Updated Feb. 2, 2021
From the chapter, “On the Frontiers of Knowledge,” an interview with C.G. Jung conducted by the French-Swiss writer Georges Duplain:
You speak of a change of era, of a new Platonic month, of the passage into another sign of the zodiac. What do you mean by that, what reality do such constellations have?
People don’t like you to talk about that, you will get yourself laughed at. Nobody has read Plato—you haven’t either. Yet he is one of those who have come closest to the truth. The influence of the constellations, the zodiac, they exist; you cannot explain why, it’s a “Just-So Story,” that proves itself by a thousand signs. But men always go from one extreme to the other, either they don’t believe, or they are credulous, any knowledge or faith can be ridiculed on the basis of what small minds do with it. That’s stupid and, above all, it’s dangerous. The great astrological periods do exist. Taurus and Gemini were prehistoric periods, we don’t know much about them. But Aries the Ram is closer; Alexander the Great was one of its manifestations. That was from 2000 B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era. With that era we came into the sign of the Fishes. It was not I who invented all the fish symbols there are in Christianity: the fisher of men, the pisciculi christianorum. Christianity has marked us deeply because it incarnates the symbols of the era so well. It goes wrong in so far as it believes itself to be the only truth; when what it is is one of the great expressions of truth in our time. To deny it would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What comes next? Aquarius, the Water-pourer, the falling of water from one place to another. And the little fish receiving the water from the pitcher of the Water-pourer, and whose principal star is Fomalhaut, which means the “fish’s mouth.” In our era the fish is the content; with the Water-pourer, he becomes the container. It’s a very strange symbol. I don’t dare interpret it. So far as one can tell, it is the image of a great man approaching. One finds, besides, a lot of things about this in the Bible itself: there are more things in the Bible than the theologians can admit.
It’s a matter of experience that the symbolism changes from one sign to another, and there is the risk that this passage will be all the more difficult for the men of today and tomorrow because they no longer believe in it, no longer want to be conscious of it. Why, when Pope Pius XII in one of his last discourses deplored that the world was no longer conscious enough of the presence of angels, he was saying to his faithful Catholics in Christian terms exactly what I am trying to say in terms of psychology to those who stand more chance of understanding this language than any other.
But what recommendations can you make for the passage that is about to take place, whose difficulties you fear?
A spirit of greater openness towards the unconscious, an increased attention to dreams, a sharper sense of the totality of the physical and the psychic, of their indissolubility; a livelier taste for self-knowledge. Better established mental hygiene, if you want to put it that way. The religions have tried to be this, but the result is not entirely satisfactory, don’t you agree?
What is very important is to exist, and that’s rarer than one realizes. To have a daily task and to accomplish it; and at the same time to attend to what is going on, inside oneself as well as outside, conscious of all life’s forms, all its expressions. To follow the major rules, but also to give free rein to the least familiar aspects of oneself. Drawing, and the fantasies and visions that it brought about, was a valuable thing. Now we take photographs, and that doesn’t fill the same need at all. In return, the painters recognize no limits to the most impassioned fantasy. They are becoming specialists in certain needs for expression; but all of us have these needs, we can’t divide up the personality’s inside work the way we think we can divide its outside activity. That breaks up something essential in it and causes an appalling psychic illness. In writing about flying saucers, I explained why men are so attentive to anything resembling a circle or a ball, the symbols of unity, of the totality of a person’s being, of what I have called the Self. There is a terrible spiritual famine in our world, but there are also people who don’t want to be beak-fed or fed with infant’s pap.
May I ask you to repeat the principal points of your system which may assist man to discover his totality and allay his spiritual famine, when he no longer adheres to the words of Christianity?
In the first place, I have no system, no doctrine, nothing of that kind. I am an empiricist, with no metaphysical views at all. I have only hypotheses. From them I have gained some basic principles. There is the self, which is the totality of one’s being, known and unknown, conscious and unconscious, as opposed to the distinction between physical and psychic. Then there are the archetypes, those images of instinct. For instinct is not just an outward thrust, it also takes part in the representation of forms. The animal, for example, has a certain idea of the plant, since he recognizes it. Our instincts do not express themselves only in our actions and reactions, but also in the way we formulate what we imagine. Instinct is not only biological, it is also, you might say, spiritual. And it always repeats certain forms which can be studied down the ages among all peoples. These are the archetypes.
The crossing of a river, now, that is an archetypal situation. It’s an important moment, a risk. There is danger in the water, on the banks. Not for nothing did Christianity invent great St. Christopher, the giant who carried the infant Jesus through the water. Today men don’t have that experience very often, or others of that sort either. I remember river crossings in Africa with crocodiles, and unknown tribes on the other side; one feels that one’s destiny—human destiny, almost—is at stake. Every man has his own way of approaching the crossing, you see. And think of King Albrecht’s death near Wettingen, too: the knights were hesitant, not very determined, one can’t be at all sure that they would have attacked the king just anywhere. But they surprised him in the middle of the ford, in the place where fate strikes—and jumped at the chance.
There is also the collective unconscious, that immense treasury, that great reservoir, whence mankind draws the images, the forces, which it translates into very different languages, but whose common source is being found out more clearly all the time. So many coincidences come from there.
Excerpted from C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, pp. 412-415