Carl Gustav Jung - Shadow(1)

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Jung’s Understanding of the Meaning of the Shadow
pages 205-229 from
Jung and the Story of Our Time
by Laurens van der Post
© 1975 by Laurens van der Post
Not the least of Jung’s services to his time was his demonstration of how the dreaming
process in man, far from being archaic and redundant, was more relevant than ever. This
symbol moving between his dream and daylight self, however, was crucial at this moment.
For years Jung had observed a sort of circular movement of awareness, dreams, visions, and
new inner material round an as yet unclefined centre like planets and moons around a sun. It
was a strange rediscovery of what had once been called the "magic circle."
Christian use of this symbolism of the circle was common in the medieval age, usually
in paintings of Christ at their centre and the four Apostles arranged at the cardinal points of
the compass around him. But no one had ever seen the symbolism implied in the pattern.
Some of Jung’s women patients who could not describe it in words or paintings would even
dance the magic circle for him. And, as I was able to tell him also, the Stone Age man of
Africa to this day does as well. Jung found this circular pattern such a compulsive, one is
inclined to say transcendental, constant in himself and others that he started to paint it and to
derive such comfort and meaning from it that for years he hardly drew anything else. He
called the process and the movement of spirit the mandala, taking the Sanskrit word for
"circle," because by this time he had seen drawings by his patients that were almost exact
copies of drawings used in religious instruction in Tibet. When I told him how I had
discovered that "mandala" was used in African Arabic also for spectacles, signifying thereby
an enlargement and two-way traffic of spirit, he was visibly moved.
He instantly told me how important a piece of evidence the discovery of the famous
"sun- wheel" in Rhodesia had been to him, since it was perhaps the oldest visual
representation of this pattern. I was able to tell him of other possibly older abstracts of
similar and related patterns in an immense expanse of stone which had once been the bed of
a river in southern Africa. This primitive confirmation as of the first primordial human
witness to the truth of his own conclusions helped him greatly. Indeed, his own confrontation
with the unconscious had ended with some superb paintings of mandalas. One called
Window on Eternity
, though painted long before his meeting with Wilhelm, is included in the
"examples of European mandalas" accompanying The
Secret of the Golden Flower
, of
which the dream magnolia was obviously an example. It shows a flower, a diamond with
light in the centre, the stars in their courses about it and surrounded by walls with eight gates,
the whole conceived as a transparent window, constituting as complete a visualisation as
imagination is capable of rendering of the whole of life and its meaning.
It was followed later, however, by another, the last of all the paintings in the Red
Book, of the yellow castle. He always thought of it, as did I and those with me seeing it for
the first time, as oddly Chinese. Hence the name yellow, not only because it is the colour
associated with the Chinese but also because it is the colour of resolution of the gold of
being
which both Chinese and European alchemists sought. So without sacrifice of special
meaning in terms of his own life and time, he returned to alchemy more zealously than ever
before.
Yet this return, despite the Chinese precept, was as difficult a task as any he attempted
before. He bought all the modern books on the subject available and when these failed him
went about the market-places to buy the work of long-forgotten alchemists in their original
Latin, which he still read as easily as we do English. He came to possess what I believe was
the largest library of original alchemical books in Europe. But they all seemed at first
obscure and meaningless, until he decided to treat them as some intelligence officer in a
great war engaged in breaking the cipher, wherein the most immediate messages of the
enemy were encoded in fragments of intercepted messages. He wrote down carefully all the
patterns of phraseology recurring most often and then he got it. Like the Chinese, the
alchemists were his true authentic, however remote, forebears. When the medieval church
began to fail the questing spirit of Europe, as it did more and more from the first Christian
millennium onwards, and such thread as it had with the living historical past appeared
irrevocably cut, the alchemists had increasingly taken over the original quest.
Their persecutors, who accused them of being vulgar materialists in search of the
wealth that was gold, could not have been more wrong. Much of what they had done was
inevitably achieved in secrecy and expressed with great obscurity for reasons of security as
well as the originality and intractability of the material which confronted them. But Jung, the
code broken, soon saw the gold they were after was no common gold; the philosophers’
stone they sought was no ordinary stone. They were trying to achieve through the external
world with their alchemistry what he sought through his psychology. As always, the
authentic process of arriving at new meaning began by seeing its reflection and symbolism
mirrored in the world without.
They were seeking to create a new sort of man, a greater awareness of reality and
increase of meaning. It was obvious to Jung now that their work was full of living
symbolism of the most transformative kind. There was not one of any distinction among
them from Hermes Trismegistus to Paracelsus who did not lay down as the first and most
important laws of his science those of purity of heart, honesty of mind, love of God, and the
patience of that love which endured and bore all things to the true end. From as far back as
that unremembered African hand which inscribed a rock in Africa with its version of what
the Tibetans call the "wheel of life," on through the story of Babylon, Egypt, Russia,
Palestine, Greece, Rome, and so on up to the present day, the continuity ot the essential
theme of life was empirically established as having remained unbroken and intact.
The detail of all this is in Jung’s
Psychology and Alchemy
and there is no need to
follow it further here, except to add that though this book appears formidable to the eye of
the reader and, with all its necessary and laborious footnotes, fit only for scholars, it is one of
the most rewarding books of history I know, easily read and in the end leaving one humble,
grateful, and infinitely reassured. Far from difficult, it is a great Homeric epic of the Western
spirit and, although obviously not written in heroic couplets, a resounding poetic statement.
One starry utterance after another comes out of the alchemical dark at one such as:
I sleep and my soul awakens.
Imagination is the star in man.
Thus there is in man a firmament as in Heaven but not of one piece; there
are two. For the hand that divided light from darkness and the hand that made
Heaven and earth has done likewise in the microcosm below, having taken from
above and enclosed within man everything that Heaven contains.
As the great Heaven stands, so it is implanted at birth.
D. H. Lawrence in one of his most inspired moments wrote that in the dust where we
have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate
magic of life. Through his reinterpretation of Chinese and European alchemy, Jung uncovers
much of this "delicate magic of life" and shows that it is not dead but relevant and alive in
the symbolism of our imagination and continues to be of great concern to our well-being in
the present.
Until this moment of Jung’s return, it would not be unfair generalisation to say that in
so far as the existence of an unconscious in man was accepted at all, it was in a negative
way. This in a sense was not surprising. Both Jung and Freud had come to it initially in their
search for the causes of neurosis and derangement in the human personality. Both had traced
the source of neurosis and derangement to an unconscious area in the mind of man. There
was a moment even when this unconscious appeared as a comparatively shallow area,
existing not so much in its own right as created out of a conscious and wilful suppression of
instincts and experience too painful for the comfort of man. In so far as it was thought of as
existing on its own, it seemed to be in active opposition and a state of cloak-and-dagger
warfare with what was conscious in man. Both Jung and Freud themselves established
significant patterns of conflict between conscious and unconscious in men, but Jung’s view
of it was a vastly different affair. Its negative aspect dwindled into insignificance beside his
revelation of its positive objective nature and its own vital involvement in the enlargement of
consciousness in man.
The conflict between conscious and unconscious forces which filled mental asylums,
crowded the consulting rooms of Freud, Jung, and their collaborators, and emptied the
churches of the day, were nothing compared to the problem of enrichment and increase in
the conscious life of man Jung found concealed in it. This was no dark, disordered world,
basically antipathetic and committed to war on consciousness. Where it was dark, it had its
own form of starlight and moonlight for the probing spirit to steer by, and laws of order and
determination as precise as those that kept the stars in their courses in the universe without.
The negations came only when man’s conscious self ignored his dependence on this world
of the collective unconscious which had so mysteriously brought it forth and tried to
establish some kind of independent tyranny over what ultimately only sought to nourish and
increase their partnership.
The trouble started only when the part of the human personality which was conscious
behaved as if it were the whole of the man. There was nothing this unconscious world
abhorred more than one-sidedness. When one extreme of spirit attempted a monopoly for
itself another extreme sooner or later rose titanic in the unconscious to overthrow it. That is
why the history of man was so much a swing from one opposite of spirit into another as
Heraclitus had observed millenniums before.
This new and revolutionary view of an unconscious was set out by Jung with an
immense wealth of empirical detail, drawn not only from his work in the mental asylums and
in his practice but from history, art, literature, and the mythologies and religions of the
world. The labour and scale of imagination and concentration he put into this work, for
anyone who has taken the trouble to glance at it, make complete nonsense of the charge,
which I myself had once so naively accepted, that he was another loose and vague kind of
mystic. He established through a way no scientist can deny that this collective unconscious
within man was objective, that the visions and dreams and imagery in which it
communicated with man’s conscious self were utterly objective facts, however subjectively
they are experienced. He showed clearly how conscious man ignored such facts at his peril,
and moreover taught himself and men how to read the language of dreams as if they were
the forgotten language of the gods themselves.
He revealed how in this collective unconscious of the individual man were infinite
resources of energy, organised in definite recognisable patterns. Each of these patterns had at
its disposal its own form of energy and somewhere located, as it were, in the centre, between
the unconscious and conscious, there was a master pattern to which all other patterns
subscribed and all their other energies could be joined in one transcendental orbit. He called
these patterns, first of all, "primordial images," a phrase borrowed from Burckhardt as
indicated before, but later changed to "archetypes," an idea rediscovered from Saint
Augustine, and before him from Hermes Trismegistus, who exclaims in the
Poimandres
,
"You have seen in your mind the archetypal image!" In this one detail again one sees the
selfless, unegotistical Jung, determined not to set himself apart and above history but
wherever possible to contain all he did in the context of his own culture. He showed an
awareness that became a fixed article of work and faith, of the importance of never throwing
away his own cultural inheritance but of accepting it, however imperfect, as the basic
material of his work, and the only aboriginal stock on which his own contemporary spirit
could flower.
His capacity for deriving new meanings from all civilisations was unbounded. He
drew on the experience of such different extremes as the Chinese and Red Indian, Hindu
India, and primitive Africa, not as substitution but enrichment of his own cultural
inheritance. He scorned the growing numbers in Europe who exchanged their own culture for
another as an evasion of the difficult task of truly being themselves and once described such
a dubious "trafffic" to me as obscene.
Meanwhile, he found that these archetypes, a word that is so much in use these days
that it is in danger of losing its value, were so highly organised and vivid in the unconscious,
impinging so sharply on conscious imagination, that they could be personified or at the very
least given abstract expression, as in that final drawing in his own Red Book of a castle that
was yellow.
An example of how vivid and complex this world of archetypes was, could be found
in its instinctive and intuitive representation in Greek mythology. This system of spirit is the
most highly differentiated, accurate, and detailed model of the forces of the collective
unconscious the world has perhaps ever known. It is precisely because of this exceptional
instinctive awareness of the collective unconscious, demonstrated in their myths and legends
and all that flowed from them, that the Greeks were able to make so formidable a
contribution to the evolution of the human spirit.
Jung himself in his Red Book, in the mural paintings he did so magnetically on the
walls of his tower at Bollingen, and in his carvings on stone, gave visual expression to his
own personifications and abstractions of some of these greatest archetypal images and
powers. He himself indeed had been familiar with one in personified form when still a boy.
He had visualised and with great benefit to himself had had a dialogue almost as far back as
he could remember, as we have seen, with one of the greatest of all archetypes, that of the
wise old man, the inner master or guru, the
sensei
of Japan, which life has formed of all its
experience and intimations of where and how it wants to take itself further, implanting it in
the imagination of every human being, so that did he but know it he was not born utterly
naked, ignorant and unarmed in the jungle of the world but had great guidance and
protection within.
As he looked back from this high, assured new vantage point of himself, on a life
lengthening so fast behind him but closing in on him so swiftly from ahead, I find nothing
more moving than this vision of Jung as a young boy, when a father he had loved had failed
him, putting a trusting hand instead in that of this wise old figure who came to him
unsolicited in the stillness of his own imagination and let it lead him on safely to his meeting
with the destiny to which he was committed at birth. We have seen how in all his moments
of greatest abandonment, when he had no male company of any kind, this archetype stayed
firmly with him. Embattled as he was, Jung was moved to go on painting and repainting his
portrait at Bollingen in a manner which is so decisive and electric that no imagination can
look at the painting and doubt his validity. One could hardly sleep in one’s bed there at night,
so alive and urgent was his presence in the murals around the room. And perhaps strangest
and most significant of all, the relevant coincidence, in high Chinese fashion, had come to
confirm the authenticity of the vision the first time he tried to paint it. The vision came to
him in kingfisher-blue wings. Jung painted it with an electric-blue immediacy that to this day
is quite startling. Some hours afterwards, walking in his garden by the lake, he found a dead
kingfisher lying there. The bird in any case was rare and he had never seen one there before
nor was he to see one again. Since the bird always and everywhere from Stone Age man to
Stravinsky has been the image of the inspiration, the unthinkable thought which enters our
selves like a bird unsolicited out of the blue, it was for Jung, as a Zen priest once put it to
me, one of the signs of confirmation from nature that sustain the spirit in its search for
enlightenment and emancipation from the floating world of appearances.
Unfortunately, the archetypal patterns of Jung’s evolution are far too many to be
enumerated specifically even in so simplified a manner, and there may be more even than
either the assembly the Greeks recorded in their mythology and legends or those Jung
discovered. But two deserve special mention because of their unique importance to our own
time. These are, of course, the great twosome: the feminine in man and the masculine in
woman. Jung called the latter "animus" and the first, as mentioned in his encounter with
Salome, "anima," thereby using again a term borrowed from the forgotten language of
Christian religion when it was still alive and fresh with its message of love in the
power-drunk world of the Romans.
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