosmi does not come from the known spirit of individual man, but from those psychic fields which end in the mystery of cosmic matter. This is a very short and cryptic allusion which touches upon a problem about which we do not dare to say too much because scientifically we do not know much about it, but I think one is cowardly not to put things in plain words, but you must take what I say as an hypothesis and speculation and not as scientifically proved. We are not alone in these speculations which are to be found in modern theoretical physics. In his studies, Professor Jung has found analogies between the unconscious and this unknown factor and you cannot get away from the idea that depth-psychologists and physicists are describing the same living factor. One might say that actually we are describing a living mystery which is neither matter nor psyche, but which manifests from one angle as matter and from another as the psyche. A young man, a student of physics, made it his problem, and dreamt that he tried to look at his own inner psyche to see it from outside, not as body but as psyche. In the dream, by a tremendous effort, he did this and saw his psyche, and it was a metal statue of a human being. He touched it and it gave a wonderful sound, but he could not stand the effort and swung back. There you have the idea that if you could look at the unconscious from the outside it would look like matter. We observe it by looking into the subject, but we are touching on the same living problem. The alchemists were searching in the same direction and had ideas which are very similar to what we observe in modern man. Among the Australian aborigines there exists the idea that before birth the souls of children live in so-called child stones. They think the child souls enter the women and

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so impregnate them. This idea of magic stones, Jung continues, exists not only in Australia and Melanesia, but also in India and Burma, and even in Europe. In the old Germanic civilization they put a stone with a hole in it on the tombs and thought the souls of the dead would live in them and from them be reborn again. There you see the parallel of the stone and the star, both being the personality before and after death. In one tradition it is a star, and in another a stone - the symbols overlap, but there is one tremendous difference between the two, for the stone is on earth and you can touch it. Therefore St. Niklaus sees first the star, and then the stone, afterwards the oil and last the old man - the Self approaches him slowly in four big steps. It is a very deep first vision.

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Lecture 2 Jung Institute May 15, 1957 Last time I spoke at the beginning of my lecture of the history of the worship of an outstanding mana personality, pointing out that since very ancient times those who have attained a certain amount of individuality and personality have acquired such authority as to be worshipped during their lifetime by the surrounding people and that after their death a cult has centered round their tombs. I also pointed out that there was an idea that such outstanding personages in some way incarnate something divine to an unusual extent. I said that the cult of saints seemed to have much the same psychological motif. We then began to interpret the four symbolical motifs which appeared at the beginning of St. Niklaus' life and noted a certain sequence of development. First we discussed the star as a symbol of the pre-conscious and postconscious individual personality, the old idea that the soul of man begins with a star in the sky and after death becomes a star again, and then came to the motif of the stone, the next symbol our saint saw in his mother's womb. We noted that in German pre-Christian religions there is the cult of the stones on graves, since it was believed that the souls of the dead lived in these stones and that up to the 11th century Bishops had to forbid people to worship stones in grave-yards. In Germany and Scandinavian countries such stones were called Bautar stones. This stone worship continued to the 18th and 19th century. German people used to build their kitchen stoves of one big stone, which also served as the domestic altar to which the head of the family brought sacrifices, in the belief that it contained the souls of dead ancestors, for though there were priests yet the head of the family held the function of a priest. Such stones were supposed to have been thrown down from heaven by a god. Meteors were especially believed to have a mysterious quality and, if found, were worshipped particularly which shows a direct connection between star and stone, as the latter was thought to be a fallen star. St. Niklaus himself interpreted the stone as the continuity and steadfastness of his own being. In an Indian marriage ceremony, a young man has to stand upon a stone to attain strength of character, another instance of the idea of the .stone as representing the strength of the personality. That a hero is born of a stone and again becomes a stone is a North American-Indian motif of the Iroquois tribe which has the myth of the twins Acorn Sprout and Feuerstein, the former being good and the latter demonic, and the two constantly fight. Both are creators - one of evil and one of good. In a neighboring tribe of the Wichita they have as a savior the Great South Star, which is connected with the sun. This Great South Star has a son called the Young Feuerstein, the latter being positive and the former negative. In medieval alchemy there is the same connection between the symbols, and the Mercury of the alchemists is both a star and the stone. I refer you to Jung's Psychology and Alchemy. The stone has become an image for immortality because of its durability. Heroes were said, to transform themselves before their death into stones, thus acquiring concrete immortality. The alchemists compared the philosopher’s stone with the glorified body; they said that by making the philosopher's stone they made the glorified body which outlasts death. We can say that the stone carries the qualities of the star, but is nearer the earth. According to many alchemist:, the philosopher's stone contains a spirit which dwells in it - a pneuma or a soul - and this soul substance, called the medicina catholica, was compared with water or oil or

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the elixir of life; probably the underlying idea being that the minerals look like stones with the metal veins in them. By heating the stone in the stove the metal suddenly appears, and into this actual fact was projected the idea that it was possible to extract from certain stones the soul of the stone, the metallic water, the mysterious essence of the soul of the stone. A Greek text says: "Go to the shores of the Nile where you will find the stone which has a ‘pneuma’ and this is the whole mystery." This metallic substance in the stone the alchemists projected into the unconscious, and in a way, you can say that this is comparable to what we do. If you think of our concept of the unconscious, it is a border-line concept, for we simply describe by this term a real though invisible fact, for it can be said that the reality of the unconscious is a concluded reality, not demonstrable directly. You can say that it is what produces dreams, that it is that "X" which arranges the meaningful order of the dream. With a certain technique of interpretation we can bring out of the dream a meaningful connection, so we conclude that there must be something which produces the dream. We have, like the alchemist, a certain amount of fact and extract therefrom a concept which we call the psyche. By a great mental effort of concentration and with a capacity for symbolic interpretation it is possible to extract from dreams a very living and meaningful experience. In alchemy this was projected into the chemical extraction of the liquid metal out of the stone for, as Jung has tried to prove by many alchemical quotations, they projected their unconscious into matter. We can therefore say that if St. Niklaus next saw the holy oil, that there is a very logical sequence, for after the stone comes the "soul of the stone", a kind of oily liquid which must probably be a symbol of the same thing in a new form. The alchemists often called, what they described as the soul in matter, an oily kind of water, or some fatty substance. Some Australian tribes believe that the fat in the kidneys is the seat of the soul. Of a man in a state of depression, they would say that someone had stolen the fat of his kidneys. In the middle of the kidneys there is a very white fat in the dark flesh, and they thought this mysterious fat hold the soul and could be melted out like the metal out of the stone and was the carrier of the mysterious life process. They projected the unconscious into it, just as the metal out of the stone was connected with the soul. The Church speaks of the "holy oil", the chrism. Christ is the "anointed one" and the chrism is used in the extreme unction given to dying people, at the first communion of children, and at the consecration of a priest. The early Church Fathers interpreted it as the dynamic manifestation of the Holy Ghost. They had the idea that just as Christ was transformed into the host, so the holy oil contained the dynamic power of the Holy Ghost and that there was transmuted, in a concrete form, the blessing of the Holy Ghost. This probably goes back to pre-Christian ritual and the Egyptian habit of smearing fat on the statues of gods in order to keep them alive. Statues were washed and anointed daily in the belief that this imparted a holy life substance and preserved their divine power. The Christian Church adopted this idea in the chrism. We have now the interesting sequence of the star in the sky, the stone on earth, and the oil - which is something man can use. The oil is a typical Catholic symbol, while the others are more remote and pagan; there is a slow approach to the realm of consciousness. We should ask ourselves what the symbol of the oil means psychologically? What is the specific aspect of the holy oil which imparts vitality and the experience of the Holy Ghost? The star represents the individual personality; the stone represents steadfastness and experience of immortality within one individual. The oil is less individual. It can be given to others, there is a different nuance, and it

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seems to have a collective connotation. I would say that it probably has to do with the emanation of the individuated personality - the impact of a man who has become a personality. You have the feeling that such a person spreads vitality and hope in his surroundings. If you are connected with your own unconscious in a harmonizing way you have a subjective feeling of being alive in a meaningful sense, you have this maximum of vitality and feel near the inner source. This is connected with a belief based on the experience that one's own individual life has a meaning, one which has to manifest and fulfill itself. An atmosphere is thus created which is infectious in the positive sense of the word, just as the psychotic state is infectious in a negative way, and the hope and belief in life imparted by such a personality is a contributory factor in treatment. This can be observed in primitive medicine men. By approaching such a personality people acquired hope and felt they were getting nearer to the meaning of their own life. That such an experience is represented by a substance such as oil has its very deep roots in the magic beliefs of mankind of the most primitive kind and also touches on one of our greatest problems and enigmas, the problem of what we like to call the unconscious psyche and how it is connected with matter. We know that this is so in some way, and therefore these outstanding personalities are very often connected with symbols which have a very concrete meaning. If St. Niklaus had come to you and asked what it meant that he had seen these three symbols in his mother's womb, what would you have said? It is one thing to know the mythological connotations and the approximate meaning of the symbols, and another thing to connect them with someone's unconscious. You would have had to talk his language. I would have said that he had to follow his own inner religious experience. One could go even further and say that the oil, the unction of the anointed one, shows the Christ-like development of the personality and that he has to undergo this process. Certain individuals have to be filled with the Holy Ghost and do bigger deeds than Christ himself and in St. Niklaus' inner fate he would have to suffer the process by which he would re-experience the fate of Christ in his own person. The three symbols announce very clearly the constellation of the process of individuation. St. Niklaus was imbued with the idea that he had a specific vocation, just as in the old tradition of medicine men and saints. The three symbols are connected with a fourth which has to do with his earliest childhood memories, namely that three days after his birth, at his baptism; he saw standing beside the stone at the altar an unknown old man. According to his own report, as he recognized his mother and the midwife and everybody else present, he made a note of this unknown old man. Psychologically, it is obvious that this figure represents the archetype of the wise old man, a personification of the spirit, and, mythologically, a form in which God likes to appear on earth. In fairy tales God is often represented as wandering round the earth as the wise old man and people recognize him at last. Professor Blanke wrote a private letter to Professor Jung about the meaning of the old man and published the latter's answer in his book. Jung states that the old man is the archetype of the spirit. In Christian tradition that would correspond to the Ancient of Days, the Godhead. Jung continues: you can also say that he is the personification of the grain of salt given to the child, in which the wisdom of God is present. If we accept this, we can say that the motif of the old man connects with the other three symbols, but that it now appears in human form. But I would not like to say

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more about this figure for he reappears in further dreams and amplifies himself. I would only like to point out a mythological analogy in a fairy tale called The Loyal Ferdinand and the Disloyal Ferdinand, a typical story of two friends of whom the good one is rewarded and the other punished. A father was so poor that he could not find a godfather for his little boy but discovered a poor, unknown old man and asked him to be godfather. The old man does not turn up until they are in the church when he suddenly appears and says that the boy must be called Ferdinand the Loyal One. He cannot give a present but instead gives the child a key and says that when he is fourteen years old he will discover in the field a castle which the key will fit and there he will find his birthday present. He then disappears. The boy often looks for the castle; but does not find it until he is fourteen. In it he discovers a beautiful white horse which can talk and which tells him to ride it. The youth then enters the service of the king and becomes a great hero and all his deeds are performed with the help of the speaking horse. In the end he deposes the old king and marries the princess and, on the advice of the white horse, rides round three times in a circle when the horse changes into a beautiful prince, who also marries, so that there is a marriage quaternio. In other variations the white horse in the end reveals that he is the equivalent of the old man and has guided the hero through life. In yet another version, at the end it is revealed that the horse is God himself. Here we have the motif of an unknown old man at a child's baptism who turns out to be God Himself. The shocking idea that God can turn himself into a white horse reminds one of the heathen idea that the Germanic god Wotan has an eight-legged white horse, Sleipnir, and he not only has the horse but he is this white horse. Thus the motif of the tale obviously goes back to heathen Germanic representation which survived and which points to Wotan. You will notice that I tend to give the Germanic background to the motifs but I trust you will see as we progress how these connections really fit into our life story. St. Niklaus later had a vision of a horse and not of a castle but of a tower, so that there is a close analogy with the boy in the above story. In the fairy tale when the boy is fourteen years old he suddenly sees a castle and in it he discovers the divine white horse. At the same age St. Niklaus saw the tower. As a boy St. Niklaus was very pious. We would now characterize him as an introvert. He used to evade other boys and, according to his biographers, he practiced good deeds, fasted on Fridays, and later extended his fast to four days a week and, from his early childhood during the forty days of Lent only ate a little bread and some dried pears. He has been criticized by some for what has been called his masochistic tendencies, but he himself affirmed that he was obeying God. A neighboring peasant, Erny an der Holden, reports that Klaus told him that at the age of sixteen he had a vision of a very high and beautiful tower in the place where he later had his hermitage and chapel, and that from that time on he had decided to lead a solitary life. In old dialect the word "einig” means to be " alone", there is also the connotation of a

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single person, the person who should live a singled out existence, which is what Klaus did, and his tendency to introversion seems not to be in contrast to unconscious tendencies. In Christian symbolism the tower is a symbol of God. Lavaud points out that in Psalm 61, David says that God is his shelter and strong tower. The famous song of the Reformation was "God is my Tower". In Proverbs XVIII, 10, it is said "The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it and is safe". Lavaud also connects the tower with the tower of Babel through which the people on earth were separated, while St. Niklaus' mission was to ensure that the Swiss people did not fall apart. In Luke XIV, 26, Christ says: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple," and later: "Whosoever does not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. For which of you intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it." The idea of counting the cost, as interpreted by Lavaud, is that obviously the symbol of the tower means that if you want to follow Christ you cannot have the penny and the cake, but must give up certain other aspects of life such as the participation mystique with the family. A sacrifice is required. The tower therefore stands for the Christian life which is very costly. We know that the process of individuation requires the breaking away from identity with the family and infantile dependence on family ties. The tower is also said to be an allegory of the Church and of the Virgin Mary, it is a feminine maternal symbol. St. Niklaus' mother was a very pious woman, some members of her family had become hermits, and one of Niklaus' uncles had become a "Wood Brother" and had built a little hermitage in the middle of the woods. St. Niklaus had been there and had seen him and the lonely life he led and possibly this had influenced him. The mother's brother is very often a personification of the mother's animus and therefore we might say that probably a certain pious and severe attitude of the mother's animus had a tremendous influence on the son's life. Altogether he shows the characteristics of a typical mother's son. Summing up, it can be said that the symbol of the tower has a double aspect and is very ambiguous for on the one side it is a defense mechanism and built to keep away enemies and stands, psychologically, for any introvert mechanism. The introvert fears and is continually overwhelmed by the outer world and has the tendency to keep away from too many impressions which might weigh upon his soul, but this kind of attitude can easily become a prison for so much defense mechanism is put up that it becomes impossible to get out of one's own defenses - a neurotic situation in which the tower becomes an inner prison and an impenetrable isolation. Animus possessed women often dream that they are imprisoned in a tower, they have imprisoned themselves in this neurotic defense mechanism and cannot get out of it. Particularly, as long as you are afraid of the Self you feel as though you were imprisoned in it, for then you have the unfortunate subjective feeling that you are inescapably tied to yourself and you feel shut in. The theme often appears in initial dreams in which people are imprisoned in their own isolation. In this case there is too much narrowing of the personality. But on the other side, Jung interprets the motif of the tower as a symbol of the Self, for the tower is also a protecting wall, a holy temenos. It is an inner mechanism of the individual who wishes to protect his own inner growth. We need to cut ourselves off from our surroundings in order to concentrate on inner growth. The beginning process of individuation is often where you start to make a difference between yourself and your surroundings, thus protecting your inner personality so that it can develop

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undisturbed, though one feels cut out from participation mystique with one's surroundings. St. Niklaus himself takes the tower to mean his lonely life and experiences it as a guiding symbol. The aim of his life was to be like a tower himself and for this he had to restrict himself and sacrifice a certain amount of contacts. It is amazing that he had such a vision at the age of puberty when there is generally a certain expansion towards the outer world and sexuality and what it means in the love life. But just at the moment when normally nature tends towards expansion Niklaus has the vision of complete restriction and isolation as if a specific fate debarred him from following the usual development in life and emphasized, in a positive way, his isolation and loneliness. I do not want to anticipate what follows, but what is the reason for this? It must be connected in a way with the stability of his personality. As you will see later, he evidently had tremendous temperament and was a highly emotional person; he had wilder and stronger emotions than the average and was perhaps even threatened by a schizophrenic explosion. Jung believes, as you know, that schizophrenia is due to an affect explosion which acquires such strength that it destroys part of the personality. St. Niklaus was obviously threatened by such a possibility and this great amount of emotion could have exploded his personality which may explain the vision of the tower at this time. At the age of thirty St. Niklaus had no idea of becoming a saint. He married a woman of a relatively good bourgeois family called Dorothy Wyss and his married life lasted for the next twenty years. He was fifty when he began his life as a hermit and at that time had a family of ten children, the youngest of who was still a baby. Thus at first he led the normal life of a peasant, and carried out all the usual small duties of village life and was even offered the position of "Landamman" (District Governor), but this he refused. He had also served as a soldier, had carried the banner, and eventually obtained a somewhat higher rank than that of a Captain. He took part in some engagements in the war with Thurgau and also fought against Zurich at Thalwil on the Lake of Zurich. He hated war, but was a brave soldier. He always did his best to save the churches as well as the women and children. He was efficient in all his undertakings and was honoured and respected for his military and political abilities and the way he performed his duty in his outer life. When between thirty-five and forty years old, in the midst of his life as a married man, St. Niklaus began to suffer from fits of depression and inner restlessness and it was during this time that he had most of the visions we know of. Unfortunately, their sequence is not clearly established in the reports, but there are two types: some are concerned with the question of becoming a hermit and others with the general problems of his time. The first type of vision, which has a more personal aspect, I will take first. About his depressions, St. Niklaus himself says that God had submitted him to a terrible temptation which tormented him day and night and made him restless and that his heart was so troubled and the depression so great that sometimes even the company of his dear wife and children was tiresome to him. During this time he had experiences of the devil, who began to attack him, but the Virgin Mary comforted him and he seems to have passed from one state to the other. He describes one of these attacks as follows: He had gone to the Melchtal to cut the thorns in the meadow and the devil threw him down a slope with such force that he was badly hurt and fainted

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when picked up. His son, who had picked him up, said that when he recovered from the faint his father said that the devil had got him. In this same period he told someone from a neighboring village that the devil had come to him riding on a beautiful horse and as well-dressed as a nobleman, and had told him that he should behave like other people and give up his asceticism for in that way he would not win eternal life. It is obvious that at the time he must have been split and in conflict with himself and the devil seems to have advised him that he should not go on in this foolish and rather ambitious and pious attitude, but should behave like "normal" people and not wish to be especially pious. When this nobleman appears on a horse and tells him to behave like other people, the vision does not say that he was the devil, that was his conscious interpretation, and is to me rather suspect, but also interesting since later three noblemen came in a vision and this time he thought they were the Holy Trinity. It is rather arbitrary to say one thing at one time and something different another time, but this is typical for Christian consciousness. Ignatius of Loyola did the same thing. He thought he had had a divine appearance and then thought it must have been the devil and thereafter he started the Exercises. Such arbitrary judgment shows a typically Christian attitude. We may detach from it and take the vision as a dream of a modern person and ask ourselves what this nobleman means. For a peasant, who did not belong to the nobility, it could be said that the nobleman represents "noblesse", the man of higher standards within himself. Niklaus obviously was of a type to rise above his family rather than sink below it. In a big family there is always a black sheep, one who drops to a lower level sociologically or morally, but very often there is the opposite: a child with a higher standard and the "white" sheep have as much trouble as the black in their loneliness. This child may be abnormally intelligent and show all the aspects of good breeding, he may be a throwback to a former ancestor. In Switzerland if you follow genealogical family histories you will find that the families go up and down in the social scale. There is much more inter-marriage between the classes without sociological taboos. St. Niklaus, from what we know from the description of the time, had a very aristocratic personality. He was an impressive and well built man and gave the impression of someone of outstanding personality. He was above the average of those among whom he was born. It is noticeable that when he became a saint many nobly born people gathered round him, as though he were one of them, and a German nobleman built his hut beside him and became his adherent. Therefore the nobleman of the dream personifies the possibility of his own inner development. Then there is the paradox that he tells Niklaus not always to have ambitions to be especially holy, etc. So it is just the nobleman who pushes him towards the more humble and adapted behavior towards his surroundings. Psychologically I think we have here the phenomenon of the way in which younger people evaluate themselves. Having for a long time taught young people between the ages or 16 and 19 in schools, I have observed some who have reached a high level but in the manifestation of their qualities have nothing to present, for they have not yet found their level of action. They sometimes look down on their teachers as if they were more intelligent, and perhaps rightly, but if anyone says that they have not done anything in life they are humiliated, which arouses revolutionary reactions in them. There is a disparity between the inner possibilities and the not yet manifested actions. This is still a problem in a later age for people who have a vocation and have an inner call to achieve something special but have not yet found a chance or the right form for doing it: they swing between over-valuation and arrogance and criticism of their own surroundings and the opposite. I am always inclined to take this as a symptom that

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the person has not yet found his or her field of action in which to show what they are and are not. When you reach that then you touch your own limits and say I am as small as this and as big as that, and acquire a feeling for the attitude which is adequate to the situation. It is a difficult stage because people are suspected of megalomania for they say: "I will show the world what I am!" Though that is suspect, one has sometimes all the same the feeling that there is something to it. From this vision it seems to me that St. Niklaus would not have needed the vision of becoming a saint had he not suddenly got into an ambitious pious attitude in which his ego prevented him from becoming an outstanding personality, but made him smaller instead of bigger, which explains the paradox of the nobleman - his really outstanding personality - who tells him to behave like other people. However, as the unconscious told him something he did not like, he said it was the devil: Later the same nobleman appeared and he said he was God: What he could not accept was naturally the devil. This motif alone would not be conclusive if we had not another vision of the same kind. On one occasion when Klaus went to the meadow to cut the grass in the Melchi, his farm on the Alps, on the way he prayed to God asking for the grace of a pious life and suddenly he saw a cloud in the sky and a voice told him to submit to the will of God - that he was a foolish man and should be willing to do what God wanted of him. Then he asks God to give him grace to follow Him and God says: “You foolish man, do it!" The only explanation of such an experience seems to be that he and his unconscious have not the same idea of what following the will of God means. One could say: "What you call being pious does not correspond with what God calls being pious." This is a typical problem nowadays among people who still have a living faith. Many of our analysands are atheists or have a non-religious attitude but in their unconscious there may be a religious attitude. But there are others who have a conscious but insufficient religious attitude which does not help them because it is not in accordance with their instincts. If their religion still meant something to them they would not need analysis, but they have a half and half attitude. They have faith, but it is incomplete, they are split, and then the religious function which is a genuine instinct in the psyche is in contradiction with the conscious belief, which creates a very subtle problem. Many values are still alive but in spite of this there are a number of complexes for the unconscious wants a different quality of religious attitude. Sometimes it even goes so far that the analysis ends by proving to people that what they believed is really true, that is, through the inner experience people can suddenly really believe! St. Niklaus was a pious Catholic in the medieval sense of the word. The image of God in his unconscious tells him that he should become a pious man, but according to what God thinks, and not according to what his ego thinks. Naturally he did not know what to make of such an experience. As a naive person he tried to be pious and then God said: "You foolish man, be pious!" We can understand that he became split and dissociated! It is not by chance that a voice comes out of a cloud, for the cloud generally holds a divine or mythological figure. In mythology the nuptials of Zeus were veiled in a cloud; in the Apocalypse it is said: "Behold he cometh with clouds;" St. Luke speaks of "the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory," etc. Clouds were also symbolically interpreted as products of the devil who wants to create the mist of the unconscious. The devil lives in the North and blows clouds out of his mouth all the time. Thus the cloud sometimes brings confusion and at other times hides the divine mystery. You can say that it represents a content of the unconscious still very much a potentiality and completely indefinite, something in which consciousness cannot yet find its orientation.

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If you have ever flown in a small airplane on a summer day, you will have seen fat small clouds. The first time I flew towards them I thought I was going to hit something and put my hands to my head to protect it, but as soon as you come to them they disperse and you go through the mist. That has always been a simile to me of how you experience the archetype. If you speak of the archetype of "the wise old man" or "the terrible mother", you have a certain idea of what it is but when you begin to think intellectually of what that is psychologically, it becomes like a mist and shapeless. If you try to pin down the meaning of an archetypal image in an intellectual way you feel lost. That is why some people have a feeling that Jungian psychology is a way of using mysterious concepts, but this is not our desire. If we could interpret an archetype more clearly we would do so but we are net able to get further yet. We can say that the archetypes are in one way defined but we have to collect an amount of material and amplify instead of defining. Thus the archetype often appears as a cloud. Much later, St. Niklaus had a tremendous vision of God which nearly made him schizophrenic for a period. The fact is that the cloud itself is already a manifestation of God, but it has no face yet and no definite shape, it is a veiled content. The unconscious was very benevolent with him in not yet showing him what was behind they cloud, but protecting him from it. We can see that he was in a difficult situation when he tried consciously to do the right thing and in spite of it was off the track because he did not know what his unconscious really wanted, and this was probably why he got depressions, for he was not at peace with himself.

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Lecture 3 Jung Institute May 22, 1957 Last time a member of the class enquired about Walter F. Otto's attitude towards the interpretation of the archetypes, and has been kind enough to lend me a copy of his book: Theophania, der Geist der Alt-Griochisehen Religion. Otto first makes an attack on the 19th century fashion of interpreting pagan gods as vegetation gods, year gods, weather gods, spring or winter gods, and says that this is a rationalistic interpretation and that we project our view of nature into these gods as though they were a personification of vegetation. He is also against depth psychology which he considers to be very negative and says that the idea of the collective unconscious is quite ridiculous. The real gods, as he thinks of them, are a personification of what he calls the coming to life of the open world, the open cosmos. This, he says, has nothing to do with the morbid experiences of neurotic individuals. You see from this that he commits two errors: Namely, he thinks that the gods are in the cosmos, whilst we have the idea that the gods come from the sphere of the subjective psyche, and that that is a very small phenomenon, while for him the god; are a cosmic reality. He thinks that we have scientifically established the borderlines of the unconscious, whilst actually we have left the question completely open. He first projects into us a narrowing of our concepts and then attacks their soundness. The other point, and that is what ties in mere closely with our subject, is that he makes a difference between the neurotic person, who, he thinks, has no inner spiritual life, and archaic man, a kind of superman who in open to the cosmos and quite another class of human being. I think the personality of the man about whom I am lecturing is a wonderful demonstration of the arbitrary nature of Otto's views. Nobody could contend that St. Niklaus appeared to be a schizoid person who managed just to keep himself from going completely mad. On the contrary, he has been recognized by Switzerland as a great saint and canonized by the Catholic Church. One can even take this saint as an illustration of the difference between a schizophrenic personality and a person who has had a great religious experience. If people get highly excited, and in a state of exaggerated tension hear voices and believe that they have had a vision of God, they are automatically classed as schizophrenic by certain psychiatrists. In the Napa-Valley State Hospital near San Francisco a regular question put to a new patient is whether he has ever seen or talked to God, and if the answer is in the affirmative, that is a point for a schizophrenic condition. Imagine anyone speaking of such an experience in front of twenty strangers! I saw a Negro who refused to answer such a question, and it was made a point against him. To have had an experience of this kind does not prove to us that a person is schizophrenic, to us the difference between the normal and the schizophrenic person is in the reaction towards the vision or voice, not the voice itself. Jung says that he is convinced that the vision of God seen by a schizophrenic is as true as the vision of any other person, but the one has a morbid reaction and the other is capable of standing his experience, and that is a very great difference between the two. In the schizophrenic reaction there are always two facts involved: first, a tendency to identify with the vision in a wrong way and make it a feather in one's own cap, and then the coming up of an outer arbitrary consciousness, generally due to the fact that the schizophrenic is unusually narrow in mental and ethical qualities and too weak to be able to stand a great inner experience. If, for instance, a narrow-minded, lazy man has a vision of God, he may have the wonderful idea that he is Jesus Christ and need

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not go to the office any longer! He thinks: "Now I am God and a great Saviour:" If you watch such a phenomenon in reality you will observe that either the heart or brain is too small and the morbid reaction to an inner experience is the cause of such people becoming insane. As the Esquimaux say, it depends on what you do with the experience: You see this polemic of Walter F. Otto's draws an artificial line between a neurotic person and the archaic man who had the genuine experience of the cosmic gods, which shows that Otto has never enquired into the reality of what happens in an analysis and has not read Jung's books before starting to oppose them. I wonder what Otto would have said of St. Niklaus? Would he have taken him as an archaic person who had a vision, or as a modern neurotic individual? Last time I spoke of the restlessness and depression into which St. Niklaus lapsed during the middle of his life and marriage, when he was so restless and unhappy that he became irritated with his family and could not stand it any longer and that during this time he had visions which, if you interpret them symbolically, show that there was a split between the process of development of his inner personality and his conscious idea of a religious attitude, that the difference in his conscious attitude and basic instinct had caused a split and brought him into conflict with himself. During this same period he had the following vision: As he sat watching his cows and horses in a meadow and, as was his habit, started to pray and to give himself up to divine contemplation, he suddenly saw a beautiful white lily grow out of his own mouth and reach up to Heaven, and from it came a wonderful perfume. But a little later when his cattle (which one chronicler says constituted his fortune) passed by, and he looked down at them, he saw that the lily which grew out of his mouth curved down towards his best horse, and that this horse which was also his favorite, snapped at the lily and completely consumed it. Klaus interpreted his own vision in the sense that those who want to keep the treasure in Heaven cannot do so if they combine it with the worries and interests of earthly life. This is like the seed of the word of God which is suffocated among thorns. The chronicler Wolflin, was a humanistic and learned man who wrote in Latin and unfortunately in a rather pompous manner. Thus we have to keep to the basic facts. Klaus said that the lily represented the striving of his own soul towards the divine, and that to have pleasure in his horse meant that he was falling for the earthly pleasures of a peasant, to whom horse and cattle are of the greatest value. He thought it meant that he was still too much involved in his peasant interests which naturally increased his irritation with his family. He felt that his personal life prevented the full development of his inner life. As Professor Blanke points out, it is possible that Klaus saw the motif of a lily growing out of someone's mouth first on a picture of Christ because at that time such pictures did exist. There is one of the Last Judgement in which the lily grows out of His mouth. In Revelation XIX, 15, it is said: " Out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword" for He is the judge of the world. The sword coming out of the mouth of the Son of Man is in some pictures replaced by a staff with flowering lilies on it. Such pictures have been seen in churches in Switzerland and Blanke thinks Klaus may have got the idea in this way.

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The lily growing out of Christ's mouth would represent, according to the Church Fathers, the soul of Christ, for the bride in the Song of Solomon is called the lily of the valley, and she was the soul of Christ. The lily also became a symbol of the Virgin Mary who is at the same time the mother, the bride, and the sister of Christ. That would be the Christian tradition of the lily. In Germanic pagan mythology it is the royal flower, it was the symbol of the King and of the Merovingian dynasty and it is to be found in the heraldic arms of the old French monarchy. The Anglo-Saxon King, Alfred the Great, is also represented as sitting on his throne holding a branch with lilies on it. Lilies were looked upon as representing the white women, the Valkyries. In Germanic mythology the anima is represented as a group of women in white. These women, of ghostlike colour, followed the dead from the battlefields and accompanied the god Wotan. The warrior is invisibly connected with the white woman who takes him to Valhalla. They foretell the hero's death and are sometimes seen in visions during lifetime. The lily also belongs to Ostara, the sister of Donar or Thor, whose name survives in the word Easter. The lily, among other flowers was one of the symbols of the Goddess Ostara. We can therefore say that in the field of Germanic mythology the lily represents the royal, superior kind of anima. It appears only in the anima figure of a man who has a royal or outstanding; destiny, where it is a protecting spirit, the personification of his unconscious in a specific way. The royal aspect is emphasized and the white colour. Ghosts are usually represented by black or white, they are out of life. If people make psychological pictures of the unconscious in black and white it is generally taken as an indication that they are detached from life, there is no emotion - as in the colour. If an anima appears as a white woman there is no feeling or emotional connection with her, she is completely split off in the unconscious -- a strange fate with which one cannot connect, which just breaks into your life from outside without connection with the feeling or inner life. This would be the uncanny, ghostlike aspect. As the early heroes were very emotional, the white women had the compensatory function of being the factor which leads to higher consciousness by being more detached. In Christian symbolism, white represents innocence and the candid (white) soul, one is not emotionally involved with the dirt of this world, one is au-dessus de la mlee. We get involved in the dirty aspects of life through our emotions and therefore it has always been a tendency of this introverted saint to keep out of being involved and to concentrate on his inner life, therefore the white might refer to this. A lily is thus the symbol of the innocence of man and we can say that when it comes out of St. Niklaus' mouth, it represents the royal contemplative attitude, and his tendency to detach from emotional involvement in this world. The following local story might also come into consideration. In 1430 when a chapel was being built in Hildisrieden near Stans, a corpse was found, and out of its heart there grew a lily. In 1444, the same thing was found in Sempach a corpse out of whose heart there grew a lily, and the story spread through Switzerland. These stories naturally are the revival of an ancient archetypal idea that flowers which grow out of a corpse represent their surviving soul - a princess gets killed and a beautiful rose grows over her grave, the lover comes and picks the flower and revives the human being. The old Egyptians when mummifying their corpses put bulbs or flowers into them and when these began to sprout that was the symbolic announcement that the dead had resurrected.

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If this association is followed we are confronted with a very strange situation, because if Klaus had a vision that a lily grew out of his mouth it was tantamount to saying that he was a dead person. Hitherto such a phenomenon had only appeared to Christ or to a dead person, now it has happened to someone living, but if we consider how Klaus has worked on his own mortification for many years, in a way he was dead, he had died as far as the world was concerned as far as he could. He was practically already a corpse, and therefore something happened to him which expressed the fact that his soul had become a flower, which normally only happens after death, when the corpse or the soul is transformed into a vegetative symbol. Such an archetypal motif I consider to be a wonderfully pious analogy, but rather too poetical and one would like to know more exactly what it means. How would such a thing manifest practically. Niklaus' greatest achievement, and the reason .why he was looked up to as a saint by those around him and was later canonized, was the miracle that apparently he did not eat any solid food for twenty years, according to tradition. He was said only to take the host two or three time a week, though he sometimes drank water. What made him so interesting to people was that he could live so long without eating. The witnesses to this fact are widespread and show that he was closely watched and his whole personality has so few other symptoms of hysteria or lying that one is faced with a problem. He is, however, not at all the type of an hysterical person and he was never caught out in lying. Therefore one must give him the credit of the doubt and say it might be true, which would make a parapsychological phenomenon which we cannot explain scientifically. Jung, in a journal of parapsychology said that he had no explanation for this phenomenon, but that he was inclined to look for it in the field of parapsychology. He said that he had once been present at an experiment made with a medium. An electro-engineer measured the degree of ionization of the air surrounding the medium and found that on the right side, the side on which the ectoplasm appeared, the ionization was more than 60 times as much as was normal. Therefore, if such things can happen, it is just possible that people around such a person can become a source of ionization (that is, such persons can pull it out of those who surround them). There have also been séances at which the medium has sat on scales and the weight, when taken, has proved to have diminished physically to a great degree during the session and to have been restored afterwards, as though something left the body of the person and later returned to it. Such things occupy a kind of borderline realm of which we know very little, but it looks as though particles of the body leave and return later. Under these circumstances; Jung thinks it possible that molecules can wander from the surroundings to the body of such a person who might thus feed on his surroundings, which could explain how it was possible for him to survive without food for such a long time. This seems to me to link up with the fact that the visions compare St. Niklaus to a dead person and his only life is like that of a plant which draws its food from the surrounding earth. If we bring the fact of the vision and his abnormal way of feeding together we could say that he has transformed himself into a plant, drawing his food from his surroundings, and not, like a human, by eating animal and plant food. This is a bold hypothesis by which one can link the fact of the miracle with the strange facts of the inner development of this man. I may have shocked many by such a cold

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hypothesis, but it is just a hypothesis, and I do not pretend that it is an explanation of the truth. It is a possibility which might be considered and should be studied further. Jung said that he generally discovered in the surroundings of such people someone who is fed upon and in a very miserable physical condition, so that you had the impression that the saintly person was feeding upon the other's vitality. On a minor scale, we know that if you get in touch with a latent psychosis you have a feeling of being supernaturally suddenly tired. Some people are so very tiring that if you are with them for a certain time you feel completely sucked. There are people who tire you simply by a difficult interview, but that is quite a different thing, for these others are not demanding, yet they exhaust you completely. It is a fact that there is such a thing as drawing on another person's vitality. People with split-off contents do this, if there is a latent psychosis. They cannot draw the well of their life from within if there is a schizophrenic split, for they have no well of life within themselves, they are always empty and hungry because they have not found the fountain to make their own inner desert bloom and want others to fertilize it and that gives this strange sucked dry or vampire effect experienced in the surroundings. We imagine this only happening in the psychological field, while in the parapsychological phenomenon it would be a physical thing and here we are on dangerous ground for this is not really proved, except for the few experiments showing loss of weight. It seems that Bruder Klaus did not feed on others and I do not know where he got his food. If we leave it in the psychological realm and do not venture into psycho-somatic fields, we can say that this vision represents the anima of Klaus, and when the lily grows up towards Heaven you can say that that gave a beautiful symbol of his striving towards spirituality, his attempt to reach Heaven with his soul but then suddenly his eyes lower and he sees the lily eaten by his favorite horse. What seems to me not to be objective in Niklaus' own interpretation, is that he accuses himself of what happens - he says: "I am the sinner," but it is the lily which bends down to the horse, not Niklaus, so if anything fell in love with the horse it was the lily, he only looked benevolently at the animal, but the lily got interested in it, it was no longer interested in Heaven, it wanted to touch the horse. We have now to go back to the symbolization of the horse. We know that the horse is a symbol of Wotan and that, especially in these countries, Wotan still survives in the form of a horse. We have a chronicler of the 16th century, Renward Cysat, who wrote 200 years later, and his writings show that the old Wotan Sagas survived to a much later date. He says that near the Alps and around Stans, on stormy nights people ride round on horses. Sometimes you can hear them all through the night near the Pilatus and round Luzern and people call them the "Turst" or the " Wuetisheer." The name "Turst" still exists in Swiss folklore and means the wild night demon who rides round on stormy nights and possesses people - doors and windows must be kept shut. He is the leader of the "furious army" ("Wut" - fury, rage; "Heer" army), of the wild army rushing through the night. Actually, it simply means the army of Wotan, and Wotan is the god of furious impulses and emotional upheaval, and still survives as the leader of such an army rushing through the woods. He very often appears as a man with his head under his arm, or with only one eye, or in a group of racing horses whom the peasants see in the night. The God Wotan is still much alive and is often personified as a horse. His sons are Hengist and Horsa (Hengst - a stallion, and Horsa - a horse). The horse was his sacred animal. Tacitus says that horses were more intimate with the god of the Germans than even the priests and you

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know that the Germans had the habit of sacrificing horses and nailing their heads on oak trees and using them as oracles. Wotan was also known as Yak, a castrated horse, or “The One who has a Horse's Beard." The horse is an animal symbol which is rather difficult to interpret as it is not very specific. Animals are usually interpreted as the personification of animal instincts, as showing different aspects of the different instincts. Anyone who gets drunk, for instance, releases the sow, who wallows in the mire. The cat is connected with the "catty" woman, and so on. Thus different animals represent different tendencies and manifestations so we have to think of the kind of animal: the fox would stand for cleverness, cunning; the cat for cattiness; the dog for loyalty and submissiveness; the pig for uncontrolled behavior and lust, but the horse does not seem to represent a specified instinct. I would call it the vital libido, its name has become the standard name for driving; power. You speak of the horsepower of engines, horsepower has become an abstract idea of vital energy, it has to do with physical vitality, the life and energy which it has at its disposal. Mythologically, the horse can see ghosts, like chicken and sheep, it is inclined to panic like sheep. If someone dreams of horses watch out, for the dreamer may have an attack of panic. A horse is a mixture of intelligence and stupidity because of this liability. The death of the mater of the house used always to be announced to all the animals, but especially to the horse. The horse is sexually a neutral symbol, while the mare stands for the mother and has a definite quality, it can also stand for power. The horse was said to be able to stamp out wells with its hooves. It personifies the excitable, temperamental aspect of a person. You will see that St. Niklaus soon afterwards got caught in a tremendous panic and simply wanted to run away from home, so that our interpretation is to the point. The horse also stands for the physical nature of man and dreams about dead or sick horses should be taken seriously as they often announce physical disturbance. Nowadays such symptoms are sometimes replaced by a car. When I get overtired, I always have a dream that my car has sand in the engine and then I know: This alternates with the horse being very tired - the store of vital energy has run out. The rider of the horse personifies the right kind of combination of the conscious personality with the instinct, if the horse goes with the rider, that is ideal for then the conscious and instinctive personality are in tune. Now the lily bent down towards the horse voluntarily. I think St. Niklaus interpreted his dream too negatively when he took the horse as his own worldliness which devoured the lily. We would say that the lily bent down to the horse. We might say that this is a Just So story: the lily bends down to the horse and gets incorporated by it. We could say that the vision represents an enantiodromia. The alchemists say that the philosopher's stone first flies from earth to heaven and then leaves heaven return to the earth. This circular movement of the Self is represented the opposite way in Christian symbolism for Christ came from heaven and then returned to heaven. The lily first grows upwards and then goes down again - the opposite direction from the Christian. We can say therefore that the lily, which is a symbol of the spiritual anima, suddenly returns towards a symbol which represents physical vitality and animal life and which has a certain connection with the physis. So, if we had to interpret the vision to a modern person we would say - watch out, it seems that an enantiodromia is taking place in your inward development, what pulled you upwards new tends to turn back to the earth, this movement means that it wants to incarnate in physical reality.

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To us, a process of individuation is only fulfilled if the spiritual becomes feasible in ordinary human life and does not remain an abstract theory of some kind. Perhaps it also corrects a wrong conscious attitude of the saint who consciously has the completely one-sided idea of for ever going up and up. St. Niklaus did not conceive of the idea of such a chance but, blocked by his Christian prejudice, he misinterpreted his inner vision and increased his inner tension. If we say that the horse represents not only physical vitality but is also a symbol of the god Wotan, we can say that his Christian soul begins to bend towards the divine image of Wotan and not towards heaven. There is a great transformation within his psyche, the image of God tends to be replaced by the horse-god Wotan and his Christian soul unites with a god below. At this period of his life, Erny an der Halden reports that Klaus told him that he went out of his country one day with the intention of leaving his wife, children and farm and all he had in order to live in a foreign country and to finish his life there, that is, he suddenly ran away. He went north-west in the direction of Basel, perhaps to go to the Friends of God who lived near the Rhine. He came to Liechtstal (Liestal) near Easel when it suddenly seemed to him that the whole town and everything in it turned red and he was so frightened that he at once went to a lonely farm to seek contact with someone and talked to the peasant there. He told him of his intention to leave Switzerland and go to a foreign country, but the peasant did not approve of the plan and said that he should rather go home to his people and serve God at home, for God would like that better than if he lived with other people and became a burden on them and also that he was a Swiss, and that the Swiss were not popular everywhere. After this conversation, Klaus left the peasant and went into the fields and lay down near a fence and hid there, and there he had a vision of a shining light which came from Heaven and touched his abdomen where he had a pain as though he had been cut open with a knife and that showed him that he should return to the Ranft, which he did. This is a very strange episode. Klaus did not return to his people but went to Klisterli in the Melchtal and hid there where he lived like a wild animal, without food or drink, and there his brother, Peter, by chance found him, in rags, and with a strange expression on his face. Niklaus said that he should be left alone but Peter fetched others and they talked to him saying that he should not continue like that. So he talked it over with the local authorities and he decided on a compromise, namely to live like a weed hermit in a little hut which his brother and others helped him to build in the Ranft - a damp dark valley without any view. It was the place he had seen in his vision. By letting people follow their instincts they sometimes cure themselves for if they can get into Nature - perhaps sit up in a tree - they have a chance to gain control over their emotions and not be burst open by them. To carry on in the outer world may be too much at such a time and therefore such people cut off one part of life in order to be able to catch the inner experience, after which they can return to normal life again. They have saved their vital energy to digest the inner experience. I think this is a reasonable and sound instinct and that the reaction of running away can be a normal one though it is very much on the razor's edge. What was absolutely normal and not schizophrenic was that Niklaus went to another peasant and discussed his situation with him. A schizophrenic would have cut every contact and have known everything better himself, but his peasant-like simplicity and humility enabled Niklaus to behave as he did and go to another peasant.

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Running away to a foreign country was a national disease among the Swiss of that time, and still to some extent continues. It is a phenomenon of possession by Wotan and the result of being overcome by a tremendous rage or emotion. For example, in the 16th century a peasant's son quarreled with his father about money and went into the woods. There he saw a very elegant warrior who asked what the trouble was and told the boy to follow him. After walking and walking for days like someone possessed, the boy turned up in Einsiedeln where he was recognized and asked what he was doing there. The boy did not know but after getting a good scolding from his friends he returned home. Dr. Riklin had a peasant patient who sometimes got caught by his autonomous complex and would get up in the night and ride off on his motor cycle in his night clothes and be found in Schaffhausen or elsewhere and be brought back. This happened whenever the schizophrenic field was touched upon. It is the motorist's form of running away. Motor cycle racing is often an underground way of getting rid of the Wotan impulse. Bruder Klaus was conscious all the time, but the phenomenon is much the same. The Swiss are imprisoned in the narrowness of the Alps and village life and affects burst out in the blind runaway primitive impulse, known to be a characteristic of the Germanic race, what the Germans call "going berserk." I would say that psychologically it represents a tremendous desire to become free and burst the chains of outer reality and its obligations and the narrowness of our consciousness and be one with the totality. Many people have this impulse and say they have moments when they would like to take their passports and disappear, they don't know where. This is a religious instinct of wanting to be free and only oneself, but if takes this concretistic form it is like an archaic form of possession by an autonomous emotion. The red colour of Liechtstal has been interpreted as the setting sun. Others say there was fire, or that the light was supernatural. But why did it give Niklaus such a shock? The colour red is associated with red hot fire, with blood, emotion, and passionate feeling. We speak of “seeing red”. Red was the color of Seth in Old Egypt. If the world is dipped in red, it suggests war and bloodshed. The Valkyries, the white women, speak of the red death that goes through the country, that bloody cloudy pass over the sky and the air is red with the blood of heroes. In many countries, for instance in Borneo, red is worn for evil magic and is the colour of death. Sarcophagi and coffins were often painted red. The analogy is to losing one’s blood when wounded, so that red came to mean death. The war dress of many primitive tribes is red to indicate the state of passion required for war. The colour has a double aspect and can also represent the life-giving emotion. In the saint's vision the colour red had a frightening effect and Klaus did not proceed with his plan so that here we should emphasize the negative aspect and say that the idea of going to the foreign country was laden with destructive emotion. He projected his inner destructive emotion on to the foreign country which then stood for destruction and dissolution. His tremendously passionate temperament is again obvious here for he must have been a very passionate and emotional person with all the dangers that that entailed. His vision of the tower at the age of 16 showed that he could only transform and integrate his passionate nature by restraint and selfdiscipline and that otherwise he would be burst open by his own passion. One of his chroniclers states that once, when Klaus was sitting at an assembly as one of the judges, a man made a very destructive and unfair speech and that Klaus saw flames

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coming out of the man's mouth which gave him such a shock that he decided never to officiate in this way again. We have to ask ourselves why this made such an impression on him - there must have been a shadow connection. He himself also had such a passionate nature which could explode when he got into touch with the world. For the introvert, contact with the world is the dangerous field for there he touches the area of his inferior function where he soon becomes emotional. If such people go out even a little, they get tremendously excited afterwards. They tend to have an over-emotional reaction to the outer world and everything that has to do with it causes an explosion within. Schizophrenics are often hungry for contact with the outer world, from which Niklaus voluntarily retired for he had enough instinct to do the therapeutically correct thing. His reaction was healthy, namely to keep his emotions within and try to cope with them inwardly.

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Lecture 4 Jung Institute May 29, 1957. At the last lecture we discussed St. Niklaus' strange experience when he ran away from home intending to go to a foreign country. The old German word "Elend" (foreign land) means "misery" in modern German and "to go to the Elend" at the time of St. Niklaus meant to go somewhere where one would be very unprotected and insecure, somewhere where one could even be murdered. You will remember that after the shock he experienced when he saw the town of Liestal bathed in red, Klaus went and talked to a peasant and was advised to go home and that later, when he fell asleep, he had a vision of a light which hit him and gave him such a pain in the abdomen that he felt as if he had been cut open with a knife and then pulled as with a cord, which, according to some reports, was pulling him home. The next morning he went home and hid first in his own stable and then in an Alp he owned where he was later found by his brother. We began to discuss the red colour and I said that it had an affinity with consciousness and the motif of death on the one hand, and with life on the other; on the one hand it is linked with death, bloody war, evil, destructive fire, and on the other with feeling, warmth, the life blood and positive aspects. It can therefore be interpreted as the emotional emphasis the world had for Bruder Klaus, a supposition supported by the fact that once when he attended the village Council he had a vision of fire of fire coming out of the mouth of one of the men present and thereafter he retired from all worldly duties because, he said, it was so difficult to deal with worldly affairs. To him they were a tremendous responsibility and so difficult that one could be pulled out of oneself. It could be said, that to a certain extent, every introvert has this attitude. Usually an introvert has a primitive, extraverted shadow, much attracted to the world and worldly affairs, but outer things have such an emotional overemphasis that he tends to withdraw from them. I venture to make the hypothesis that Bruder Klaus had a violent and emotional temperament and was in very grave danger of blowing up, of getting angry, or disturbed and upset by outer events, and that the sight of evil deeds which he was unable to prevent worried him excessively. There are people who cannot just stand by and witness evil, they feel that it should be stopped, but they also realize either that they are helpless, or that if they get too emotional they get out of balance, psychologically, themselves. Therefore without the realization that it is the individual's own emotionality which conditions the experience, the evil of the world is very disturbing. But to attain such realization would require a certain psychological insight, a possibility which did not exist in those days and in Bruder Klaus' time, and he therefore retired from activities where such destructive experiences could hit him. Seeing the world dipped in red is a theme which occurs in an alchemical text, the Turba, where it is said that when the red spirit appeared the adepts began to notice for the first time the original substance of the world - its basic substance - and from then on it could be transformed into the philosopher's stone. For the alchemists, it was a sign that they had reached the basic matter of the world, i.e. that form of psychological emotional energy which builds up our picture of the world; it is the moment of realization of the psyche as a principle of its own. The alchemists say if you have found this "red spirit" that then you can build up a new inner world. This

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amplification ties in very well with our text for Bruder Klaus built up a new inner life after his experience of the "red spirit". Niklaus' reaction to his experience is strikingly not that of a schizophrenic. He did not cut himself off but, on the contrary, his healthy instinct told him immediately, that it was the moment to keep in contact with human beings and he had the simple humility that enabled him to go and consult a peasant. There is no sign of megalomania; he never adopted the attitude of being specially favored and unable to contact simple people. A schizophrenic would be more likely to retire into isolation, being caught in the archetypal experience and unable to keep his feet on the ground. It seems that Bruder Klaus did not discuss his inner experiences with the peasant but kept them to himself and thus neither lost the subtle feeling of the mystery by talking too much, nor shut himself off in arrogant isolation to be "alone with God". He kept a middle way between the two extreme reactions - the difference between a schizophrenic and a normal person who had had a religious psychological experience. It is interesting that when the peasant tells him to go home and serve God at home, that he agrees, and then hides and has the further experience which confirms him in his intention of returning home, for he feels "as though a cord were pulling him". The peasant lived near the border and knew how the Swiss were treated when abroad. In listening to him Klaus showed humility and common sense, proving that he had preserved his inner balance. Such a healthy reaction is something one has or has not, though when people succumb to such an experience one feels that it is either through some kind of stupidity, or obstinacy, or vanity, or small-heartedness. One feels that the person should not have snapped, but should have accepted the experience and not been so childish, but it is a tragic fact that some can hold it and others cannot. One cannot judge - some vessels break, others do not. I think it is best to have a double attitude: to convey to the person that you think it would be wrong to run away, but, if they cannot stand it, to remember that one is not God and cannot judge. Ultimately, I think it is the simplicity of the instinctive reaction which is the deciding factor. Later, towards the end of his life, Klaus had a terrifying vision of God and says that "he threw himself on the ground - lest his heart should break." He knew that it was too much for him. The heart breaking would mean schizophrenia and this Niklaus prevented by flinging himself flat on the ground and not looking at the vision any further. One might say that it was a sign of reverence and of his simplicity. He never lost the spontaneity of his basic personality, the final criterion which preserved him. The alchemists call the philosopher's stone the res simplex, the ultimately simple thing, the not composite thing, a unit so condensed that it cannot be further split, the homo simplex, the, simple soul. That is simplicity in the positive sense. In Latin, homo simplex means a naive and not very differentiated person. In an alchemical parable of the 16th century, a king enters a well which he is dissolved in and he reappears reborn, representing the making of the philosopher's stone. In his bath he is assisted by one person only, the homo simplicimus, the basis for the whole transformation without which nothing could be done in alchemy. It is clear, therefore, that the homo simplex is an aspect of the Self, an image of the Anthropos, just an anonymous, humble human being, man himself, who has the basic quality of being human. If the "homo simplex" turns up within us, that is the saving and transforming aspect through which one can stand such tremendous experiences without breaking.

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Wherever anyone is deeply split or dissociated, it is always a question of whether this aspect will appear. If it does, the situation is saved and if not then things become very tragic. One could say that this simplicity of human reaction is something divine in man. Professor Jung describes it as Nature's answer within man which has immediate access to consciousness. From the depths of Nature something reaches ego consciousness with an immediate impact. Bruder Klaus had this simplicity. There is the same idea in Zen Buddhism where instruction is directed to first bringing the pupil into complete dissociation with himself, a condition which is reinforced until, as the Zen Buddhist says, the "original man" turns up from within, when it is possible to look into one's own nature, or the original man manifests from our own depths. That is the moment of enlightenment. It is the same idea as the alchemist's homo simplex and is what manifested in the reactions of Bruder Klaus. The motif of the pulling cord plays a great role in the ancient rites of the Shaman initiates, the rites of the circumpolar initiation. The initiate has to climb a birch tree and a rope is attached from this tree to another in which an old Shaman is hidden who sends over the rope the magic tools required by the initiate in his future work: the drum, and all the different staffs, and implements of the Shaman. The rope establishes a connection with the Beyond and the spirit world from which the initiate gets all his gifts for his future duties. They also assert that the original Paradise and spirit world was at one time right in our world and that everything was in a blissful state, but that later, because of the sin of man, the spirits retired, though Kings and Shamans still have a cord with which they can cross to the other world, which is why they wear such a cord themselves. Thus the cord represents a connection with the collective unconscious, it is an understanding which links one with it and it has also, like all archetypal symbols, an instinctive basis. Professor Jung says that every archetype we know has an instinctive basis; the archetype of the tower would be the instinct for self-defense and so on, so that one can ask, “What is the instinctive basis of the archetypal image of the cord?” I think it has to do with the animal's instinctive dependence on a certain piece of ground. According to Professor Hediger, it has to do with the umbilical cord. Hediger speaks of the attachment of an animal to a certain area of terrain for each animal has its specific terrain. A possible intruder who remains outside the area is not attacked, unless he comes within a certain distance. It has been proved by measurement that animals have definite limits to their territory. If the animal is removed from its terrain, it will walk back as far as a thousand kilometers. Mice will slowly walk back taking weeks and weeks to do it. If the distance is greater they won't attempt it, the frontier coincides exactly with their minimum chance of getting home. The animal is safest within his own terrain where it knows all the hiding places, whereas if it has to search or is uncertain, a slight delay may mean exposure to the enemy. Beyond the thousand kilometers chances of survival are too small so an effort is made to establish a new home by attacking another mouse. This instinctive attachment to one's own ground is very strong, and we have reason to believe

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that the human being has the same instinct. Hediger believes that this connection with the terrain is a secondary development, the first being the umbilical cord and the connection with the mother. He cites the kangaroo, where the mother's body is home and the same instinctive attachment is later transferred to the place where the animal lives. One speaks of the mother country, the maternal body on which we live. We are the children of mother earth. Attachment to one's own terrain comes instinctively to mind here. Strangely enough it exists also on a spiritual level, it comes from the instinctive feeling that one belongs somewhere and deals with the mythological image of having an inner spiritual home. The word "home" becomes a religious symbol of the Self, like the heavenly Jerusalem. Paradise and the return home after death have to do with this archetypal constellation. It seems to me that this theme appears when Klaus realizes that he has to go home - now the moment has come when he has to find where he belongs; he could not go on in his split, restless condition. And then he had the strange experience of a light coming down which cut him open. We may assume that this light which comes clown from heaven has to do with the star of his pre-natal vision which has now come down to him. We interpreted it as the principle of individuation projected by him onto the star. It was then a far away idea, far from his consciousness and in cosmic realms. Now the light touches him and expresses the moment when he has been reached by the emotion of what it meant. That is why the light hit him, or cut him open. Into the belly we project the seat of desire or emotion. In the Greek language all this part of the body stands for desire, hunger and thirst, and sexual appetite. All the emotions were said to be seated in the belly. In the order of the Chakras in Tantric Yoga, the belly is the Manipura-chakra, the seat of emotional realization. In a certain African tribe they say, do not make me think so much, it gives me a belly ache, showing that they think and react in this region. Jung, in a discussion with an African chief, said that the earth was a sphere, but the man replied that it was flat, so Jung asked: "When you see a ship coming over the horizon what do you see first?" The man replied "The chimney, the smoke, the middle, and then the whole of the ship." So Jung said that that showed that the earth was round. But the man said "No, in the Koran it is said that the world is a big bull which Allah had thrown into the sea, but one horn sticks out, which is the earth, but please do not make me think any more, because it gives me a belly ache." It does happen that if something moves us very deeply we may have to go to the toilet. It may be that this light which came from heaven was a sudden enlightenment which did not touch his conscious person, but the depth of his animal personality. Jung interprets this as an enlightened realization, corresponding to a latent unconscious content. Of the content itself, we only know that it was an experience of being enlightened without the ability to name the content. The later visions show that it is an anticipation of a vision of God, but for the moment Klaus is touched by a light and does not know what it is, but the effect of it was his retreat from the world. The process of individuation has hit or reached him as an emotional reality, not yet as a thought or feeling reality, but he is gripped by it, and acts unconsciously in accordance with its message. It is the religious experience which you find in all countries. For instance, a Zen Buddhist Master says: "Change your body and your spirit into a bit of nature, like a stone, or a piece of wood. When you are completely turned inwards so that all signs of life disappear, then suddenly a plenitude of light will enter you, like light out of the deepest darkness, then you will find the Self, the original face of your own being, then you will find the marvelous landscape of your orginal home. All the symbols are there. There is only one direct way open and

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without hindrance and you can enter upon it as soon as you have given everything away.” Thus it seems to me that the "going home" of St. Niklaus is symbolical and has the same meaning as turning to "the marvelous landscape of his inner home", giving himself to the process which drove him to future development. But the enlightenment has the character of a very painful lesion. There is a close parallel in Nordic Shamanism and medicine man initiations of other primitive peoples. As Mircea Eliade says, being elected as a medicine man is generally connected with a psychological crisis. Frequently the man is hit by enlightenment, which is taken as a sign that he will become a Shaman. Or a meteorite may fall to the ground near him - the star and the stone coming together on the earth. Initiates often say that the Master has taken out their insides and put magic stones into them for the renewal of the body. There is an Australian report of a medicine man initiation where it is said that the Master had put a lot of little stones into the man's belly which had this effect. The motif of lightning is also very frequently observed and has to do with acquiring a protecting spirit. The protecting spirit tells the Shaman how to act. One Nordic Shaman said that the protecting spirit Angakok consisted of a mysterious light which he suddenly felt within his body and by it he could see in the night and into the hidden thoughts of others. When people came to Bruder Klaus for advice he knew before they spoke, from the inner light which he felt in his body, why they came and what was in their minds. We can say that the symbolic meaning of the cutting open of the person and through that transforming him into a medicine man means that the naive, natural unconscious personality is renewed by the process of individuation, or by the realization of the Self. To become involved in the process of individuation is not sheer pleasure, but a very severe lesion of the personality which accounts for the regret many people feel that they ever entered upon it. They look back to the happy time when they were just going along in life and did not have to deal with the difficult task of coming to terms with their unconscious. Carrying the process of individuation is a very heavy burden. St. Christopher who took the Christ child across the river nearly broke down in the middle, for he realized he had taken the whole cosmos on his shoulders. One may have entered analysis to get rid of disagreeable symptoms but gradually one realizes that one has taken on the obligation of becoming oneself. In the Sumerian (and Babylonian) epic, before Gilgamesh met Enkidu, his double, he dreamt that he saw a lot of stars in the sky and that one fell on him. Later he dreamt that a mountain fell on him. As Frau Dr. Kluger interpreted this in her lecture, this dream announces the coming of the moment where the process individuation begins. Painful cutting open is a motif also very often found in alchemy. Professor Jung has interpreted the text of Zosimos, one of the earliest Greek alchemists of the 3rd century A.D. Zosimos had the vision of an altar in the form of a shallow bowl with a priest standing on it who said: "I am the priest of the innermost hidden sanctuaries and I am undergoing a terrible punishment. In the early morning someone came running in great haste and cut me into pieces with his sword." Zosimos saw at that moment how to change himself through great suffering into a spirit. As Jung says Zosimos’ interpretation that it is a punishment is probably a projection of the dreamer. It rather symbolizes the unconscious man, caught in matter, who can only become conscious through being dissected and cut apart in such a way, which means the act of self-knowledge.

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Analysis expresses that, it means dissolution. We accept the fact that we are investigated, cut open and dissected, and then there is a new synthesis of the personality. We can say that the beginning of the process of individuation is a death experience. Or, as Jung says, it is a heroic and tragic task entailing great suffering for the ego, for the ordinary empirical man has to submit to a power greater than himself and the ego has to give up its self-will, it is, so to speak, raped by the Self. We can compare this to the suffering of God under the injustice of man and the darkness of this world. People frequently dream and have visions of the suffering god-man, or even of the crucified Christ. As Jung said, human and divine suffering are complementary and if man can understand that it is the divine power which suffers because it has to enter the world, and that he suffers because he is on the way to his inner totality and his ego is beginning to submit to the divine power, his suffering is more bearable. What appears as the suffering of the god is a process of incarnation which the human experiences as individuation. The ego has to be enlarged for the Self by suffering, and for the Divine it is as though it had to be narrowed into the individual, the moment of incarnation. In the Apocryphal Acts of John, Christ says to St. John: "If you dance with me, think about what I am doing, because your suffering is that human suffering which I want to suffer." It is the suffering of the god who wants to become real in the human being, a complementary process which meets in the moment of extreme suffering. We can therefore say that there is a transformation process of God with which the human being begins to participate. As St. Niklaus had a very intense relatedness to God, he was, as Jung said; open to a tremendous invasion of the unconscious with the possibility of unusual enlargement of his consciousness and personality, for he was from the beginning destined to suffer this complementary process. Question: "What is the difference between the suffering connected with the process of individuation, and what we call neurotic suffering?" Answer: In practical words, you can say that neurotic suffering is felt to be meaningless. It is like a puppy chasing its own tail, always milling round in the same circle and something tells us that that is unnecessary. It seems as thought one could get rid of it if one had a certain insight or realization and therefore it is generally accompanied by a guilty conscience. One suspects that one could avoid it, that one is tormenting oneself in a meaningless way. In the process of individuation the suffering is actually much greater, but one has at the same time the deep instinctive intuitive knowledge that it has to be and is meaningful, and thus one can stand it better, but the borderline between the two kinds of suffering is very small for if the ego has not the right understanding, the suffering of the process can become neurotic suffering. I can illustrate this by a very rude story: An idiot confided to another his depression over the fact that he could not control his urine. The other said that this could easily be cured by going to a psychologist. After treatment the two met again and the sufferer on being asked if he was cured replied: "Oh, No, I still do it, but now I get a kick out of it!" ("es macht mir 'Freud'.") St. John of the Cross speaks of the dark night of the soul. A Catholic suffering from a neurosis on reading that might believe that his suffering was the dark night of the soul. I do not know how religious people and priests who have to hear confessions, can judge the difference if they do not know anything about analytical work and dream interpretation. According to Jung, a feeling of guilt implies guilt. Question: "If one dreamt of the cord as something inhibiting, how could that be

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explained?" Answer: In mythology the cord and the thread stand for a meaningful connection and the acceptance of an ethical obligation. You could say that God had put you on a leash and that you had to follow Him - that would be an ethical religious obligation. The negative aspect of the cord found all over the world implies being bound or tied magically, and would apply to infantile dependence. In a dream either aspect may be emphasized and the context has to be studied as well as the trend of the whole dream, with special attention to the lysis. One of Bruder Klaus’ friends states that his place of retirement was not an arbitrary choice, but that Klaus had a vision of four shining lights, like candles coming down from Heaven, showing him where he should build. It is in a rather narrow, damp, quiet green valley with woods and a little river at the bottom. There is no view of the mountains down there. Normally, medieval monasteries were built in beautiful places. St. Teresa of Avila even said that they should never be built except where there was a beautiful view. At Klaus' old home there was still his old father and his brother Peter, as well as his eldest son now 20 years old, so that there were enough people to look after the farm. Had this not been so, it would have been very irresponsible of Klaus to leave his wife and children alone. His wife was then about 40 and the youngest son, Niklaus, only 16 weeks old. His wife had consented to his retirement. She seems really to have been convinced that he was doing the right thing and was not bitter about it, though it must have been very hard on her. Apparently she was a pious woman and able to appreciate his reasons. She used to visit him on Sundays and usually brought some of the children with her so that he had a short talk with the family. He himself said that he never felt the slightest temptation to return home. From the time that he had the vision of the light he fasted totally and did not eat again before his death. But there was an uproar about it all and he was accused of being crazy and of lacking in his duty as a father. All the pros and cons of the case were discussed in a very humiliating way, which probably accounts for his wish to leave Switzerland. It is much more difficult to become a prophet in one's own country, and naturally all his friends and enemies commented on his behavior, and there are still people who contend that he was a misanthrope and a schizophrenic. Jung, in his paper on Bruder Klaus, says that one cannot speak of his retreat as misanthropic, or compare it with the hiding away of asocial individuals; he says that in this case we should rather see that the impact of the inner experience was so great that for that reason he had to retire. To retire out of a dislike for mankind is different from retiring because there is something more important to be done. He could not divide his energy, he had to attend to the inner thing, but he remained an alert person, capable of contact with others and did not grow peculiar, on the contrary, his spiritual liveliness and intelligence and capacity for contact increased tremendously after his retreat. From the time of his retreat, St. Niklaus devoted every morning to prayer and contemplation. In the afternoon he sat in the sun or visited another hermit, Ulrich im Mosli, a Swabian of good family who had visited St. Niklaus and become so enthusiastic about him that he had decided to become a hermit too. He also built a hermitage in imitation of St. Niklaus, but he took a lot of books with him which were a solace to both of them. It was rumored that Ulrich im Mosli had committed a murder, or done something equally bad, but he became very saintly and even

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decided to fast like St. Niklaus, but the latter advised him to go slowly. He managed to keep it up for exactly three days before breaking down. When St. Niklaus heard of it he smiled and said that he had already asked his wife to cook a meal for him. But the two were good friends and Ulrich attained a certain degree of holiness and though he was never beatified or canonized he had a good local reputation. St. Niklaus visited him when he needed company and they talked together. According to some reports St. Niklaus sometimes left his hermitage and went for long walks. He frequently went to Einsiedeln where he would attend mass and then walk back. He always went barefoot. If he had too many visitors he would leave the hermitage and disappear into the woods. He became such a "medicine man" that he had about a hundred visitors a day and it grew to be so bad that he had to ask the priest to issue permits to the people. Some times people had to wait two or three weeks before they could see him. Crowds arrived daily and sometimes after working till mid-night he had to send people away. He cured all kinds of psycho-somatic diseases and gave advice to people about their problems, as, for instance, those of a woman who could not control her jealous suspicions about her husband though she knew them to be untrue. He generally knew what people wanted and surprised them by telling them before they spoke. He was very witty and ill-intentioned people he generally met with a rather biting and witty remark - though not beyond what was compatible with saintliness – but he retained his peasant wit completely. He gave sound, simple advice and effected miraculous cures. Before he was canonized reports about his miracles and cures were collected. He has been described as a good-looking man who looked his age. He had brown hair, slightly gray, was well built and tall and had a deep, male voice. He did not express himself as a peasant but as an educated man. Some people say his hands were always cold and that he looked melancholy, others that his hands were warm and his colour natural, and that he was gay and friendly and open to contact. This may have depended on the visitor! One report says that he always had his mouth a little open as though listening or looking at something. After his great vision of God on December 31, 1478, St. Niklaus must have changed enormously. It is said that people ran away and could not bear to look at him because of the shaken expression on his face. That tremendous vision must have altered him considerably. The four lights St. Niklaus saw, descending like four candles, and showing him the place where he should build, were his third light symbol: 1) the star; 2) the light which hit him and cut him open, and 3) the four lights coming down and showing him where to build. The number four always refers to the possibility of making a content conscious. If the Self is represented as a circle it has the idea of a totality; if a square it is the totality in its possibility of becoming conscious. After he has been hit and touched emotionally by the light and the process of individuation then comes the stage of becoming conscious. People hit by the archetypal processes, which come spontaneously from the bottom of the psyche and who are not connected with the outer world, are often strangely and emotionally moved by something which they feel has taken them out of reality. They cannot describe what it is and can only say indirectly that something is going on. If you observe the dreams in such a case you will find that tremendous archetypal contents have been touched and that a new creative content has come up from the depths and since it is completely new, consciousness does not know about it. A genius with a new idea working inside him cannot either say exactly what it is. One has to watch the symptoms through which the future realization tries to manifest itself for this is the beginning of the process

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of the realization of the Self. Why, in this case, and probably in many others, is the process linked with the motif of attachment to a certain place on the earth? This is the psychological problem of the genius loci. Certain specific places contain a genius, say a psychological potency, a kind of psychological factor bound to a tree or a lake and with which a human person can get into connection. You find that people who go through the process of individuation have become tied to certain places and are forced to stay there. I confess that I have no explanation but can only give amplification. It seems as though there were originally the problem of the process of individuation going beyond the personality and into connection with the whole cosmos. It is a great problem and worthy of thought.

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Lecture 5 Jung Institute June 5, 1957. You will remember that at the last lecture I just mentioned the fact, though I think that it is not generally valid, that during the process of individuation there arises the indication in the case of some people, that the unconscious wishes them to become attached or related to a certain place. It is more frequent in primitive psychology. In primitive civilizations the whole landscape is usually psychically mapped out: a specific mountain is a place where one can have a certain particular experience, a forest is the place where an evil spirit lingers - a magic place where darkness breaks through certain caves are set apart for childbirth, etc., it is as though archetypal events were geographically linked up with different places. Rationally, we can say that every place has a certain psychological impact upon us, connected with a certain archetypal situation. If you go up to Seelisberg, for instance, there is a walk above the famous Rutli, where you look down on the lake and where, when you turn a corner, you suddenly have an open vista before you and see the whole Alps and another bit of the Lake of the four Cantons - you face a tremendous panorama. In two steps you have entered a new world. The place is known in the local saga and it is said that if the herdsmen drive their cattle round here, that as they turn the corner it seizes them and takes them away. You stand there with your whip and the cattle have gone! But you must not panic, but must pretend that you have not noticed anything and crack your whip and urge the cattle on and a minute later they will be back: If you get into a panic and start searching round you may fall down a steep place or an accident may happen to the cattle. I can only say that at this place a kind of eclipse of your unconscious takes place because you are overwhelmed by the view and, naturally, it is a magic spot, it symbolizes a psychological phenomenon. On one side everything is black and antagonistic and suddenly a new world opens in front of you. This is a psychological experience - everything seems black and dreary but you carry on courageously without any particular hope, and suddenly a new vista of life opens. Therefore that place is a typical magic spot and the cowherds say it takes the cattle away. That is an example of the psychological impact of the landscape upon our image or state of mind. It symbolizes a mood. When the Archduke Albrecht was murdered by John Parricidia, the latter rode behind him the whole morning without having the courage to murder him, but when they came to a certain ford, a dark and gloomy place of evil repute, John Parricidia cried out: "Shall we let this bastard carry on any longer?" and slew him. That was the place to do it! Fords all over the world are places where the spirits suddenly pull you down into the water. Cross roads also are “the right place to commit a murder." On the Buchberg, in a certain dark spot in the woods, there is a place where again and again, rape, murder and suicide occurs, the place attracts such deeds. Naturally, peasants say that there must be some evil lingering there. It is a northern slope, sunless, with the dark woods below, and one does think if I wanted to commit suicide this would be the place, for the situation fits. One could say that there was a connection with the landscape through projection. Probably in romantic landscape paintings there is an attempt to express such "soul" landscapes which fit certain moods. In parapsychological documentation the motif of localized ghosts always appears. There are two classes of ghosts - those people take with them and those bound to the locality. There was the famous case in the 18th century of Mister Joller of Stans where a man sold his haunted house and went to Zurich, but as soon as he had settled there

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the ghost appeared again, obviously he had brought it with him. Such phenomena account for the hypothesis that a ghost is an autonomous split-off complex which manifests in such a pseudo-exteriorized way so that the complex travels with the person. Then there is the other kind of ghost which is locally bound, and not affected by people coming and going. I only mention these things in connection with our problem as to how far our unconscious is connected in a mysterious way in a time and place continuum. That would make a nice field for investigation! Later on we shall visit the spot where St. Niklaus was tied by his own unconscious, by the four lights showing him where to build his hermitage. I would like to hear what impression you get of this place when you see it, what the genus loci will tell you. It is a damp hole with absolutely no view, a place which encourages introversion and concentration on oneself. It does not pull you out of yourself as a beautiful view does. There he retired from the world which to him was so laden with emotion. If we look back at the history of Switzerland, it is interesting to see that the whole country has followed the pattern set by St. Niklaus. The 15th century was the time of its greatest extraverted expansion, and after the defeat of Marignano, Switzerland retired more and more into its shell, partly voluntarily. The Veltlin (Valtelline) was given up voluntarily and after the First World War the Vorarlberg wanted to join Switzerland unconditionally, but the Swiss refused, even though neither effort nor cost would have been involved. The country kept strictly to its attitude of neutrality and non-expansion. This attitude coincides with something which Jung has pointed out as typical for the Swiss character, namely that Switzerland tries, as far as possible, not to project its shadow onto foreign countries, but to "have it out" among themselves. There is the conviction that this is the way to proceed. There is a free press, everybody can attack anybody else, anybody can bring out a newspaper, or any scandal. The whole democratic idea of Switzerland is to allow internal fights, and even to encourage them, with the result that the Swiss are a difficult people, but not to the outer world where, politically, they are rather harmless and agreeable, for they are not so inclined to project over the border, and the admixture of languages and potentialities encourages such a possibility. But there is a further step which the Swiss still have to make, namely to take back within the individual the shadow problem, which is accepted already within the country and Jung thinks that is the next task ahead of us as individuals. It is his conviction that this is the only way by which we might avoid a further world war - if enough individuals can do it. The one man who did this and went even beyond the Swiss habit of "having it out among themselves" was St. Niklaus, and in that way he behaved as a modern person; he retired and took the whole battle on within himself. If he had gone on with his political life he could not have contained his shadow so he took the shadow within himself and retired from the world. From our standpoint this would seem rather irresponsible and I would say that it needed more strength to stay in the friction of the world and keep the attitude of the "tower" inside. We should build a tower within ourselves, not outwardly become hermits but inwardly build up the strength of the individual and concentrate on the individual problem so that we could not slip out through the back door. That. St. Niklaus could not do, for he had not the psychological ideas we have. He had to do it in a projected form - build a hermitage and retire to it as a demonstration. With that small act he saved Switzerland and, though chronologically this is out of order, I would like to anticipate what took place, later.

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The nuclear peasant Cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden got into quarrels with the city Cantons of Bern, Luzern, Zurich and Fribourg. The Zurich Cantons controlled certain areas and worked up a revolution against the peasant or country Cantons and at one time civil war seemed inevitable, a war of the city Cantons against the country Cantons. Though they tried to reconcile their differing standpoints, passions ran high and the thing seemed impossible and it was decided to declare war. Italy, at this time, was very bitter against the Swiss; Austria was only waiting for a chance to set hold of the democracy, and France wanted to interfere, so if there had been a civil war Switzerland would have been torn to pieces and utterly destroyed. In school books we read that at this moment St. Niklaus appeared at the "Tagsatzung" (Diet) of Stans and told the people to keep the peace. This is a pseudo-poetical representation of the facts, but the original chroniclers of the 16th century give a different account: Niklaus' Confessor, who was at the Meeting when war was decided on, ran to St. Niklaus asking what they should do. He was told to tell the people to be reasonable and keep the peace in the name of God – just a nice governessy kind of message! The Confessor returned with the hermit’s message and discussions were resumed and it was decided to go on negotiating. So, with a few reasonable people he worked out a compromise and in the Museum of Schwyz there are still versions of the agreement drawn up by St. Niklaus. After several had been considered, a treaty was signed, civil war was averted and Switzerland was saved. The amazing thing is that it was not St. Niklaus' actual message which saved the country, but what he accomplished was due to what Jung calls the unconscious authority which he had acquired. Through realization of the process of individuation within himself he had acquired such "mana", and people stood in such awe of his personality and he meant so much to them that just with a reasonable, banal word he could stop a war! To me that is one of the most overwhelming examples of the influence of one individual against a whole collective. One works upon one’s own soul, trying to realize all the humiliating and dirty business in one's own shadow and at the same time one gets discouraged by the news. One feels that one day the atom bomb will come and what will it have helped to have worked upon oneself, one might just as well have enjoyed life, for the bomb will get one in the end anyway. This statistical argument against the individual is so overwhelmingly strong and seems so reasonable that I hardly know anyone who does not from time to time succumb to this thought, it is too plain and too evident for one not to believe it and yet the dreams appearing in the process of individuation point to the fact that in the individual is something just as strong and far greater which can make up for everything else. To take such a mystical standpoint seems even megalomanic, but in spite of that we can see that such a thing has worked: one individual working upon himself like this did save a whole country from what might have become a European conflagration. That is an historical example and it is an encouraging one. At least honest effort on this side seems worth while if such a thing is possible. Possibly that is the main reason why the Swiss worship this saint so much. He made the complete attempt to cut himself off sociologically and turned to the inner voice without compromise. It is also impressive that he did not exclude the extraverted aspect, for he did not go so far as not to care about people and if you read the literature in this field you will see that it is generally agreed that the saint was highly intelligent. Several noblemen visited him and discussed politics with him and wondered how it was possible that a peasant, who never seemed to bother about worldly affairs, apparently saw the whole political European situation and was not estranged from reality but knew what should be done. But St. Niklaus put his main emphasis on his inner development and his retreat from the world did not mean running away from his own problem, but shows the

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importance of the inner things for him over and against the outer. So far I have given you the biography of this saint up to the time when he built his hermitage. In addition to the vision of the four lights, there were four other great visions before he built the hermitage, which I will now discuss with you. These visions did not only illustrate a personal problem but go into the religious situation of the time. The following is one which occurred during one of his depressions when he was debating, whether he should retire from the world or not. The Vision of the Three Visitors: Three men of distinguished appearance whose dress and bearing proclaimed them to be of noble rank, appeared to him while he was occupied with household duties. The first entered into speech with him in the following manner: "Niklaus, will you put yourself, body and soul, into our power?" The latter answered immediately: "I will submit myself to nobody but the all-powerful God, whose servant I desire to be with body and soul." On receiving this reply the three turned away and broke out laughing. Turning to him again, the first said: "If you have dedicated yourself to the eternal service of God, I promise you that when you have reached the age of 70, the merciful God in pity for all your labours, will deliver you from all your burdens, therefore in the meantime I admonish you to endure steadfastly and in eternal life I will give you the bear's claw and the flag of the conquering army, but the cross, which reminds you of us, I leave you to carry. By these words St. Niklaus understood that if he could bravely overcome many temptations he would enter into eternal glory followed by a mighty army. If you look at it superficially, this vision looks like a rather transparent motif. The three were supposed to represent the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who visited him and promised him eternal life, and he did die when he was exactly 70. But from a modern psychological standpoint there are some things which seem to me to disagree with the accepted interpretation. It is interesting that St. Niklaus seems to be quite uncertain himself as to who the three men were. He said that he would only give himself to the service of God, so it is obvious that he is not quite sure who they are, they might be the devil! Another point is that when he says that he has dedicated himself to the service of God, they begin to laugh. Why? Sometimes those three men speak of God as though he was another person and then again they say: "I" will give you.... "I" will tell you that when you have reached the age of 70 God will be merciful to you. They speak as though God were someone else and yet speak sometimes in the first person and sometimes as though they were messengers. Commentators say that they were perhaps three angels and not God Himself. Then there is the strange symbol of the paw - or claw - of the bear which is not to be found in Christian symbolism and which both Catholic and Protestant commentators avoid. I propose therefore that we now look at this vision without any traditional prejudices and treat it as the dream of a modern man, which means, from the Jungian standpoint, that we take the motifs as they are. If it is not said that it is the Trinity we do not take it as such. Probably St. Niklaus himself when he got back to a normal state of consciousness thought it was the Trinity, therefore, as an association, it would be correct, but the dream itself does not say so. We have to accept the three noblemen who remind the saint of the Trinity, and discussed with him his way of life and promised him eternal life and a certain symbolic role. We cannot dissociate these three noblemen from that other nobleman we had in the dream before whore he appeared and told St. Niklaus that he should not try to lead such a special life. At that time, because it did not suit his conscious attitude, he decided it must be the devil talking to him, this time he says it is the Holy Trinity. Let us say that the three

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noblemen remind us of the other, and that the figure of a nobleman putting riddles is reminiscent of Wotan who also rides about and tries people out with riddles. This seems arbitrary, but there is something which seems to me to confirm my idea, namely the name of Wotan - Hrammi, the bear’s paw, or claw, which is one of Wotan’s official titles. Why are there three people if this has to do with Wotan? Wotan also sometimes called himself Bjorn, which means "little bear". This was another title and also the title of his fellow god Donor. The bear was a very sacred animal and Wotan very often walked around the country and entered houses of peasants and asked for a meal and when asked would hay that his name was Bjorn, and after he had left the peasants would realize that they had been visited by the god without having recognized him. In Switzerland the bear is a very sacred animal. You will find a bear's paws nailed over a stable door as a protection from evil spirits though usually now they are replaced by the horseshoe as easier to obtain, but paws are preferred because of the strength and power they represent, the essence of the strength and power in a battle. In Switzerland the bear is equal to the lion of the more southern countries. The bear was also one of the most widespread protective spirits of the Nordic Shamans who generally had a bear spirit as guarantee of their magic power. In pre-Christian times his name might not be mentioned, he was spoken of as the "little grandfather" or the " clever father", "the old one", "the holy man", "the holy woman", "the honey eater" or "the gold foot", with the idea that he had a golden foot. Up to the 17th and 18th century such names survived in Russia and Lithuania. The bear seems to have been a bisexual archetypal symbol. In Greece it was sacred to the mother goddess Artemis, and in Germany to the Fulgya, the female follower of a hero. Bears' paws were also used as a protection from the evil eye. In old Prussia a bear's paw was put into the tombs of the dead to give them the paws and strength to climb to the Beyond. Here the paw is combined with the idea of getting into the Beyond and eternal life, Lavaud, the best Catholic commentator, tried to find out something about the bear in the Bible and quotes a place where Isaiah says: God has watched over me like a bear, like a lion in the dark, he causeth me to miss my ways. Isaiah complains here that God is hard on him and is like a demon waiting for him in the dark, attacking him. The terrible animal in the Apocrypha also has the feet of a bear. According to these hints in the Bible, the bear has to do with evil, or the dark side of God, God in his destructive aspect. Later, as you know, St. Niklaus had a tremendous vision of the dark side of God. The glorious army which is to follow St. Niklaus fits in with the Germanic idea of heroes going to Valhalla, where only those go who die in battle. To sit eating and drinking and fighting and quarrelling with no women present was thought of as a wonderful life in the Beyond and if St. Niklaus goes with the banner of the victorious army into the place of Valhalla he is there as one of their leaders. Actually, he was a flag bearer at one time. All this might imply that he had a kind of Germanic, pagan vision which he interpreted in a Christian way, but this is not true, because the three who seem to be Wotan leave the cross to St. Niklaus and say that he must carry that to the end of his life and that it will remind him of them. This symbol is clearly Christian and is obviously the well-known Christian idea of the imitatio Christi. The real motif of Christ implies the carrying of the cross, and this he is told he has to do till he becomes the leader of the army in the Beyond. The cross, taken psychologically, and not theologically, represents - I quote Jung - the suffering of becoming conscious, moral conflict, and the uncertainty of one's own thinking. The cross has been interpreted as the cosmos and its four elements and Christ sacrificed to it. But it has also been interpreted as the idea of the suffering

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between the opposites which Christ accepted voluntarily for Himself, so that the Divine undergoes this suffering. One can therefore say that to carry one's cross is to accept one's conflict and it seems that acceptance of the utmost conflict is the way in which the flag may be obtained and the decoration of the bear's paw. The bear, from the amplification I gave you, represents the divine animal. The god appears in the old traditional way as the animal, which refers to the animal in the god-man. This religious experience comes through the body, through one's own animal nature. In the pagan mysteries before Christianity was introduced in all these countries, the ecstatic identification with one's animal nature, sexual experience, or fighting, or any other typical animal experience was experienced as the divine mystery. In the Dionysian and Eleusinian mysteries the .experiences were psychologically understood as a oneness with the Divine, but in Christian times have been treated as a mystery which one has to try to live and then be quiet about. In Germanic tribes, in contrast to the people of the Mediterranean, it was not so much the sex drive which became deified as the fighting instinct, which constituted the bridge for experiencing the Divine, and that came into the custom of the so-called "going Berserk". The word "serk" means skin or coat, and Berserk would mean wearing a bearskin in the sense of being possessed. Possession is very often expressed in primitive languages as being covered by a coat - witches threw a veil or a coat over someone who then was turned into an animal, it was a way of being bewitched. It has to do with the primitive mask; by putting on the mask you are transformed but then came the situation in which the mask could not be removed. To "go Berserk" originally was an inheritance. In certain noble families it was an inherited capacity enabling those who had it to double their own personality. The great hero sat in the hall and when his friend called for help, he began to yawn and suddenly there appeared on the battlefield a huge bear who killed all the enemy. Meanwhile the body of the hero lay like a corpse in the hall or near the fire and afterwards he did not remember what had happened. In the state of being Berserk, you do not see the hero who has perhaps done great deeds in the ecstasy of fighting and later is unconscious of what has happened. This was also looked on as suffering. Some chroniclers spoke of it as possession and others as a specific heroic quality. We know that overwhelming affect can result in peculiar behavior. In schizophrenic attacks, for instance, people can perform the most amazing tour de force - walk on one toe, or climb cut of the sanatorium hanging on to the walls like an animal. They can accomplish the most amazing deeds which rationally would be impossible. We can therefore say that a super-climax of affect makes a human capable of performing astonishing things and subjectively carries the experience of ecstatic oneness with the Divinity. It has a divine quality and can give the feeling of the unio mystica with God. Many people do not want to get rid of their affects because of the tremendous joy they experience through them, even though they have to pay with exhaustion afterwards. One is always confronted with the fact that the analysand one day will have to make his decision as to whether he wishes to be loyal to his emotional state or become more human. Wotan is the god of this divine affect. "Wut" means rage and therefore he is the divine transformer of this frame of mind and the god of the heroes who die on the battlefield. We have already thought that SL. Niklaus must have a very violent nature and a very Berserk quality in him and this element now comes into his image of God and it can be said that the vision anticipates what he actually saw later. He did not go into this human side of his being and he frustrated a certain realization of his own animal nature. Jung thinks we are not thoroughly Christianized; the deeper layers of our

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nature remain untouched. If, therefore, a man like St. Niklaus makes an attempt, he gets up against his animal nature. According to Christian teaching this has to be domesticated at all costs and that is St. Niklaus conscious endeavour and is why he consciously accepts the crucifix. But what is the religious experience which the bear can give? That part, Christianity has cut out of its program, though in other religions it belongs to the essence of its life, but it was cut out of Christianity because of its social destructiveness. Modern man is always confronted with the question of what is to be done with the animal nature. St. Niklaus took upon himself the cross and did it so thoroughly that he was promised that one day he should know what the other experience was. The realization of the religious experience of the divine animal in the vision of St. Niklaus is presented so to speak ahead of the development. You could say that there has been a worship of oneness with the divine animal. This happens in primitive societies very often, for instance in the Mediterranean antique mystery cults. With the Christian Trinity this element has been rejected and cut out of the religious inner life. In the vision of St. Niklaus we could say that the symbol of the Christian faith would be the carrying of the cross, Christianity teaches us that we should only suffer the impact of this world and ourselves be crucified but never get into it, i.e. if I get into a Berserk rage I must redress it and ask God to help me to get rid of it. Christian teaching says that is what you have suffer, that is the merit of the Christian life, that belongs to the human, that means carrying one’s cross, it is the helpless suffering belonging to this world and is looked on as an ethical merit. Wherever there is such a tremendous primitiveness in a human being that this world is too strong and is destructive for the person, the Christian solution is adequate. But if this process goes too far, if there is a long tradition where it has been practiced and where a certain point has s been reached then there is another problem. Such people have become too Christian, they are cut off from their roots, they are thin, the pleasure of life and vitality has gone, the repressed world becomes destructive and then you have the noble Christian person with the tremendous explosive shadow - the gentleman who goes to church on Sunday and on Monday manufactures the atom bomb and enjoys the phantasies of when “they” will get it. There comes an explosive destruction and that is what Christianity has brought about. Therefore nature seems to think of another way - to take this world and put it ahead of us, to say Christianity is something to go through for the sake of civilizing ourselves. Whoever has lived in primitive countries knows the value of this. If you have seen how people in nonChristian countries, where there is no care for the sufferings of others, simply say that that is karma, you realize the tremendous value of the Christian attempt at selfdiscipline, and that the humanizing of our most primitive animal instincts is a stage to be gone through. But in the vision of St. Niklaus you have the return of the original world and his unconscious says first you have to carry the cross, but after death you will carry the bear's paw. The solution is projected into life after death, the program is too high for this life, but there the hope that what one does not achieve here one may achieve in the next life. So becoming the hero and attaining one’s Christian attitude at the same time is an impossible ideal. Therefore St. Niklaus could only suffer the Christian fate, suffering the impact of this world and hoping that after death he might attain in some other way. The image of this man's problem was the same as that of many other 15th century people; the desire for a real union of the two opposites if the animal nature could be

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integrated, without loss of the former values. In Communism they go back into paganism where you have slaves and a free life, and if you are in a rage you just kill. The great problem is the danger that one slips back, which is no merit. In this vision the unconscious outlines a program in which the animal could be integrated ahead and united with the values of the Christian civilization. The borderline between the regression into a pre-Christian state or progression into the post-Christian is very small. In St. Niklaus' time the old Wotan and his wild hunters were still to be found in the country in spook forms and thus the regression was as near as progression. When Klaus was creeping about in a half-naked state among the bushes it was touch and go as to which way things would turn out. The pagan world had gripped him so strongly that to keep his Christian way was almost impossible. The only possibility if touched by this problem is to intern oneself until one discovers where the thing leads. Wotan, as stated by a member of the class, does not only represent the ecstatic experience of fighting and raging, but also the ecstatic joy of death. The whole Germanic race is very much influenced by this tendency towards a kind of suicide in death such as is described in a book entitled "Letters of German Students from the War". They are letters from men, who later died, describing; what they experienced and felt about the war before they fell and the mystical longing for death is amazing. There is no hate of the enemy, no real conviction of the Nazi ideal, but a mystical longing to die and a projection that this would be an ecstatic religious experience. This has always made the Germans such dangerous soldiers and gives them such a tremendous drive. It is very similar to the Berserk-rage; you can call it inverted aggressivity. People with such an inner conviction have a tendency to self-destruction. This romanticism and longing for the experience of death you meet with in several countries in the type of the puer eternus and with the mother problem. You have the early dying youthful god and the slight tendency towards death mysticism. In the Germanic race it combines with the aggressivity problem, the early dying heroic youth with the aspect of Berserk-rage. The archetypal image which rules all this is the god Wotan. Why is only the bear's paw mentioned and not the whole bear? And why does he only get the decoration in the Beyond and only carry the cross in this life? The bear's paw is evidently a sign for the power of its nature, the bear itself. The bear is dead and only the paw remains, so we could say that it is not the bear but the symbol of the bear that he will experience after death, the reintegration of what the bear means has to take place on a symbolic layer. It is a sublimation of the bear which wants to be integrated in the bear in its heroic form, which means if this world returns in a postChristian realization it is on a psychological level that it gets integrated and not on a concrete level, which would mean a regression into pagan behavior. Klaus will carry the paw as a kind of symbol and not become the bear himself. Carrying the flags with animal symbols is an old custom of Germanic priests; they carry such symbols round their fields to promote fertility. Therefore it can be said that St. Niklaus has become a priest of a new religious attitude which reminds one of a pagan attitude, but is actually a further development, a step forward in the Christian attitude. I would like to point out that the Germanic priests who carried such flags with animal symbols wore long hair and women's clothes, like the Nordic Shaman. St. Niklaus wore a long shirt, the female Shaman wears man's clothing, which is a primitive way of expressing wholeness. A female Shaman among the Bructerers who, according to Tacitus, lived in a tower, often received deputies from other countries and gave them advice just as St. Niklaus gave consultations to people. We can therefore say that he is becoming a Christian hermit with certain features which represent the old Germanic

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priest and that the sense of awe which he formerly experienced on seeing a priest must have been an anticipation of his own future development. I want to read a few passages from "Symbolik des Geistes" which amplify the idea of the change from the pagan to the Christian problem. Jung says that the Christian symbol of the cross represents a stage in which man becomes conscious of his ethical conflict and his own inner opposites. In pre-Christian times though people knew that they had a shadow, the right hand did not really know what the left hand did, the shadow just splashed out all over the place. This accounts for the social situation of late pagan antiquity which led to an intolerable situation. In Christianity man awoke for the first time to the ethical conflict and to the fact of his social duties. Within the Trinity, Christ belongs to the divine form of the son. The Father represents the state where the shadow is simply lived from time to time and is also repressed. The age of the Son, of Christ, is where we have become conscious of ethical problems.

Pre-Christian Stage Of the Father Worship of the state of oneness with the God in His double nature.

Stage of the Son

Stage of the Holy Ghost

Christianity and the Cross. Here the animal element is cut out.

Where submission to the irrational is restored.

There is something which reaches beyond the Christian cross – the submission of the ego to the inner totality. In this stage a symbolic figure turns up, which represents the human totality. (We can say that St. Niklaus is an example of a person who has assimilated the Christian faith within himself and has gone beyond it to reach a totality with the integration of the animal nature.) The integration of the divine animal is such a great problem because only through ecstasy could one get a complete experience of the oneness of the personality and the oneness of nature. If the experiment is rejected in some way one remains mutilated. The idea is the integration of the dark side without loss of one’s ethical qualities, that is the great moral problem here. The Berserk man is the man who is in a state of oneness with the totality through an ecstatic emotion. In the next vision Christ appears as a Berserk figure, there could not be a more perfect union of the opposites. Christ will turn up as a man with a bearskin, so you see where the unconscious is aiming.

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Lecture 6 Jung Institute June 19, 1957. We have not yet finished our discussion on the three men who visited St. Niklaus and whom he took for the Holy Trinity and the fact that they laughed in such an odd way when, in reply to their question as to whether he would devote himself to their service, St. Niklaus said that he wished to devote himself body and soul only to the service of God. I think here that we have to remember that these three men represent the more archaic form of the Holy Trinity, that is, Wotan and the two other gods, Honir and Loki, or Donar and Loki. Wotan frequently walked about the country visiting the peasants either alone or accompanied by these two companions. He also represents the Nordic form of the trickster god; he has a certain sense of humour and makes fun of and with the people, an aspect of the image of God which has completely disappeared and is something lacking in God's image in our religion. The fact that in a number of Christian legends there is a reappearance of the trickster stories, is a proof that the aspect is missed. There is a story of Christ which says that when sleeping at an inn with St. Peter, he made the latter take the outside of the bed, so that he would be the one to get the beating for not having paid for their food and lodging! Such popular stories illustrate the lack of this element which forms a part of most primitive pagan religions. The figure of Wotan bears the shadow qualities of the clown and when St. Niklaus' three figures laugh, there seems to me to be an indication of the trickster, for since Wotan is devil and god in one, St. Niklaus' reply that he wanted to serve God only, must have appeared very amusing to them. Another point I want to bring out is something which ties in with what happens later. In Schwyz, Uri, Obwalden and Nidwalden, local legend has transformed the wild army of Wotan into something a little different from what it originally was. In all the Germanic countries there are legends and stories about the wild army which rides about on stormy nights, generally led by a man who carries his head under his arm (sometimes the whole army does this) and hunts in the dark. People who meet the army are said to go mad and peasants who see it disappear for ever, or never recover from the shock. Sometimes a man goes ahead of the arm to warn people. Stories and legends persist through the whole of central Switzerland. The wild army, or wild hunt, with Wotan as leader, with one eye bandaged, is said to produce all kinds of beautiful music and is called "the blessed people.” Their character has become milder and more agreeable and they have become a band of musicians. It is the dead who go around like this for Wotan is also a leader of dead heroes. Lonely people are sometimes visited by the "blessed people" and to be visited in lifetime is a sign of piety and good fortune and a great honor. This element of the friendly dead who walk around and play music seems to fit in with the local image of Wotan. This image again shows the same unconscious tendency towards an integration of the wild hunt" in a positive form in the Christian world.

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Now we turn to the next great vision because the motif of music reappears in it. The text of these visions, hitherto unknown, was found about 1923 in a monastery. Though the visions seem to have been accurately reported, unfortunately the manuscript begins in the middle of a sentence, though probably at the beginning of the vision. It starts off: ".... which he knew." The text afterwards is as follows: In a vision he saw a man who came as a pilgrim with a staff in his hand and his hat bound on his head as though he were going walking, and he carried a coat. And in his spirit he knew that the pilgrim came from the sunrise or from far away. Though he did not

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say so, he came from the place where the sun rises in the summer and he came to him (Klaus) and as he stood before him he sang the word "Alleluia.” And when he began to sing, his voice echoed and everything between heaven and earth held (that is supported) his voice as a small organ does a large one. And he heard three perfect words which snapped back in a lock, like a very strong spring. And when he had heard the three perfect words, all of which were quite separate, he yet did not want to speak of them as separate words. And when he had finished the song he asked the man (Klaus) for money. And he (Klaus) had a penny and did not know where he had got it. And the pilgrim took off his hat and received the penny in it. And the man (Klaus) had never known what a great honour it was to receive a gift in a hat. And the man (Klaus) wondered very much who he was and where he came from and the pilgrim said: "I come from there" and would not say any more. And he (Klaus) stood in front of him and looked at him. And he (the pilgrim) had changed and showed himself without a hat and wearing a coat which was blue or gray, but he did not see the cloak any more, and he was such a noble, well-built man that he (Klaus) could only look at him with longing and desire. His face was brown, which gave him a noble appearance. His eyes were black like a magnet, his limbs were so well formed that they were of particular beauty. Although he was dressed, yet his clothes did not prevent his limbs from being seen. And as he (Klaus) continued to gaze at him, the pilgrim turned and looked at him. And then many great wonders came to pass: the Pilatus mountain crumbled away (became flattened out on the ground) and he, the pilgrim, opened up the whole world so that it seemed to him that all the sins of the world became manifest, and a great crowd of people appeared, and behind the people the Truth and all had their faces turned towards the Truth, that is, they stood opposite it. And on the hearts of all there was a large bodily defect as big as two fists put together. And this defect was egoism which deceives people (leads them astray) so badly that they could not look at the face of the pilgrim, just as little as man can bear the flames of fire, and, terrified, they wandered around and back again, scolding and affronted so that he saw them from far away. And the Truth which stood behind them remained there. I will anticipate a little here. After the first part of the vision, it is said that the pilgrim changes "like a Veronica". This is an allusion to the fact that St. Veronica, according to the Christian legend, had seen Christ carrying the cross and had offered Him a kind of large handkerchief to wipe the blood and sweat from His face, and that Christ pressed it to His face which thus became imprinted on it. In the legend, St. Veronica is depicted as holding the cloth with on it the imprint of Christ's suffering face. There are other versions in which she is distressed at the thought of Christ being crucified and that He came to her in her house and said He would give her a picture of Himself to keep and that He pressed His face on a piece of cloth and gave it to her. This relic later developed healing qualities and was said to have cured the Emperor Tiberius. Then there is an old custom, carried out in very bad taste, which consists of making a wooden image with a central picture and one or more pictures super-imposed, so that you get a different picture according to the angle from which you look at it. It is a trashy kind of picture and changes all the time which gives the connection to Klaus' description that the pilgrim changes all the time "like a Veronica". Naturally the Christian and traditional interpretation is that the pilgrim is Christ and that the three perfect words he sings - which are one yet do not touch each other -

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refer to the Holy Trinity and the name of the Godhead. This seems to me to a certain extent to be correct. If we take Christ as an image of the Self, we can say that it is an archetypal symbol of the Self, which would be an analogy to Christ with certain different features. On the other hand, the Wanderer also refers again to Wotan, who is called “The Restless Wanderer.” Some of his other names are: “The One who is accustomed to the Road,” “The One who is tired of Walking,” or “The One who goes from Place to Place giving Advice.” Frequently he wandered about singing and begging for money, or, like a strange ghost, would come to the King’s Court and tell stories, appearing as a one-eyed man in the hall where there was a big fire. Here he would sit down and tell story after story, fascinating everybody, until suddenly he would get up and disappear and people would recognize the fact that the god Wotan had been there. He went about wearing a big hat and generally his coat was blue or gray. He was sometimes described as looking noble and it was said that he had a long beard, but only one eye. (The pilgrim in the vision has two eyes.) He is sometimes said to be fascinating, beautiful, and young, and as having a homosexual attraction. One Icelandic reporter, Snorri Sturluson, says that everybody was fascinated by his beauty on seeing him and Bruder Klaus’ vision gives the same nuance. He says that “his limbs were so well formed that they gave him a special beauty and that they were visible through his cloak.” Wotan was the lord of love and of homosexual love. Homosexuality between young men, and especially among soldiers, was very prevalent and he was the lord of such men. Germans still have the tendency to emigrate and wander about. Before the war they went everywhere and the habit is recommencing for young Germans still roam about in this restless way and Wotan is responsible for this tendency. It is an expression of an inner longing and restlessness. On a higher level, there is the same motif in the Nordic idea of the Shamanistic journey. Most Shamans are able to make " journeys in the spirit"; they fall into a trance and wander away in the spirit and when they return say where they have been and often they have grasped, in a telepathic sort of way, a knowledge of the far away place they have visited. This is the "journey of the soul" which you read of in material on the primitive medicine man and here it seems to be projected into the form of the wandering god. Wotan followers generally have this tendency to restlessness in a physical sense, or, on a higher level, to such spirit journeys, as in the case of St. Niklaus. When Klaus ran away to Liestal, he ran away from the world, but this was stopped. Later he began to make journeys in the spirit; he would be found in his hermitage with his eyes open and when he returned to consciousness would say he had been to visit friends. He never gave more details and legends grew up of his having been seen in all sorts of places. Actually, he did sometimes leave his hermitage and wander round, so that is really true, and the legend of his wanderings has been built up around that. When we go to the Ranft you will see the monument (given I think by the 41st, 42nd and 43rd Companies of the Swiss Army) which stands on the brow of the hill at the foot of which Niklaus had his hermitage. These Companies were on the German frontier during the last war at the time when Switzerland was nearly attacked. Hitler had made a double plan to break through into France from Holland and Brussels and Switzerland, attacking both ends at the same time. The Germans could easily have done it, but the Swiss army was good and it would have cost a lot of blood and they would have had to continue to keep the Swiss under control. So they began the attack at the Dutch end, intending if they could not get through quickly there to make an attack on Switzerland. There were a few days during the war when everybody

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expected an attack any moment and if France - unhappily for her and luckily for Switzerland - had not broken down so quickly this would have happened. But during those few bad days ., when everyone expected the attack, a few Swiss men from Schwyz had a vision of St. Niklaus protecting Switzerland and the story of this vision spread through the whole country and people were convinced that it was St. Niklaus who protected them. Small groups of people were asked to volunteer to protect the bridges and fight to the death and the Companies in question were formed of such men. They were all facing death. After this collective vision they collected money and put up the monument which we shall see. Thus St. Niklaus is still a living archetype in Switzerland which illustrates the tremendous impact of his personality. To return to our vision. The pilgrim sings the three words which bring an echo from the whole cosmos - earth and heaven and everything between answer so that there is complete harmony and the pilgrim seems to have a key position in this harmony. This could be explained rationally as an inner experience where suddenly everything falls into place and becomes meaningful. This is what the Chinese call being "in Tao". It is the experience of the totality of the cosmos. When such an archetype is constellated, there are generally all sorts of synchronistic phenomena and thus the whole cosmos actually ties in, there is a oneness in the whole reality which is in a meaningful eternal connectedness beyond sidereal time and place. Suddenly Klaus has the feeling that the three words are shut up like the lock of a door, or a very strong spring. This seems a strange expression. Psychologically, we can say a thing "clicks". A mysterious event which we cannot account for rationally but where we can see that something clicks, as in a dream which you interpret, and you have the feeling either that it clicks or not. There may be an interpretation to which you have an emotional reaction and then you generally get a kick out of it and a lot more vitality and you feel that you are again in Tao and on the right track, and these interpretations which "click" are those which bring forward the inner process of development for these are the rare moments when "It" clicks. We might say that here a part of the unconscious energy gets associated with the ego complex and goes over into the ego. You can describe it as a dynamic event, but it is a very mysterious process for something gets assimilated to the conscious personality which was not there before, something has snapped into place. Every true cognitional process has this feature of a widening of consciousness. Pauli, the physicist, defines cognition as the "click" of concepts with the experimental results. If the experimenter has a model of the reality of the atom and it clicks with what the experimental results show, he feels that he is on the right track. Therefore physical recognition would be the click of the inner model with the outer reality. Naturally, this is not only true for the scientist, but also for the psychologist who tries to find the thing which brings about the click, the way of approach, which can open things. That is the famous symbol of the key. You can open up connections if you have the right knowledge of something for then you can bring order into the chaotic state. St. Peter has the keys of Heaven and the Catholic Church has the right knowledge which anybody can use (Apocalypse 3, 7). In alchemy there is the symbol of the philosopher's stone as a key. It provides the right method of getting along with the outer and inner reality, through it you can make things click, a working hypothesis. You have the reaction: "Ah-ha, now I see!" It seems to me that this pilgrim has the essence of what makes things click, he has the key position of cosmic harmony, which shows that he is a symbol of the Self. Singing, combined with the idea of a lock is also found in Nordic tradition, There is a Greenland report of a woman Shaman who had, to exorcise some ghosts. She first

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called the women of the village and said that they must sing a certain song, so that the spirits would he attracted. The song was called "The Locking Song." There you have the same combination, namely that a song is like a lock which opens or shuts, it opens for the right spirits and shuts for the ghosts. We have the same idea in the vision of St. Niklaus for after the pilgrim has finished his song the vision of the Truth comes. So his song opens up the inner truth and Klaus suddenly sees with the eyes of the spirit the Truth standing behind the world. The god Wotan was supposed to be able to open through his song what had been shut or locked up. If we try to define this psychologically it would refer to the so-called frozen affect which can be studied in schizophrenia, but is found also in the realm of the normal person. If an affect reaches a certain climax, it is no longer "hot" but becomes "cold.” If you are really furious, you set into a cold rage and freeze up in bitterness and anger. This is the climax of the affect of rage; or any exaggerated emotion can lead to coldness and a feeling of lameness. All very strong affects have a tendency to freeze if they reach an exaggerated climax. People say it was "as though something snapped in me and I had no further emotion.” Strong emotional shock affects can bring about this reaction. People in the war in a moment of terrified shock instead of experiencing a tremendous reaction felt nothing, they would be quite calm and reasonable - but not quite there. Normally, the emotional reaction comes later, but the longer the state of being "frozen" continues, the worse people are neurotically affected afterwards and the greater the damage. Very sensitive people have this condition frequently. There are people who remain frozen for a lifetime, for a corner of their psyche is not linked up and leaves the whole as though dead, and if touched may produce such an effect that it has to be left locked up. If you have to treat such a situation you have to see what the dreams say. What I have seen in such cases is that a tremendous amount of symbolism appears, Wotanic if the background is Germanic, and Dionysian if the background is a Mediterranean one, for Wotan is a god with many similarities with the Mediterranean Dionysus. If a person in such a condition can be helped it is generally by a tremendous religious ecstatic experience which breaks through suddenly and then the affect, so to speak, falls into its right place because it serves the Divine. You might say that only a numinous archetypal reality is worth such an affect. In primitive religions all strong emotions are given to the Divine and tie into the religious devotion, really deep emotions serve the religious realm, which explains why you find tendencies to such ecstatic cults in which frozen affects are realized in the service of a god or goddess, and it seems to me as if in the dreams of modern people you still find the same tendency. That is the symbolism of being "locked up" (verschlossen) for the person cannot break out. The ecstasy in drunkenness has to do with this condition. The ecstatic, dark emotional side has been shut out from the Christian religious experience and teaching. In the early cults it held an important place, but the Christian religion has cut it out, which is unfortunate for people who have this side in them for they cannot be redeemed by the Christian faith. They say that it does not touch their depths, and they prefer a Communist assembly where there is emotion and shouting, they have the feeling of being moved by emotional impulse. Therefore the fact that our religion does not deal with the emotional aspect is dangerous for it may then burst out and make mischief where there should be reason. We might say that the pilgrim is Wotan, but he sings the definitely Christian word "Alleluia", and you would have to say that Wotan worships the Christian God. The word "Alleluia" does literally mean "praise the Lord" and here there is the idea that the

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pagan god sings praise to the Lord. The three visitors also sometimes spoke as though they were God and sometimes as though they wore not. This double aspect seems to point to the fact that it is an appearance of the archetypal image of God which does not coincide with the Christian image but has something complementary to it - the same thing, but different. One cannot understand it, I think, without the key given by Jungian psychology. The archetype of the image of God appears afresh in the soul of St. Niklaus. The Alleluia song seems to represent a tendency to the unconscious for a more emotional idea of God, not a contrasting, but a complementary one. The Wanderer and St. Niklaus look at each other and suddenly the Pilatus crumbles and there appear many people and beyond them the Truth personified. This again fits with the symbolism of Wotan who bears the title of the True One, the One who manifests everything which has been hidden, and so the song of Wotan opens the whole world. When we have our outing you will see that the Pilatus shuts out the north-west and makes the place where St. Niklaus sought out his hermitage into a lonely corner of the world. Pilatus is a place where Wotan "spooks" and also where pagan Celtic remains have been found. Animal sacrifices must have taken place there and the pagan Germans took over the Celtic cults. They had no temples, they worshipped their gods in woods and on mountains. The old name for the Pilatus is Mons Fractus, the broken up mountain, so naturally it lends itself to the idea that the mountain would break up and disappear. It opens not only a side of the world but the inner situation of human beings, suddenly Klaus sees the inner situation of the world, of humanity. So we might interpret the mountain as a kind of symbol for an emotional blockage, for something which has been blocked. A frozen affect, for instance, is such an emotional blockage which covers the collective unconscious and when it breaks down the deeper situation manifests itself. St. Niklaus had the gift of the Shaman or medicine man and could see what was hidden in the hearts of men. People had no need to talk, it is as if the blockage which prevents us from seeing what is in people had fallen down in his soul and this gift the god Wotan had given him, for Wotan is the lord of ecstatic love and of complete devotion, the love which devotes itself without condition or discussion, just undivided devotion. The lord of such an emotional attitude breaks down the blockage, and thus it becomes manifest that the great disease of the collective situation of that time was egoism (Eigennutz), the desire always to profit oneself, to save one's own skin; the opposite of love, a mercenary spirit which, as we know from history, was a very obvious disease of the Swiss at that time. It is, in general, a disease of the peasant who has such a hard time working on the soil and is in danger of losing the spirit of love. But I do not think we should project it on to them only. This idea of mercenary profit is a disease and strangely enough is especially apparent in Christian civilizations which preach a religion of love. We are the most mercenary people in the world: I think that has to do with the fact that the Christian symbol has lost its root in the archaic layers of the personality; it has dried up and become so intellectual and has taken away from people the gift of being moved and generous. The spirit of generosity is connected with the depth of ones own emotional nature for if we are not connected with our instincts we cannot be generous; people who live only in their heads cannot be generous for this side can only be lived by someone who has accepted his animal nature. We are social beings and if we reject the animal side we can isolate ourselves in intellectual egoism and not share in our fellow creatures’ sorrows and difficulties. The great god of ecstasy and love makes manifest the disease of the 15th century. We have become the opposite of what our faith professes, mercenary and egotistical. In the middle of the last millennium, the Gothic attitude

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came to an end and was succeeded by that of wanting to take possession of the earth (colonization, etc.). It is this cold, mercenary spirit which makes us so much hated by other races. It is as though St. Niklaus saw the nations turning their backs on the truth, they turned, so to speak, from their inner truth and ran into their disease of egoism. The vision then continues as follows: And his, the pilgrim’s, face changed "like a Veronica" and he (Klaus) had a great longing to look at him further. And he saw him again, as he had seen him before, but his clothes were changed and he stood before him in trousers and coat and with a bearskin over them. The bearskin was sprinkled with a golden colour. But he saw and recognized it very well as a bearskin. The bearskin suited him particularly well, so that the man (Klaus) saw and realized that he (the pilgrim) had a specific beauty. And as he stood in front of him (Klaus) and let himself be looked at, so elegant in the bearskin, Bruder Klaus realized that he must leave him. He said to him: "Where do you want to go?" He answered him: “I want to go up the country." And more he would not say. And as they parted, he (Klaus) gazed at him continuously. And then he saw that his bearskin shone, more or less as though one passed a shining weapon over it, the glittering of which one can see upon a wall. And when the pilgrim was about four steps away, he turned round and he had his hat on again, and took off his hat and bowed to him (Klaus) and left him. Then he (Klaus) knew such love for him, that he was quite one with him and he (Klaus) realized that he did not deserve this love, that the love was a part of him. And he saw in his spirit that his face and his eyes and his whole body was as full of loving humility as a vessel filled with honey into which not another drop can be introduced. Then he saw the pilgrim no more but he was so saturated with him that he needed nothing more of him. It seemed to him (Klaus) that he (the pilgrim) had made known to him everything that was in heaven and on the earth. This motif again fits the god Wotan, for he is the one who changes all the time. Wotan could transform himself continually, like Hermes in Greek mythology. In his naiveté St. Niklaus describes this ability to change as a Veronica and now Wotan reveals himself in a bearskin which gleams with a shimmer of gold which strikes him as beautiful. In Lithuanian mythology the bear is called "gold foot," he is the king of the beasts. Gold represents the highest value and incorruptibility. In alchemy the gold would also represent this. The bearskin I have already interpreted with the Berserk, the one who wears the bearskin. God is now a Berserk, and has the quality of "going Berserk," which originally had not the negative connotation but meant being possessed by the god of war and having the capacity to accomplish great deeds in a state of ecstasy. The idea of affect or the dangerous aspect of the man in the bearskin is like the sharp brilliant weapon which reflects in the light. To St. Niklaus it represents a great mystery. The one problem which Christianity has not solved and which is therefore the great problem of our civilization is how to deal with evil. As Jung has said in Aion, Christianity suffers from the dogmatic idea that evil is only the lack of good, the privatio boni. Darkness is said to have no substance in itself but to be simply a lack of light and evil only the lack of good. As Jung says in Aion that is as though somebody had forced me to put my hand in the fire and then said that it was not hot, or that in the North Pole it is not cold, there is only a lack of warmth. Intellectually, you can pretend that this is so, but normally and practically, and that is the aspect we have to deal with in psychology, evil is as great a reality as good. If I am jealous or envious, that is a reality. If my neighbor has a better car and I am jealous, I can say that this is a lack of love and can preach to myself that I ought not to be jealous, but if you

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speak like that to your own bad qualities they do not listen but go on existing and the well-meant sermon does not solve the problem at all. We have to admit that evil is a very strong reality in us and not just the lack of good. If you deny it, it just gets at you from behind. To slaughter a few million Jews and make soap from them and then say that is "only a lack of charity" is cynicism. Such mass murder is constantly breaking out among us and Christian teaching does not prevent it. Therefore it might be wise to take the problem of evil more seriously. We have to admit that in us there are evil tendencies and it does not help us to say that they are not there for we cannot talk them away and if someone overcomes an evil quality it is a great event and I think one might better overcome it if one first accepted it. The greatest sin of mankind is unconsciousness and the evil that people do is the result of that. Intellectual realization is not consciousness, there has to be a full realization with an ethical impact and shock, and then sometimes the evil does stop, but it must be a realization by the whole person. If the shock is great enough people may cease from the evil, but it takes a very bad shock. Assume that a mother is eating her child and realizes this during the analysis, really realizes that she is killing or castrating her son, a real shock may stop her, but if she sees it only intellectually, she will go on. If the shadow is to a great extent integrated, then the individual is touched and can deal with it in its immediate surroundings and does not contribute to its evil any longer. What is not seen in the shadow contributes to the collective evil and everyone who accepts his share lessens the collective evil. The iniquity in the godhead is a mystery beyond human comprehension, but we might try as far as our personal evil is concerned and it is more helpful to accept the fact of evil. We should take it as an immediate and very real reality and try to deal with it.

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Lecture 7 Jung Institute June 26, 1957. Last time I mentioned the problem of evil with a specific purpose in mind, namely to illustrate the problem presented by this vision where Christ appears wearing a bearskin, as this seems to me to represent an attempt by the unconscious to integrate the destructive animal side into the symbol of the Self - to make it one thing. The dark animal-possessed man is here harmoniously fitted into the symbol of the Self. Such a figure of Christ is perhaps less pure than the dogmatic figure, but, on the other hand, the bear has obviously lost some of its dangerous features for the man wearing the bearskin even evokes in St. Niklaus a great feeling of love and "Minne" - a specific kind of love - so that we have here a living example of the idea of integrating evil and destructiveness into wholeness. This man who has the bright reflection around him, like that of a polished weapon - a dangerous association - has nothing dangerous in himself, but, since he wears a bearskin and shines like a weapon, he might represent something one would not like to attack, but there is nothing destructive or aggressive in the figure. On the contrary, it evokes a deep feeling of love. To my mind, this represents another way of dealing with evil, not by asserting that it does not exist, so that it gets at you from behind, but by facing it and finding out what it is, and its emotional and animal nature, for much of our destructiveness is due to animal unconsciousness. If integrated into the totality it loses its maliciousness and autonomous destructiveness. The bear and Christ are then one thing and Christ acquires a slightly uncanny feature, since He does not just represent the man of kindness with the sweet pardoning nature, but it is a figure which wears a bearskin and wanders about. Yet, at the same time, he has the power of love, a love with a stronger flavor than the watered down Christian charity which we like to believe in. The Berserk is a richer symbol of Christ, brought up by the collective unconscious. As you know, Jung studied alchemy and all these strange traditions because he felt that in them were themes of the collective unconscious to complement the one-sided aspects of our idea of Christ - the incompleteness of the dogmatic figure. The unconscious has tried to enrich the figure from below and to make it a more real symbol of totality and of the Self. We could say that this vision of St. Niklaus is also an expression of the time - a compensation - for the people of that time killed, hung and robbed to the most amazing extent; there was no thought of loving Christianity and very few made an honest attempt to live the Christian life. One could say that that was man's fault, but, psychologically, we can say that it is the fault of the dogmatic figure which does not grip man enough, or convince him sufficiently to induce him to make the great effort. Man does not live up to his ideals if they are too pale and unreal, they do not convince us, and here the unconscious tries to correct this oversight and show a new ideal man, an attitude which is worth striving after and living for. If we take it less on the collective level, though I think it is mainly a collective symbol of the time, we could remember, as I pointed out to you before, St. Niklaus' emotional nature and emotional feeling, as instanced when he saw the flames coming out of the man's mouth - a projection of his own emotion - and after which he took the decision to retire from the world which would otherwise have eaten him up. His deep emotional side, which in a schizophrenic person would have led to an outburst of emotion, was kept within by his retreat from the world, so that his "bear" side became integrated into his totality and thus lost its negative features and his personality became

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transformed and acquired depth and verity. You see again and again that if someone succeeds in integrating emotion instead of letting it out, then it adds to the personality, it is as though the person had become spiritually richer, for the autonomous destructive character which came from the emotion and was not integrated, has disappeared. The unconscious usually symbolizes emotion by fire which can destroy, or can produce light, and when one is over-emotional over an incident one can ask oneself why, what is behind it? Why do I react with such an over-dose of emotion? If you ask that question in objective honesty, you will always discover an unintegrated shadow, for the exaggerated emotion points to an autonomous complex. If you make an honest attempt to find out about your emotions you will increase your self-knowledge and gain in totality. Therefore emotion is a secret liberator. One does not know how to begin in the search for self-knowledge but the simplest way is to find out where you become over-emotional, to see where the "bear" is and that will lead you to unintegrated complexes and totality. In the apocalypse when Jesus is asked: “Who will lead us to the Kingdom of Heaven?" He says, "The fishes in the sea and the birds in the air." It does not matter what fish, or what animal it is. With St. Niklaus it is a bear, the bear comes twice - with the bear's paw and in the bearskin. What brought him to the Kingdom of Heaven was his vision, for he learnt to integrate his aggressiveness and hidden rage about what was unjust. Question: Have all animals such a meaning, or are there differences? Answer: If St. Niklaus had had a vision of a lion, I would have said that it pointed to a power drive. The elephant would be in another category, for the elephant is unique among the animals. The Bushmen say that any superior man get the title of "Lion,” the highest title, but they never call anyone elephant because the elephant represents wholeness and outstanding genius which only appears every 6,000 years on this earth. In India the elephant represents an aspect of one avatar of Buddha. The elephant is the god-man among the animals and represents the greatest, the most integrated wisdom of nature, it is in a different category from the bear or the lion. The serpent is a very complex factor, difficult to sum up, it would represent the basic tendency towards unconsciousness still hidden in somatic sympaticus reactions and the deepest unconsciousness in man. We cannot make any rapport with a snake except by magic, or music, or by going into a trance, while with all other animals you can make contact by talking to them. Thus in a snake there appear layers of the unconscious which you can only meet by the trance, but it is also the greatest bringer of light and wisdom. The snake stands for uncanny, very far away contents of the unconscious to which we have no feeling or intuitive relationship, one is faced with a riddle. The tiger is sometimes represented as the wife of the lion, it has definitely more feminine features and is closer to the earth mother; the jaguar is also the earth mother, the devouring mother of life and death. In China the tiger is the symbol of the Yin principle while the lion is, so to speak, a warmer animal and has more to do with affect and the heat of the summer sun. It is the kingly animal. Negatively it would represent a power drive and positively generosity for it lets the smaller animal go free. In Walt Disney's film the male lion is too lazy to kill, but you can say that he is generous. As animals, lions are famed for their non-aggressiveness. An elephant is said to fear snakes, mice, drunkards and pigs. His fear of the mouse has a physical cause, since it may crawl up his trunk and suffocate him, mythological projections on animals usually have a hook in reality. The elephant - being very Victorian - is said

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only to mate once in a lifetime. He washes morning and evening and after his bath perfumes himself with flowers. The integration of the animal nature of man is one of the greatest questions and problems and one to which Christianity has given no answer. What can I do with my animal nature without repressing or killing it, or letting it loose on others? The problem came up in Bruder Klaus' time and you see the answer in his unconscious. When the Berserk-Christ figure said “Goodbye” he saw something shining, like a polished weapon which hung upon a wall. A polished sword gives a reflection and Klaus saw in this something hidden. We can speak of mental reflections as reflection, using the word in the psychological sense and meaning that, instead of having subjective opinions, we try to get objectively inside ourselves. Most people are concerned with their own egos and think they are this or that and consider that as reflecting about themselves, but this is just day dreaming – the ego mirrors the ego – introverts especially like to consider this as deep reflection. If you try to reflect on your unconscious material you gain a kind of scientific insight into your inner features which is objective reflection and this would be in the nature of an honest attempt. One can also say that the weapon represents decision and discrimination. The sword stands for discrimination and aggression, with a sword you also cut things. Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot. But here, instead of being used as a weapon to kill others, it emanates light - integrated aggressiveness. If every time someone annoys me, I say "Stop" "Why do you get emotional?" then I replace aggression with insight, which would be the same as replacing aggression by discrimination. Klaus says this is something hidden. It is a mystery to him how this can be integrated. The sword, according to an alchemist (G. Dorn) stands for the wrath of God. The angel at the entrance to the Garden of Eden also had a sword and his fiery sword appears as the symbol of the avenging affect of the Old Testament God. In the change from the Old to the New Testament, when God tried to incarnate in man, He changed the sword of wrath into the hook of love, so you see the sword meant this dark, judging side of the Divinity. When God appeared in the Vision of St. John in the Apocalypse, a sword came out of his mouth - some are redeemed and others condemned. This sword should he transformed into the spirit of love, something which takes place here because the Berserk figure emanates love. If we look at the roots in Germanic mythology of the words "sword" and "shining," we find that the word bright or shining always implies a definite mana emanation - the Shining One, the Splendour of Victors, The Trembling Shimmering Thing - are all names of famous swords. "To shine" in old Nordic mythology has the meaning of a clear sky, of a good mood - for you are either like a thunder cloud or like the bright sky, in a good mood. Ziu (Anglo-Saxon Ti or Tiig from which we get Tuesday) is the god of the bright sky. The Latin word and the Indian word - Deus and Deva respectively - go back to the etymological root and refer to the brightness of the day sky, and this gives the same association with bright and shining in reference to the divine, and to enlightenment. This figure which emanates such splendor, emanates consciousness and has a divine quality. Bruder Klaus also experiences fascination and physical attraction when he looks at the Berserk figure, there is a slight homosexual tinge, and he feels so full of love that he is overflowing with it, for he feels that the beaker overflows with love like a pot full of honey into which not another drop could he introduced. "

Minnie" is a very interesting word. Martin Nincke says that it implies more than our

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word love and means sexual love, affection, and everything which we would call love as well as the loving thought for absent friends – the strong connection with someone not physically present, away on a journey, or dead, and the connection of man with God, whom man does not see physically. It has to do with the telepathic connection with absent or distant people, like the sudden telepathic connection of a woman whose husband is away. The true psychic relationship of two human beings is brought about by "Minne." In olden days, at German parties one drank to the god “Minne" and got another beaker to drink to the dead and that was called the "Minne Beaker", when in loving concentration one became united for a minute with those absent. Honey ties in here for, as Paracelsus says, honey is the sweetness of the earth. It was thought that honey conveyed a poetical gift and quality. If you smeared honey on your tongue you could speak in ecstasy. “Take some milk and honey before sunrise and you will find magic in your heart" is an old recipe. Honey was used as an offering to the gods. In the Bhagavad Gita Upanishad II, 5, is another connection between the symbol of honey and the realization of the Self, for there it is said: "This Self is the honey of all beings, to this Self, to this Atman, all creatures are honey. And what is the Purusha, the divine man, than the Self made from light, energy, and from immortal substance. What this Atman is, i.e. this Purusha which is made from light, energy and immortal substance, that is this undying thing, this Brahman, this is the cosmos." So you see the honey in the first part of this sentence means the loving contact between the Atman and all beings, the connection with the divine, with the "Anthropos" figure, which in India is the Purusha. We might therefore say that the honey motif is like a transformation of the red color which when Klaus saw projected into the outside world at Liestal had a threatening aspect, but now when the red principle is within has turned into honey. When Klaus realized that the Berserk was like a pot full of honey and could take nothing more, then he knew everything which was between heaven and earth. His realization is a realization of love and of knowledge and when he feels this he knows everything between heaven and earth, every inner question is answered, then the Berserk is as much a symbol of "gnosis" as of love. We always like to think that intellect and heart are opposites, but here the two principles are united in loving understanding, they are not really opposites. Jung speaks in Von den Wurzeln des Bewusstseins (The Roots of Consciousness) about the blood substance as seen in alchemy. In alchemy, he says, they were greatly concerned about the so-called rosy coloured blood and often compared it to healing power. Jung says that this blood substance symbolized a certain aspect of Eros, also symbolized by the rose, which unites the one with the many, making them whole, being thus a panacea and an elixir pharmikon. This aspect of Eros, Goethe described very aptly in his Secrets. This phenomenon, like the idea of the Christian caritas, always points to the fact that in social life there is a deficiency which should he compensated. In antiquity the lack of love was obvious (slavery demonstrated the lack of human love) and this still survived in the Middle Ages with its cruelty and unreliable jurisdiction and feudal conditions which ignored the rights and dignity of man. One would expect that Christian love would take its right place under such awful conditions, but what happens when Christian love is blind? Love alone does not help if not accompanied by understanding. To make the right use of love a wider consciousness is required, a higher standpoint to enlarge the extent of the horizon. It is quite true that love is necessary, but it must be coupled with insight and understanding. The function of love is to light up the areas which are still dark and to bring consciousness to them through understanding (durch “begreifen” – to grasp the objective dignity and meaning of the other individual and to love the other in objective

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understanding.) outside in the world as well as within in the inner world of the soul. The more love is blind, the more it is "driven" and the more destructive are its results for it is a dynamic which needs form and direction; the more love is not blind, but is enlightened by understanding, the more we have what could be called real Eros. We can say that the Berserk with his "Minne" principle typifies such an idea of love and understanding as one thing, complete understanding and loving acceptance of the other's condition and of the surroundings. You could also call this "absolute knowledge" in the cosmos, which is connected with the experience of the Self. This, I think, is one of the deepest experiences Bruder Klaus had of the symbol of the Self and one of the most impressive symbols of the totality. It is, I think, the vision from which came much of his later attitude, such as his prayer to God asking that he might be taken away from everything which took him from God. There is no reflection or ascetism in it. He had a very deep and wise love and understanding of his fellow beings which he demonstrated in his consultations where he evinced real comprehension. Even sharp criticism was always accompanied by consideration for the other person. The Vision of the Fountain: Through his suffering, and by the will of God, Klaus' sleep was broken. And he thanked God for His martyrdom and His sufferings. And God gave him grace so that he found support and happiness in it. Thereupon he laid himself to rest and it seemed to him in his sleep, or in his spirit, that he came to a place which belonged to a community. There he saw a crowd of people who were working very hard but were very poor. And he stood and looked at them and marveled very much that, in spite of all their work, they were yet so poor. Then there appeared on his right a well built tabernacle. (The tabernacle is the small receptacle in which the monstrance with the host is kept - it houses the host. In Latin the word is "tent." It has now acquired a religious significance. Here it must have been a small construction, or tent, in which the holiest and most sacred divine symbol was kept.) In the tabernacle he saw an open door and he thought to himself: "You must go into the tabernacle and see what is in it, you must soon go in by the door." Then he came to a kitchen which belonged to a whole community. On the right he saw stairs going up, about four steps, and he saw some people going up, but only a few. It seemed to him that their clothes were sprinkled with white. And he saw a fountain flowing down the step by a big trough to the kitchen and the fountain was of three substances: wine, oil and honey. This stream flowed as quickly as lightning and made such a loud noise that the place echoed as if a horn were played. And he thought: "You must go up the stairs and see where the fountain comes from." And he marveled very much that the people were so poor and that nobody went in to draw from the fountain which they could quite well have done for it was common property. (That is, why did not these poor people use the wine, oil and honey?) And he went up the stairs and came to a wide hall. And there, in the middle of the hall, he saw a large square box out of which the fountain flowed. And he went to the box and looked at it. And as he went to it he almost sank, as though he were crossing a swamp, and he drew up his feet quickly (had to walk very quickly) and came to the box. And in his spirit he realized that whoever did not walk quickly would never get to the box. The box was reinforced on all four sides with strong iron plates. And the fountain flowed through a pipe and sounded so beautiful in the box and in the pipes that he marveled very much. And this stream was so clear and pure that one could have seen a hair lying at the bottom. And however strongly it flowed yet the box remained full and overflowed. And he realized in his spirit that however much flowed out of it, there was always more there and he saw how it leaked through all the cracks. And he thought: "Now you will go down again." Then he saw great streams flow from all sides into the trough and he thought to himself: You will go out and see what the people are doing, why they don't come in to draw from the

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fountain which has such a great overflow." And he went out through the door. And he saw the people working very hard, but yet they were very poor. And he watched what they were doing. And he saw that someone had built a fence through the middle of the square and in the middle of the fence there was a lattice door which a man held with his hand (He invented the Customs and taxation;) and he said he would let no one in or out unless they paid him a penny. And Klaus saw how someone turned a thumbscrew on one of the people and how he said: "That is to force you to give me the penny." And he saw a piper who played and who demanded a penny. And he saw a tailor and a shoemaker and the other craftsmen who all wanted pennies. And they were all so poor that they could hardly manage to pay. And he saw nobody go in to draw from the fountain. And as he stood there and watched, the place was suddenly transformed into a dreary slope like the place where Bruder Klaus' church was and where he lived and he realized within himself that the tabernacle was himself, Bruder Klaus. This time the tabernacle, as is said at the beginning of the vision, appears on the right side of the dreamer which shows that it is a symbol closer to his consciousness. This might have been a vision of St. John of the Cross, or of any other saint, for it is close to Christian symbolism. P. Alban Stoeckli quotes the famous sermon of Johannes Tauler who speaks of turning to the inner soul. He says if you turn towards your own inner soul you will find there that from its very depths there is a spring welling up all the time and that is the loving (Minne) intimacy of the Holy Ghost which the mystic finds at the bottom of his soul. In former times, among the Church Fathers, Christ was often spoken of as the rock from which the water of life flowed forth, the fountain of life. The water is interpreted psychologically as the immediate fusion and contact with God which wells up from the depths of the mystic's soul. Medieval art produced many representations of this well of life. When Christ's side was pierced and some of the lymph flowed out it was said that this would continue to flow in the Catholic Church, just as when Moses struck the rock and the Children of Israel drank from it. This is a simile frequently repeated in the sermons of the Church Fathers. The famous painting of Van Eyck shows the blood of Christ flowing from his wound divided up into four fountains and distributed through the whole world. It is a parallel to the Holy Grail, a vessel which contains the blood of Christ. Christ in a supernatural appearance is supposed to have given the grail to Joseph of Arimathea. Afterwards it was transported to France and later became the mystical centre of Arthur's Round Table. There are many representations of the idea that the blood of Christ is the secret well of life which nourishes man, it stands for the eternal food, the blessing of life which is distributed to everybody. We could also compare this square contained with the altar in the shape of a vessel which appears in Zosimos' vision. He sees this large altar in the shape of a vessel in which people are cooked and transformed into spiritual beings. The water in this connection symbolizes the meaningfulness of the unconscious. What it is in itself we do not know, but we know that if we can extract the meaning from a dream and integrate it, it has not only the aspect that we know more and have a greater insight, but we obtain at the same time a revivifying affect, and that is the immediate effect of such an understanding, therefore such an experience has always been compared to the "water of life". In Church symbolism the water of life is a good sermon; if I leave the Church with a better feeling then I have got some of the water of life. The Catholic Church speaks of the water of the doctrine and says that it has a revivifying effect to get water when you are thirsty is an indescribable feeling. "My soul thirsteth for the Lord" says the psalmist, but if you have this experience the thirst

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vanishes and there is a feeling of well-being and satisfaction and of being embedded in something meaningful. Water also has a purifying effect. There are three stages in this vision: the courtyard, the kitchen, and the four steps going up, and then the square well with the water in the centre. Only a few people go through, it is too difficult for the others. Then comes the cubic symbol of the reservoir and round this is the swamp where if you don't walk quickly you sink. From there the water flows down the stairs, it is not quite clear how, and is then distributed by the three pipes into the basin below. Klaus marvels that people do not make use of it. The few people who go up have white spots on them - alchemically are close to the Albedo, they are beginning to be purified, beginning to be more conscious and get more enlightenment - but Klaus is amazed that there are so few. But still in this courtyard of working people there is an effort to become conscious, namely in the kitchen, but there are still fewer who make the mystical further development illustrated by the four steps to the centre, the symbol of the Self. From the point of view of value, it is interesting that in the kitchen, wine, oil and honey are distributed, all very expensive substances, but higher up and of more value is the water, the cheapest thing is the thing of the greatest value, not the refined substance, but the cheap water, the aqua vilis. Wine, oil and honey are substances which have to do with the Christian symbols: the wine - blood, the oil - chrism. The honey, though not really taken as a symbol in the Catholic Church is regarded as a simile of love. All three substances are associated with human effort so that you might say that they are aspects of the unconscious which are acquired by effort. But it needs no outer effort to reach the water, the thing which is everywhere and in the richest profusion. Beyond the Trinitarian principle with its idea of a spiritual effort and the Christian way of life, there is a fourth step and a fourth substance and this fourth step is not a step higher up, it is rather a re-descent into complete simplicity. In Zen-Buddhism one finds this same symbolism of the descent after the great effort. A series of pictures symbolize the process of enlightenment. The first is concerned with the taming of the runaway oxen, first with the whip and afterwards without. This is the overcoming of the demands of the animal nature. In western meditation texts undisciplined animal nature is overcome by meditation and fasting. Then, having put the whip aside, the adept kneels down and then comes the realization of the Self; there is just a circle, without content. Then the man has disappeared into the spiritual experience of the Self, and you would say that this is the climax of human development. When you have got there, you have got as far as a human can go. But then comes a last picture; it is of a fat beggar man with a big belly who has a kind of senile smile on his face and a pupil beside him. He goes now to the market and begs for his food, but wherever he walks the cherry tree blossoms. It is the return to the water itself after the great enlightenment, the return to being a completely unconscious human being. He does not intend to do any good, he is even a beggar, and others do something for him. He has no motive, he is a nobody, but the cherry tree blossoms as he walks by, perhaps he is even so unconscious that he does not notice it. There is the idea that as long as there is any conscious striving towards becoming conscious you cannot avoid the ego in the endeavour, for you never get there unless you take your analysis seriously, or do not try to understand your dreams. You have to go up the stairs with an effort and this is a stage which cannot be skipped and it leads to a certain very deep inner realization of the Self, but this is not the whole thing, because after that comes the experience of the water which is an experience of

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the Self in a new aspect, a complete return, away from any conscious striving towards goodness or understanding. The alchemists, with their strange and more complex way of putting things have the same idea. They said that the most precious thing in the world was the cheapest and that was the water, which had no price, but that is the most precious substance for those who knew what it is, for those who know the mystery of the permanent water. In olden times the peasant drew the water from his own well and the container in those days was a wooden box reinforced with iron. Practically every farmer had one, there was no organized distribution. People will not look at what is under their noses, the mystery of self-knowledge and of humbly looking at oneself does not cost anything, but it is not liked. The many in the courtyard could have it but they do nothing. They have no libido, and yet it is distributed without charge. The Chinese rainmaker who has been sent to cure the drought says that when there is a drought everything is out of Tao. When I got to the place, he says, I was at once out of Tao myself, and therefore I asked to have a hut made and in the three days I have spent in the hut I have done nothing but get myself back into Tao, and then, he says, with a wicked old man's smile, and then, naturally, it rains!

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Lecture 8 Jung Institute July 3, 1957 Last time we spoke of the four substances: oil, honey and wine, and then, in a class of greater value, the cheap, ordinary water of the spring. I quoted texts from the German Fathers who compare the body of Christ and the vision of God with the spring or well of water within the depths of the human soul. The swamp, psychologically, is quite relevant in the approach to the fourth, the dangerous element. In going to the kitchen and taking the wine, and honey and oil, there is no danger, but in approaching the fourth, the central symbol, we come to the dangerous problem of the step from the three to the four; it is a moment when one might be swallowed up by the unconscious, it is the psychological problem. Technically, we can say that the swamp comes about through the water overflowing, as it would do in an ordinary fountain in a country place, creating a dirty swampy place around. This would probably be the association here. One could say that the water itself stands for the immediate spontaneous manifestation of the unconscious psyche and that the box in which it is kept would refer to the fact that such contents should be realized and retained by human understanding. All our activity in psychology is directed to the effort to catch the water of the unconscious, so that it should not build up a swamp in the person's psyche, but remain pure and have a revivifying effect. If spontaneous unconscious manifestations are not grasped and realized in some form, they degenerate in the psyche and create unconscious possession: unclean phantasies of a destructive nature. Jung even says that we can cure schizophrenic conditions to the extent that the patient can be got to give form to his inner contents. Otherwise there is the situation of the swamp; one is swamped by the unconscious overflow of impure phantasies in which the most sacred and the most profane ideas are intermingled. If you study a schizophrenic's flood of talk you will find a juxtaposition of contents of the most numinous feeling value with the most profane. E.g. such an individual will simultaneously carry on a telephone conversation with the Virgin Mary and storm and rage about the non-arrival of food or tobacco. Jung once had a patient who would disappear into herself “to telephone to the Virgin Mary." This blurring of values, of the important and unimportant, has to do with the affect and feeling life of such people and it is this confusion which creates the swamp around the well. Therefore the inner well has to be purified and kept pure by conscious understanding. Whether it creates a swamp or a well of life in the psyche depends on the human conscious understanding. The official Church interpretation would be the swamp of sin, but I think for this vision that would be too narrow for here we are concerned with the innermost sanctuary. I think it has rather to do with the danger of degeneration of the inner fantasy which is not understood, for if we are unable to explain and understand the most important creative impulses of the unconscious psyche they degenerate into power and profane sex fantasies, or, into possession by a power figure such as Hitler, for instance, who identified with the archetype of the inner god so that he became megalomanic. It degenerated into a wrong kind of fantasy life. The fact that St. Niklaus has to cross this swamp to reach the central symbol reminds one of the crossing of the ford or the waters, which plays a great role in religious systems. In the Gnostic sect of the Perates, their central symbol represented such an idea. The Perates lived about the time of Christ. The name came from the Greek word

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meaning "to cross" and the Perates are those who went over the water and crossed the big ocean. They say that they have given themselves this name because the world is a big swampy sea and they are the people who went beyond it to the "other shore." In the sea the people without "gnosis" sink and are drowned, but the Perates cross over and get to the place of peace and inner salvation. They quote the crossing of the Red Sea by the Children of Israel saying that the drowned were those without gnosis. The gods of the lost and the gods of salvation are together in the place of the utmost union of the opposites; they live together on the other shore which is what the Perates try to reach. Jung quotes this in Mysterium Conjunctionis Vol. I, p. 217, where he says that the Red Sea is the water of death for unconscious people, but for the conscious it is a baptismal water of rebirth and the going over into the Beyond. The unconscious people are those who have no realization as to the essence and meaning of man within the cosmic realm; in modern language, those who do not realize the personal and collective contents of the unconscious. The first part would be the shadow or inferior function which would refer to the sin and impurity of the neophytes. The collective unconscious is expressed in the teaching of most of the mythological mystery cults which reveal secret knowledge as to the origin of all things and the way of salvation. Unconscious people who have not been cleansed from the shadow and are without guidance, drown, that is, they no longer continue to develop psychologically. To go over and reach the other shore they should realize something hitherto unknown to them, namely the inner opposites, all those contents which are predominately in opposition. I think what Jung says there about the origin of Christianity what was to a certain extent true at the time of St. Niklaus, for the realization of the opposites was lacking then also. His unconscious made a serious attempt to unite the light and the dark and to bring the opposites into one reconciling symbol. In the vision, the swamp and the well of life are in the same place and St. Niklaus succeeds in stepping across the swamp and not being drowned in it. Probably, without the meditation exorcises he did at that time he could easily have been drowned in the unconscious and become a funny day-dreamer, walking about and talking to himself. If such people open up to someone, they spill out material consisting of dissociated unconscious and dissolved fantasies. They are a good picture of what it means to get stuck in the swamp, but St. Niklaus was able to get a more central symbol for he concentrated on what was important and allowed his feeling function to focus on that and to grasp it. His Directeur de Conscience, Heiny am Grund, had given him exercises which consisted of prayers to be made every three hours on the theme of the suffering of Christ. These prayers were undertaken as follows: At 6 p.m. He thanked his Christ for the love He gave mankind as demonstrated by His washing the feet of his disciples and by the Eucharistic meal; At 9 p.m. He thanked his Redeemer for His love in having suffered and sweated blood for mankind and Niklaus begs Him to free him from the fetters of evil; After midnight: He says Mattins and thanks Christ for His love and for His sufferings in the house of Chiapas where He was despised and spat upon. By the shameful treatment He suffered, Niklaus begs to be forgiven the shame of his sins;

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In the early morning: He thanks Christ for the love which enabled Him for Niklaus' sake to be mocked by Herod and his soldiers and begs Him for grace with which to bear all attacks with the same patience; At 9 a.m. He thanks Christ who through His love submitted to the scourge and begs that he, Niklaus, might be scourged on earth so that he might be spared punishment in eternity. At 12 midnight: He thanks Christ for allowing Himself to be crucified. At 3 a.m.

He thanks Christ for His death and for having died for him upon the cross.

This meant getting up several times in the night. At the time when he had his depressions and consulted Heiny am Grund he was advised to do these exercises arid to pray daily at definite hours. This helped him to a certain extent but the depression, only really stopped after he went to Liestal and decided to become a hermit, though the exercises lessened his sufferings and gave to his personal conflict a super-personal point of orientation which enabled him to understand that his sufferings were parallel to Christ's and not just that of the ego in conflict, but of the Self and its demand: for incarnation. God's wish for incarnation is the real reason for his sufferings and takes away some of the neurotic aspect but naturally does not banish suffering. The next thing I want to discuss is the motif of the profane court to which Niklaus returns and where he wonders why the people behave so peculiarly. In an individual this is normally the problem of the inferior function, the function by which the inner person relates to the super-personal, so that it even becomes the function of religious experience. One has a religious approach through the inferior function because the latter is contaminated with the whole unconscious and, not being differentiated; it carries the whole thing with it, the Self as well, so that the unconscious totality of the person is touched. The inferior function cannot be integrated totally, one can only adapt to it to a certain extent. By working on yourself you fish up one auxiliary function and then another and in time have the three out of the chaos of the unconscious and so far you have not had to give up your standpoint and you can fish up all the time. But then comes the crucial moment for you cannot put down your hook and get up the fourth, you have to go down yourself, so that the whole process of development changes. The ego must give up its superiority and humiliate itself and agree to things which seem foolish and unnecessary, it has to let itself be over-run in order to assimilate the fourth function. One has to give up the claim of being master in one's own house voluntarily: only through this voluntary submission can one relate to the fourth function. It can become something close to you by which you can relate to the unconscious, but you can never integrate it. You can say that there are four functions but only three steps and, as Jung says, this corresponds to the Christian idea of the three ages. First comes the state of mind of man in the Old Testament where there was no problem of the opposite, of light and dark. The contradictions in God Himself did not bother Him. The image of God mirrors His own mood: He wants to bless man, but then is angry with him and drowns him and then has to make a rainbow to remind Himself. Jung illustrates this by the example of the Elgonys (an African tribe) who, as long as the sun shines say that life is wonderful, but when the night comes they disappear into their huts and say that everything is wrong - they have forgotten the daytime where everything was good.

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We know from our own childhood that we were like that, at one minute everything was all right and the next, when you were thwarted, everything was wrong – you just switched, and that is the state of deep unconsciousness. Then comes the age of the New Testament and the first realization of the problem of the opposites as an ethical problem. In the first stage people do good and then wrong, but do not suffer from this, and if you reproach such people they evade the point. There are many people still in this stage who have no real shadow problem because the shadow, though it appears to them from time to time, does not become a crucial ethical problem to them. In the next stage, however, it does become a major ethical problem and there is a serious and whole-hearted attempt to take it seriously and try to solve it. This leads to the cross and crucifixion and that is what the Christian teaching meant, the problem of the opposites. But the cross is death, i.e. it leads to an impasse and anybody who has tried to go on with that attitude too long has to give it up after a time. There have been saints who have tried their utmost but they have come to the conclusion that there must be something which leads beyond it. St. John of the Cross, for Instance, says there are three ways for the inner development of man, to the right - the way of the world, to the left - the way of asceticism and mortification (the Carmelite Order to which St. John belonged was dedicated to this and this is what they practise in that Order). St. John practiced it to an extreme degree. He says this way leads, to a certain extent, to inner development, but then becomes a cul de sac, for it is as bad as the other. It must be given up again and a middle way found for development. Pushing the problem of the ethical opposites and striving for one or the other, results in a dead end, it is against life, you cannot go further. If you stick in the second stage, you have to die. The early Christian martyrs chose death; they lived the second stage to its bitter end. But if one does not wish to follow a religion which leads to death, one has to find the third stage that of the Holy Ghost, as Joachim of Fiore put it. Psychologically, that means an attitude of no longer trying to solve the problem with the ego consciousness, but by submitting to inner guidance, the spiritual guidance of the unconscious, when the ego gives up its own standards of good and evil and submits to guidance, and that is St. John of the Cross' third way. So we have four elements and three procedures. The same is true within an individual faced with the integration of the fourth function for then all ethical values and evaluations of consciousness which one hitherto held have to be given up. Sometimes one has even voluntarily to suffer the defeat of consciousness, the thing for which one strove most, that very thing is in this stage thrown away. In this one gains the whole totality in which the fourth element is embedded because one submits and goes down into it and gets the human contact with nature and the super-personal elements of life. Analysis becomes synthesis at this moment and the whole attitude changes, and the whole method of the unconscious changes in this phase. The three procedures are very beautifully illustrated by a German mystic, Heinrich Seuse, who says that the religious inner life consists of three steps; first, the way of purification in which one has to practise mortification and suffering and sink into a stage of feeling lost and helpless. Then the way of elevation and realization of the sufferings of Christ, the Christians, and the worship of the Virgin Mary. Then, the third step, in which contemplation comes in and in which the grace of sanctification begins to act and in this third step one reaches the gift of wisdom. Jung illustrates the same idea when he speaks in The Psychology of the Transference

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(The Practice of Psychotherapy) of the stages of the anima figure, beginning with the biological as represented by Eve, then Helen on the aesthetic level where woman has already acquired some value as an individual, then the realization of the Virgin Mary, a spiritual form of the anima, and then one could not go higher, so the way goes down, because the fourth is wisdom and wisdom is a bit less, and then it is wisdom to lessen again. It is more to be wise than to have a white attitude, though apparently, looked at from the outside, it is like going down again being less super-human and less white. Seuse says something similar when he speaks of the worship of the wisdom of God - a contemplative attitude towards the inner things. There is a certain parallelism here. Christians who have had the courage and the uncompromising attitude to try to live according to Christian teaching have come to the conclusion that a bit less is even more than the one-sided spiritualization with its cramped attitude. St. Niklaus also said that a state of contemplation was like enjoying a dance, and people said of him that in a good mood he was incredibly gay. A young man once asked him if he should contemplate and Niklaus said "Yes" that he should, "it was something wonderful, like dancing." The young man looked shocked and Niklaus repeated what he had said. He had a mind of simple cheerfulness. When theologist’s came to check up on his orthodoxy and tried to catch him out and prove that he was a fraud, he would say that he was a completely unlearned peasant and could not read or write, and would they please not ask him such difficult questions. In that way he was not at all oily and pompously saintly. We have now to discuss the problem why in the first courtyard people are troubled by unnecessary activities and try to extort money from each other: they make fences, they tax, there are different crafts, etc. They work and work and destroy themselves and are not much better off at the end. So Niklaus wonders very much why they do not go a bit further and find everything they need. This at first seems easy to interpret, if one forgets to look at it from the subjective level. You could say that it was the beginning of the Renaissance of degeneration into worldliness, the age of horizontal expansion, of the discovery of new continents and the development of trade, etc., and that the spiritual realization of the Middle Ages had turned over into powerful and driven worldly expansion, that the increase of self-discipline and consciousness of Christianity in the Middle Ages was now used to conquer this planet. The destructive features which make Christians so much disliked among the family of man because we have more concentration and more brain and have increased the boundary of our consciousness, began to be evident at this time. We owe much to Christianity but make bad use of it and this mercenary spirit of the white man is in a very immediate way linked with our religious development and has led to all the dubious phenomena of Christians who believed that their contradictions could he reconciled with their religion. The illegitimate child of Christian teaching - egotism - is what manifests in this atmosphere of the courtyard and is the shadow of the 15th century, so to speak. St. Niklaus repeatedly said that the men of the Church were eaten up a mercenary spirit: parsonages were bought, and so on, the mercenary spirit overwhelmed Christian life and the State began to put out its claws over people. That is how it looked from the outside and how the problem of the time was constellated, it was the beginning of worldliness and its dangerous consequences. But there is still more to this motif. In the other vision there was the bearskin Christ who asked for a penny from Niklaus. In this present vision He is a profane plurality of people who are the beggars, so we must

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say that these profane beggars must be connected with the beggar man in the former vision. We have experiences in our time which show exactly what is meant. If a claim of the unconscious, a claim towards individuation receives no attention, it is replaced by an inner mass spirit. People who have realized what the problem from within might be are put before the choice of either going the way of individuation or becoming one of the mass. But what is even more important, is the fact that, whether Communism gets our country or not, we are all on the way to become communistic from within something you can observe every day in your practice. People dream about it all the time and you are continually confronted with: "Oh well, what is the use of making such an effort inside, there are thousands of other lives, so what is the meaning of mine?" Or, in a woman it is the animus which thinks: "One ought", "It should be done", " Everyone thinks so." The animus of a woman is a doctrinarian, an announcer of collective rules and not of rules for one person and no one else. As soon as one notices: "One should" or "I know it is so", as soon as I do not take myself seriously any more in any way I am, psychologically speaking, on the road to inner Communism, I am building a road for the mass man, where the individual is unimportant. It is necessary for young people to adapt to collective consciousness that is a normal phase of development, but not all share in this, some do it outwardly only, but a certain amount of normal adaptation is necessary. If we are on the way to individuation we do not begin to walk about naked, just to annoy others, it does not mean to be ill-adapted. But to allow oneself to think in a collective way is always destructive, even in puberty, instance, if a girl starts to "date" boys because "One has to" she is already on the way to a love life of prestige instead of feeling. Whenever one feels compelled to behave like the others that is already animus possession. The Communists say that time works for them and psychologically they are right, because more and more people come under the spell of the "mass" from within. There is perhaps national resistance to Russian methods, but all “isms” prepare the way and one can eve be anti-Communist in a collective way. One should stop thinking in collective terms and try to make an honest attempt to a re-evaluation of the individual and its importance and instead of fighting, turn away and concentrate on what is more important. The bearskin Christ figure refers to the Wotan experience and later historical events have shown what has happened. In Professor Jung's article on Essays on Contemporary Events you will see that he evaluates Nazism as Wotan-possession which has not been recognized as a religious experience. Instead of being that it has become a completely destructive mass movement. Its centre would have been a Wotan experience had the Germans been able to keep it within and not allowed it to become a collective movement. If it had been kept on an inner mystical level it would have led to such experiences as St. Niklaus had, but instead it became a mass movement and thus the process of individuation becomes demonic possession. In this vision the danger is already expressed; the beggar who wants the penny could become a profane greedy man. In the background of Nazi wishful fantasies is the desire to establish a superior kind of man and a kingdom of justice. The same wishful fantasy is in Communism. With a religious attitude, this would have been right and would not have led to destruction, murder and war, but the ideas were projected into concrete reality and became destructive.

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In the vision suddenly the whole place changes into the place where St. Niklaus himself lived, and he realizes that he was that tabernacle. The end of the vision hints at the fact that all he saw was happening within himself, though it did not come from him personally. The people who ask for the penny could refer perhaps to his own doubt as to whether he was not just a queer sort of fool who wanted something extra for himself - not saintliness, but just a queer impulse - in modern language a schizophrenic condition. The doubts he had would stand for the collective within him which questioned the rightness of his lonely way. Everybody told him that he should not leave his family and that he could serve God just as well by staying at home and that to leave his wife and children was a mean thing to do. He did really put such questions to himself; he had the collective element which is personified in this vision. He wondered whether in continuing his lonely way as a saint, he was not pursuing a kind of personal ambition. The Swiss especially hate to be eccentric, for their idea that everyone should try to be alike, there is a strong collective atmosphere which is even more emphasized among the peasants and anyone outside the average is viewed askance. St. Niklaus was surrounded by that atmosphere. To be a peasant in the country and then to become a local saint in the same place was a great affront to collective feeling and he must have felt the impact from within as much as from without. He knew how foolish he looked to others and he had to have the backbone to stand up to that. This inner conflict was responsible for his depressions, for he was not yet quite sure what he should do.

The Third Vision St. Niklaus’ sleep was broken through God’s and his own sufferings and he thanked God for His suffering and for His martyrdom. And God gave him grace so that he found support and happiness in it. Thereupon he laid himself down to rest. And when his spirit was bound, though he thought that he was not yet asleep, it seemed to him that someone came in by the door and stood in the middle of the house and called out to him in a strong clear voice and asked him what his name was, saying: "Come and see your Father and what he is doing." And it seemed to him that he arrived quickly at the target (that is, the distance which an arrow travels) in a beautiful tent in a great hall. There a few people lived and the man who had called to him stood at his side and acted as his intercessor. And though this man spoke, yet St. Niklaus did not see his face and did not even wonder about it, and he spoke for St. Niklaus and said: "This is the man who lifted up and carried your Son and came to His help in His fear and distress. Thank him for it and be grateful to him." Then there came through the palace a beautiful and stately man whose face was like a shining light and who wore white robes like a priest's alb. And he put both his arms round Niklaus' shoulders and pressed him to Him and thanked him fervently for having come to the help of His Son in His distress. And Niklaus was cast down and felt very unworthy and said: "I do not know that I have ever done your Son a service." Then the man left him and Niklaus did not see him again.

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And then there came through the palace a beautiful, stately woman also dressed in white and Niklaus saw clearly that the dress was freshly washed. And she put both arms round his shoulders and pressed him warmly to her heart with overflowing love because he, Niklaus, had helped her Son so faithfully in His distress. And Niklaus felt unworthy and said: "I do not know that I have ever done your Son a service except that I came here to see what you were doing." Then she left him and he did of see her again. And then Niklaus looked round and saw the Son sitting in a chair beside him and he saw that He was also dressed in the same way and that His clothes were spotted with red as though they had been sprinkled with a brush. And the Son leaned towards Niklaus and thanked him profoundly for having helped Him in His distress. Then Niklaus looked down at himself and saw that he also was dressed in white sprinkled with red, like the Son. And that surprised him very much for he had not known that he was dressed like that. And then suddenly he found himself in the place where he had lain down so that he thought he had not slept. In the writings of German Christian mystics, like Teuler, when the human soul appears before the throne of God, God comes down and embraces the soul and thanks it for its sufferings, for anyone trying to live a Christian life is actually helping God. Such an idea was to be found in many mystical texts of the time and compensates a doctrine which ascribes everything to God the Redeemer. But the Divine and the human are intertwined, since man does something for God. It is interesting that the Holy Ghost tells God to thank Niklaus. He is ordered to do so. The Virgin Mary does not need to be told, for she has more softness and she thanks him for what he has done for her Son. The Unknown Being with the clear, strong voice seems to be the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, the Comforter and Counselor, and Niklaus is confronted with the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary as the fourth parson. Imagine what this vision meant in the 15th century! Already there we have the whole background of the dogma of the assumption of the Virgin Mary, she is already the fourth person of the quaternity and from the white robe which she has like God's, she is equal to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. She is now the queen of heaven, but not yet a goddess. She is the mistress of heaven and earth but is still denied the title of a divinity; she is nearly, but not quite the same. The dogma lags a little behind the development of the time, but it is amazing that in the 15th century such a development appears. As Professor Jung says in his comment on the Assumption of the Virgin in Answer to Job, the Assumption has to do with the idea that a further incarnation of God, which began with Christ, is still going on, and that it now reaches ordinary man and not only one chosen man, Christ. The Assumption of Maria therefore expresses a great hope, the great longing in the human soul for the union of the opposites. What I said about the unity of the three you can apply to the dogma of the Virgin Mary. Probably the Pope was very much concerned at the political situation of the time, but Niklaus had these visions because he himself was torn by the ethical conflict and the Virgin Mary in this situation became the reconciling symbol. It is in the nature of woman not to intensify the opposites, not to put them against each other, but to strive for relatedness and peace. A woman can stand a blurred situation without being upset by it as a man is. Jung always quotes Anatole France's anecdote where the short-sighted saint went to a lonely island and saw a lot of men in smoking jackets

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walking about and from the boat gave them a collective baptism. He had not noticed that they were penguins! That put Heaven in a tremendous difficulty and the heavenly assembly got into a great to-do because if a being is baptized it has an immortal soul should one therefore bestow immortality on the penguins? So all the Church Fathers assembled and here was a great discussion, but in the end God thought it better to ask Catherine of Sienna, and she said: "Oh just give them a soul, but a little one!" For a woman that was quite simple! The same applies if someone gets into a dead issue in a fight with the shadow. A man in such a case would need the reconciling appearance the anima that brings in Eros which is beyond the opposites. Niklaus was attacked by the devil several times at the beginning of his retreat and the Virgin Mary frequently appeared and comforted him. She could smooth the ethical conflict when it got out of hand. On one occasion she appeared to him the top of an apple tree. That is original role of the feminine principle, reconciling through love what is irreconcilable from a logical standpoint, by being human and having human understanding for the other. The patriarchal tradition in the Christian religion has cut out this female element too much. Everything must be clarified. That has its advantages, it has pulled us out of a certain swamp but it also has destroyed a certain Eros attitude, the reconciling attitude, which is why the Assumption of the Virgin Mary creates a new healing symbol, a symbol which may point to a possible way out of the present situation. The split in the world, between East and West, is once again the problem of the shadow which each projects on to the other, neither wanting to give in. Actually, as Jung says, we have an iron curtain between ourselves and our shadows and there we would have to begin to be human and have human understanding. So we have the first amazing attempt of the unconscious to integrate the female element and build up a quaternity symbol. St. Niklaus is rather lost, and says he has not done anything, but in the end he discovers that he is completely identified and assimilated with Christ, he is a second Christ.

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Lecture 9 Jung Institute July 10, 1957. Last time we left off in the middle of the vision in which St. Niklaus sees first the Father in a white robe then God the Mother, robe and also in a white robe, both of them thank him for what he has done for their Son and then suddenly St. Niklaus notices that he is sitting beside Christ, who also thanks him for what he has done, and he discovers that he is wearing exactly the same garment as Christ Himself, namely a white robe sprinkled with red, probably with blood. There is also a further invisible figure, the Holy Ghost, the intermediary, for he asks first God the Father to thank Niklaus and then introduces him to God the Mother, thus making the connection between these four figures. So we have the heavenly quaternity of Father, Mother and Son and the fourth would be St. Niklaus who is integrated to the divine quaternity. With the fourth element, man enters the quaternity and the Holy Ghost functions as the quinta essentia, the spirit of one-ness which makes the four one. This role of the Holy Ghost is, in accordance with tradition, the Paraclete, and people filled with the Holy Ghost, according to the Bible, will do even greater things than Christ, so that you could say that the Holy Ghost is the instrument by which man assimilates even further the Christ-figure and is so able to enlighten other individuals so that they become -parallel figures to Christ. This would be even orthodox Christian teaching. Through suffering the inner opposites and through his tremendous effort towards genuine personal religious experiences, we can say that St. Niklaus has suffered crucifixion. The process of individuation has become so real to him that he has been torn by the opposites and therefore wore red and white like Christ, the colors of the alchemical opposites. The last stages of the philosopher’s stone are the albedo, whiteness, followed by the rubedo, redness, and the heavenly marriage is represented as the coming together of red and white, and this same symbolism is expressed in the red and white garments of Christ and St. Niklaus. Through suffering and going through the process of individuation Niklaus becomes a twin brother of Christ, thus fulfilling the role of the philosopher's stone which was conceived by the alchemist's as an analogy to a twin brother of Christ. In Psychology and Alchemy (German version pp. 480-483, 1944 ed., and pp. 339-341 English translation) in the chapter on the relationship between the symbol of the philosopher's stone and the symbolism of Christ, Jung says: "The alchemists never thought of identifying themselves with Christ; on the contrary, it is the coveted substance, the lapis that alchemy likens to Christ. It is not really a question of identification at all, but of the hermeneutic sicut "as" or "like unto" which characterizes the analogy. For medieval man, however, analogy was not so much a logical figure as a secret identity.... Without knowing it, the alchemist carries the idea of the imitatio Christi a step further and reaches the conclusion we mentioned previously, namely that complete assimilation to the Redeemer would, enable him, the assimilated, to continue the work of redemption in the depths of his own psyche. But this conclusion is unconscious...." (Namely, by pushing the imitation of Christ as far as possible so that one reaches a certain state of analogy with him, then one would also have the gift of redemption of others.) "....The artifex himself does not correspond to Christ; rather he sees this correspondence to the Redeemer in his wonderful stone." (You see, he does not think, I am the brother of Christ because I push his redemption further, but that his stone is something of the kind.) "From this point of view, alchemy seems like a continuation of Christian mysticism carried on in the subterranean darkness of the unconscious - indeed some mystics pressed the materialization of the Christ figure

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even to the appearance of the stigmata." (You can say that Christian mysticism has not gone as far as it could have done, the alchemists went further on this road. Christian mysticism with its phenomenon of stigmatization, gave more the appearance of identity with Christ.) "Had the alchemist succeeded in forming any concrete idea of his unconscious contents, he would have been obliged to recognize that he had taken the place of Christ - or - to be more exact, that he, regarded not as Ego but as Self, had taken over the work of redeeming not man but God. He would then have had to recognize not only himself as analogous to Christ, but Christ as a symbol of the Self. This tremendous conclusion failed to dawn on the medieval mind." The first part of this is clear, namely if the human being lives the imitation of Christ to its utmost, or even a step further, then he becomes identified with Christ, he is an analogy, but not as the Ego, only as himself in his greater totality, for as the analogy of Christ he can perform the works of Christ. The work of Christ is to redeem man, but the further step is to redeem God. That is also the difference between the figure of Christ, and the philosopher's stone. In the Christian of redemption Christ comes to redeem man, what happens to the creature, the trees and animals, and the stones, is left vague. The alchemist said that his mystical aim was not to find redemption for himself, he was interested in redeeming what he thought was the divine essence in matter, so he tried to redeem God, so to speak, to redeem the divine essence in matter and the divine spark in creation. If we make an analogy with our modern attempt to come to terms with the unconscious, one is not interested oneself in one’s unconscious in hope of feeling better or getting an easier life - an egotistical idea - but one goes into analysis with the idea of getting rid of certain symptoms. But after a while, if this stage is overcome, there comes a turning point in the process individuation where one begins to be interested in it for itself, one no longer asks how can I get a dream to help me to feel better but, what is the secret hidden meaning of the unconscious and what does it want me to do? And then you become the servant of a power in the unconscious which, subjectively looked at, is the super-personal, and the process of individuation begins to be a service, the work of serving the greater thing within, and no longer asking does this bring me suffering or happiness, but how can I help towards realization of this thing that is deeper than me? The task is no longer the redemption of the Ego, or man, or some sociological helpfulness, this is not denied, but it goes a step further for ultimately, the only really interesting thing is to serve as a process of individuation. This is anticipated by certain mystics who from doing good deeds and good works, progressed to the condition of becoming the absolute servants of the divine centre, no matter what their own situation, or what it implied in suffering. The same idea was unconsciously realized in alchemy, for the alchemists were searching on the same lines, but with them it did not come quite to consciousness so that they only expressed it symbolically. They were probably hindered by certain Christian prejudices, not realizing that they themselves were attempting to push Christian mysticism beyond its former limits. In the last vision of St. Niklaus the same idea is expressed, namely that by really living without compromise the burden of his own inner process of individuation and taking upon himself all the .suffering, without realizing it, he had become an analogy with the figure of Christ and a redeemer of God. This has never been emphasized by the theologians, it has been skipped. But if you have read Answer to Job you may remember that Jung tries to point out that God's decision to become man and suffer crucifixion is ultimately due to the fact that God Himself suffers from His own

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darkness. The official version is that God had to become man to redeem us, so the sins were ours, and God the generous figure who became man to redeem us from them. But if we realize that man cannot carry the load of the divine shadow and that therefore a great part of man's sinfulness is not his doing but is forced upon him through the shadow of God, you can say that if God decides to become man and be crucified He accepts the opposites within Himself and accepts the suffering of His shadow, redeeming Himself and paying for His own opposites, more than for the sins of man. Becoming Christ-like is a divine development by which St. Niklaus tries to redeem himself from being split. Every man who takes upon himself the same problem of the opposites, though on a small scale, becomes, as it were, the realization of a process which really goes on within the image of God Himself. That St. Niklaus had to have this vision shows that he had not realized this. If we ask ourselves in what frame of mind a person has to be to have such a vision, I could make a guess, though I cannot prove it. As we know that he was depressed at this time, I would say that the frame of mind would be that he took his suffering too personally, that he tried to the right thing and did not understand why he was doing it and that he was lost in the narrow considerations of this world and did not quite understand what was going on in the dark background of his own soul. He did not at that time understand his task and that what was hidden to him, what was happening, that he was becoming Christ-like. He was drawn into the process of becoming an analogy of Christ. Such a person must be someone deeply impressed by his own shadow and who, being depressed by this painful realization, does not understand the suffering from the shadow in a greater connection. Being troubled as he was by what seemed to be a conscious conflict, i.e. leaving the family and how he could best serve God, he did not realize what the deeper root of his suffering and restlessness and unhappiness meant and therefore the unconscious gave him this vision to show him that by suffering this conflict he had become assimilated with Christ. Thus every time someone goes through this process of individuation it means that God partially becomes man in him, every process of individuation is a process of incarnation of the Divinity, if you take it in its projected mirrored form. In his book Answer to Job Jung says that the vision of St. John in the Apocalypse anticipated the second part of the conflict of the fish Aion, which began about the year 1,000 A.D. and lasted up to our time. In the figure of Christ, he says, only the light side of God became man for Christ was born and begotten without sin. Great care was taken that He became man without touching His darkness and only the light side of God incarnated, this might have been with the purpose of creating a solid basis for a further incarnation. In St. John's vision the idea is that God would once more incarnate and this time with his dark side as well as his light side, namely in the child of the woman who fled into the desert. In the vision of St. Niklaus you see that he is chosen to become one of the vessels of a further incarnation of God. The fact that the .same vision the Virgin Mary is represented on a higher level than the dogma of that time, as the mother goddess beside God, and St. Niklaus is represented as a twin brother of Christ, is closely connected. The Virgin Mary as a human being has always been represented by the Christian theologians by two other figures in the Bible. In the Wisdom of Solomon there is the female figure of the Wisdom of God who was always with him, a divine being who was with God before creation. Theologians have artfully identified this figure with Christ, and thereby skipped the fact that it is a feminine figure and they have thus eliminated

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the essential feature. Other theologians have identified the Sophia figure with the Virgin Mary. After the death and Assumption of the Virgin Mary there is still another figure in the Bible for the Apocalypse makes mention of a woman with a crown of stars that gives birth to a new savior. This, the theologians affirmed, must again be the Wisdom of God, or again the Virgin Mary, because they did not know what else to say. If you accept Jung's interpretation in Answer to Job you can say that this poor postMarianic figure of Sophia would be the anima figure which carries the process of a further incarnation of God in man, the process of individuation for each male human being. It is interesting that St. Niklaus who suffered this process was so hit by the problem and speculated a great deal about the figure of the Wisdom of God with which a further vision of his is concerned. He contended that the Virgin Mary should be recognized as divine and a super-personal figure and he identified her with the personification of the Wisdom of God. He also believed in the Immaculate Conception which was not a part of the dogma of his time but was accepted later. But St. Niklaus anticipating the further development of the problem, believed in it, showing that his concern with the figure of the Virgin Mary was linked with the tendency to bring forth more the feminine and psychic element among the figures of the divinity, to include more of the substance of man in it. The Virgin Mary, an ordinary human being, has now ascended to heaven, this time in an incarnation of the divinity; a female, the inferior figure, has been accepted in the heavenly world, which demonstrates the compensatory unconscious tendency of the time to try to alter the one-sided spiritual realization of the patriarchal religious system which does not allow enough reality for the world of Eros and the ordinary man carrying the process of individuation. The fact that the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Niklaus in an apple tree shows a further element, namely the greater inclusion of the life of Nature, another point lacking in the Christian religion, namely the acceptance of Nature in its beauty and natural features. The official Christian symbol is a dead man hanging on a dead tree, and St. Niklaus has a living woman in a blossoming tree - the whole difference of the unconscious idea is thus expressed. The symbol of God as a dead man hanging on dead wood expresses the idea that totality, as portrayed in crucifixion, can only be realized after death through complete mortification of the human being. The living woman would portray the process of individuation in this life and in complete accordance with Nature, as a process of living growth and in the blossoming of the tree. All the previous visions of St. Niklaus occurred before his retreat to the Ranft. Afterwards he became very silent about his inner life. According to his visitors, he was sometimes gay and happy and at others sad and introverted; much must have happened to him to which, in his peasant reserve, he never referred. Also, after his retreat, he became such a famous person surrounded by many people. An unknown person can afford to say more about himself, but after his retreat St. Niklaus was so surrounded by public attention that he had to he more careful, particularly as he was checked up on by malignant theologians who did their best to catch him out. The only vision we know of after his retreat was one he had in the years between 1474 and 1478, which would be about 13 or 14 years before his death, which occurred in 1487, when he was 70 years old. So he must have been about 56 or 57 when he had the vision.

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Heinrich Wolflin reports that St. Niklaus had a vision after which everyone who saw him was terrified when they looked at him. He had had such a shock himself that people turned away from him in terror after it. When he was asked why this was he said that he had seen in a vision a penetrating light which represented a human face and that at sight of it he had feared his heart would break into little pieces and he was so overwhelmed that he had turned his face away and thrown himself down on the ground and because of what he had seen his face had become terrifying to other people. Another biographer, a little less reliable, the French humanist Karl Bovillus, who had also visited St. Niklaus and had had conversations with him, describes the same vision and says that there appeared to St. Niklaus on a clear, starry night, a human face bearing a dreadful expression both angry and menacing. He seems to have had the vision during the night and the two reports agree that he saw the face of God which terrified him so much that he nearly lost his reason. Psychologically, the symbol of his heart breaking into pieces would mean schizophrenia, that is, that he could not stand the experience. Dismemberment - exploding, into little fragments is a picture of an outburst of insanity. But St. Niklaus threw himself on the ground and again you have evidence of his basic, instinctive sanity, which makes the whole difference between a schizophrenic and a normal person. Instead of going off his head he knew how to cling to reality, the earth being the basic physical reality of human life and he clung to that so as not to be pulled out of himself through trying to face something beyond human understanding. He showed that utmost simplicity and humility of attitude which is lacking in the schizophrenic who goes about saying that he himself is Christ or God. St. Niklaus did not identify with what he saw but held on to the reality where he belonged and thus was able to bear the experience. This picture has been compared with that of the avenging Christ as described in Revelation 1, 13, where He is the avenger with the sword coming out of His mouth. Jung has also pointed out that this ultimate and last vision is connected with the visions he had before. First he saw the star and the light in heaven, and then was touched by the light when it hit him in the abdomen, after which he did not eat, and now again he sees a light, but this time in the shape of a human face. The light has come closer and closer. At first he only sees it far away, this time he sees with his own eyes a content within, it has become a personal being. Taking it psychologically you could say that it was a process of approaching consciousness for a content slowly comes closer and when the person sees a human face it means that now the content has reached a stage where the human being can have a human reaction towards it, it has advanced a step and has reached a layer where it can be understood or assimilated, Only when it has reached human shape can you realize it. St. Niklaus does not say much about this vision. Some therefore who do not like the vision have criticized this fact, but anyone who has had such an inner experience knows that the deeper it is the less one says about it. I want first to go on with Bovillus description. He says that St. Niklaus saw a face and on the head was a three-fold tiara, or papal crown, in the middle of which was the sphere of the world, and on the sphere a cross. The face had a long three-fold beard. Six sword blades without handles seemed to go out from the face in different directions. One went from the forehead upwards and penetrated the sphere and the cross, with the broad part in the forehead and the point upwards. The others emanated from the two eyes, having their points in the eyes and the large part outside, two came out of the nose with the broad part in the nostrils, the sixth had the

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broad part upwards and the point in the mouth. Bovillus was affected with preReformation ideas and put into his description a negative figure of the Pope. Martin Luther says this shows the wickedness of the papal system and the whole vision is said to show the rottenness of the Pope and the Catholic Church. So you see St. Niklaus might have done better to say nothing, for the thing was so twisted by others that he had to be more and more silent about it. It is an interesting fact that it is said that after this vision Niklaus had a painting made of it in his hermitage, so you see the importance of it. According to reports, the painting is not as Bovillus describes the vision, but more like what we have seen in the church at Sachseln. The actual painting shows a face with a beard and a wheel around it with six pointed rays within the wheel, three going out and three coming in. In his own comments on the wheel Niklaus never mentions swords, but speaks of the spokes of a wheel, so probably Bovillus saw the painting in the darkness of the cell and thought the spokes represented swords, but the saint himself never said so, but gave a long explanation of the spokes of the wheel. A copy of the panting made in his cell is in the church at Sachseln but the face has been painted over by someone who could not stand the original threatening face, and turned it into a sweet face of God. One can see that there is a different picture underneath but the church does not want the threatening face to be seen. A German named Ulrich, a kind of mystic who wandered about on a pilgrimage, as Niklaus had wanted to do, but of whose background we know nothing, made a report which was printed in Augsburg in several versions. He says that he had an interview with St. Niklaus when the latter asked him if he had seen his will and his book of wisdom and brought him (Ulrich) a drawing with only the spokes and gave this pilgrim the following explanation: I would like to let you see my book in which I am studying and whose teaching I try to understand. He showed the drawing of a wheel with six spokes as shown and he said: Do you see this figure, the Divine Being is in the center that is the undivided Godhead in which the saints find their inner joy and pleasure. The three points which point towards the inner circle, those are the three persons and they emanate from the one Godhead and embrace heaven and the whole world which is in their power, and as they emanate from divine power, so they are one and indivisible in everlasting power. As you see by the wheel from the inward turning point of the inner circle there is a great breadth which ends in a small point. As is the meaning and form of the spoke, so is the all powerful God who covers and surrounds the whole of Heaven and who, in the form of a little child, entered and came out of the highest Virgin without violation of her virginity. (You can say that God is great within and when he becomes man in the outer world he is a helpless little child, born of a Virgin, so he narrows Himself when He comes out.)

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He has also given us the same delicate body as a food together with His indivisible Godhead. As you see by this spoke which is also broad at the inner central circle and small at the outer circle, even so is the greatness of the all powerful God in the small substance of the host. Now observe a further spoke of the wheel which is also broad at the inner circle and small at the outer, that is the meaning of man's life. In this short time we can, through the love of God, earn an unspeakable joy which has no end. That is the meaning of my wheel. One cannot be quite sure whether the further texts are St. Niklaus' or the pilgrim's, so I am omitting them. You see, what seems to have happened is that first St. Niklaus had a terrifying vision and then he had a painting made of it and covered that with a mandala. The idea of the wheel and the spokes probably comes from mystical texts. In all probability St. Niklaus had seen such drawings and treaties by German mystics where God is represented as a circle. For instance, Seuse represented Him as an indivisible circle. The idea of the mandala is widespread in the German mysticism of the time and St. Niklaus probably knew of it and somehow felt the urge to integrate this terrible face into such a mandala drawing. Jung says in speaking of him, that through his loneliness and his turning to inner things, St. Niklaus had looked so deeply into himself that he had a terrible and wonderful genuine inner experience. In this situation the dogmatic idea of the godhead in the mandala was very helpful because it enabled him to assimilate the vision of God and saved him from disintegration. Jung’s idea is that he made use of the traditional image of the circle and its dogmatic interpretation and with the help of this mandala drawing, which served as an instrument of order, he protected himself from psychological dissociation, or from a schizophrenic outburst. The mandala has the function of holding the person together, conserving the totality of the person from disruption and is the instrument of assimilation of such a tremendous experience. The idea of the godhead being a circle is a general mystical idea, but the idea of the wheel is original. It is a mandala and has the function of bringing order into the inner chaos. It serves, as Jung says, to make the experience understandable. A stone which falls into quiet water makes circles of waves and in the same way such a sudden and violent vision has a long later affect. It is like a shock which has to be slowly assimilated by living it over and over again and therefore there will be a tremendous spiritual effort at integration. The shocking experience needed assimilation by human understanding. The vision is a hunch, an " Einfall", it is something which "falls into" your mind, or occurs to you. Such a vision, Jung says, is a powerful "Einfall" in the original meaning of the word and therefore there was always the effort to make rings round it, like the rings round the stone which fell into the water. As it was the teaching of the time that God was the highest good and perfection, such a vision with its tremendous contrast with the dogmatic teaching must have had a great moral effect and he therefore needed many years to integrate it into consciousness and he did it with a mandala, as man has always done since the Bronze Age, for even Paleolithic material shows mandalas.

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But even if no such writings had come to the Ranft and if St. Niklaus had never seen a round window in a church, he probably still would have been able to put his experience into this form because it is archetypal. It is a refugium, a method of saving oneself, which is why he has put the circle over the terrifying face. We might still add one point to the symbolism of the wheel for which we have to go into the meaning of the number six. There are two groups of three. According to number symbolism the three represents any kind of dynamic creative power and six represents the reaction of the receiving creature to creation, the creative emanation and the counter-reaction towards the centre which is why R. Allendy in his book, Le Symbolisme des Nombres 1918, says that six represents the tension between the creature and his creator. In antiquity six was the number of Aphrodite and of marriage which again means the equilibrium of two poles of opposites. Six is therefore an equilibrium as a dynamic fact. It is a polarity through which counter action tends to stabilize itself in opposition. In Neo-Platonism much is said about mystical, magical wheels, symbols of the relation between the upper and higher spheres. We can say that the wheel is an effort to put into form the dynamic dialectical process in which St. Niklaus tried over and over again to relate to the shocking experience till a process which is going on; it turns round and carries the process within him in a constant effort for relation to it from another and still another angle, which is the typical kind of assimilation for a very vital symbol. It was still a “process” going on in him probably till his death. It is depressing and shocking in a way to think that a man who has devoted his whole life to God and totality has been rewarded by this shocking and terrifying experience, it shows that the process of individuation is not a kindergarten affair for those who want safety and a life free from suffering. Jung says that in the neighborhood of death, and in the evening of a long and meaningful life, a view opens sometimes into great spaces, for in old age one is no longer concerned with the vicissitudes of daily life but in the observance of far away things. In old age the outer shell becomes thinner and people become sensitive under the mask of not minding any more and then the spirit of God can penetrate more easily and call man again to the fear of the immeasurable Godhead. The dangerous age for the outbreak of schizophrenia is between puberty and. 30, and again in old age, because in these periods consciousness weakens and if a content of the unconscious breaks through and there is not enough healthy personality to hold it, schizophrenia occurs. St. Niklaus carried the potentiality of this experience all through his life. It was probably the whole nagging and tormenting quality in his psyche and, as a flower opens, the vision came at the end of his life, but at that time he was able to assimilate it. It is also the completion of the Wotan motif, which I tried to show you, going through the whole series of the visions, because the divine figure looks at him with an expression of anger and menace. The name of the god Wotan is connected in Gothic language with fury, brutality and rage, with being possessed and mad. The same word is also connected with the idea of being poetical, inspired, and with storm, courage, sexual impulse and even sperm and ecstatic love. All these words are etymologically akin and Wotan was said to look at people in a penetrating way so that they became terrified and shocked. Nietzsche whose illness was due to the invasion of such an image refers to the great hunter, the unknown god who looked down at him through clouds with a mocking eye. But his heart did burst into fragments. If we ask why this Wotanic influence comes up again, why does the image of God as it breaks through have such an archaic form, I would not say that it was Wotan, though

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it carries an amazing number of analogous features to that god, as well as having the features of the Judeo-Christian divinity. We must ask if the image of God reveals itself from the unconscious of the human being and, if it has a certain background, we must ask why does the unconscious pick up old archaic features and fill them with these ideas? There must be a purpose. We can say that there two things lacking in the Judeo- Christian image of God. First the relationship to Nature, though God did reveal Himself in the rain or in the burning bush, or other natural phenomena, but the connection of God with the surrounding cosmos was much thinner than that of Wotan who is the storm in the woods. The Judeo-Christian God is more an entity outside cosmic nature. But there is another feature which is as much emphasized as in the old Germanic tradition, namely the relationship of God to what Jung calls the principle of synchronicity. Wotan is the inventor of the throwing of runes, sticks with certain drawings on them, something similar to the I Ching. Conclusions were drawn in accordance with the way the sticks fell, it was an oracle technique which is still carried on in some African tribes. The medicine man has a collection of animal bones or sticks and from the patterns they make on the floor he is able to see hidden facts, it is a technical help to visualize the unconscious. If we take these mantic methods seriously psychologically, then we have to free ourselves from causal rational thinking. Jung has introduced into our understanding of a series of events the idea of synchronicity, which means a principle of correspondence or similarity which makes things which are not causally connected like to coincide at a certain moment. The fact that I throw the sticks does not produce the victory, but it coincides with it, it is a Just-So story without causal connection. Wotan was the inventor of this technique with the key position in synchronistic events. You can find traces of the same thing in Jewish tradition. Dr. Hurwitz has informed me that the old Jews had an oracle technique to find out the will of Yahweh. This was an archaic remnant which had been dropped, while in the Germanic religion it was the living means of contacting the Godhead, a spontaneous connection of the divine within nature. These features of the God are important to the lonely individual who wants to find out where he stands in surrounding nature and to relate to the Divine, for he needs its manifestation. What does it help me if I pray to God and have no answer? How do I know I have touched something which is real to me? If there is no manifestation, no hint from the Divine it needs a lot of faith to believe in it. In the Christian faith we have just to believe and hope for the best, but if one never has personal confirmation faith becomes difficult, and, as we see in our civilization, any kind of anti-Christian propaganda can destroy it in us and it can be dropped as an illusion. Therefore there is a feeling need for direct connection with God and there our eyes naturally turn to Nature and again back to the phenomenon of the miracle or marvel and there you see people experience synchronistic events which they generally, take as confirmation of the fact that they are touching something real, that they are realizing something which is greater than themselves, that they are "on the track." One woman, for instance, dreamt that she met three tigers and next day in an ordinary Swiss barn came across three tigers. There is no causal connection but it is a direct experience, which will naturally make the dream more real to her and make her more concerned with its content. The archaic man within us will take it as a sign, a hint from the gods, that this dream is really important. We must reckon with the archaic man within us and respect him as older than ourselves. St. Niklaus living in this green dark valley only confronted by the trees and no house or any other building in sight, was right in nature and it is therefore only natural that his experience of God would include nature. The experience wanted to reach him in its full reality. St. John of the Cross also had a very close relation to nature, though not

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so close as that of St. Niklaus. This complete inclusion of nature makes St. Niklaus a very special kind of saint. As a Christian saint he is enriched and completed with the more archaic features of the healer, the medicine man, and the Shaman, and it seems as if in the process of individuation there is a return to a more archaic and pagan layer leading to the inclusion of the outer reality of nature and primitive physical man. In that sense you can say that his inner experience and development anticipated features of the process of individuation in modern man because now, a few hundred years later, we have met with the same questions and problems. In history great future developments are often anticipated through a few lonely persons and after a time more and more people discover them, so we can say that we are confronted with the same problems which St. Niklaus touched upon a few hundred years earlier, so that in the study and experience of his visions for I do not mean that we should imitate him – we can learn about our own problems and those with which civilization is now confronted.

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