This is the central archetype of wholeness and totality. It does not refer to the individual self but to the whole of the personality; ego, consciousness personal and collective unconscious. The self appears in dreams, myths and fairytales as king, hero, prophet, saviour; it appears as the magick circle, the square and the cross; it is the total union of opposites, it is a united duality as Tao and yang and ying, it appears as the mandala, it appears as the imago dei (the image of God) and is equated with the totality of self which is universally expressed and the power of this creation is within the self. Even if God has been pronounced dead the psychological God lives and is equated with supreme power and supreme being; it can be worshipped in many guises - machines, computers, material possessions, states, money, idols, icons, man, woman, child, animal, even atheism - all substitute and stand in for imago dei. Supernatural powers are attributed to whatever carries this image of the self. Whatever we are committed to in awe, in blind allegiance, or devoutly in faith is an expression of imago dei. Abstractions such as science may be reified versions of God. The psychology of the unconscious archetype does not say anything about the reality of the existence of God but only the psychic manifestations experienced by individuals.
We are now like primitive societies which have lost numinousity, (sense of sacredness) lost raison d'�tre and then decayed. Society now strips mystery and numinousity of all things so that nothing is holy. The number 'four' symbolizes wholeness or totality, the symbol of the self is the square, it is an archetype of universal occurrence. If you want to describe the horizon as a whole you name the four quarters of the heaven. The circle and sphere are natural symbols of completeness, their natural minimum division is a quaternity, the Circled Cross is one of the most ancient of all symbols. Imago dei is both God and shadow, good and evil, deity and devil. The archetypes are always the opposites, unified in the Self into wholeness.
"Age old magickal effects lie hidden in this symbol for it is derived from the protective circle, or charmed circle, whose magick has been preserved in countless folk customs. It is an obvious purpose of drawing a sulcus primigenius a magickal furrow around the centre of the temple temenos (sacred precinct) of the innermost personality in order to prevent an "outflowing" or to guard by apotropaic means (to ward off evil) against any disturbing influence from outside". (Jung) [The word temenos is Greek for a piece of land cut off as sacred domain, a sacred precinct or temple enclosure, set off and dedicated to a God. It is protected space set off as holy and inviolate and in founding a city an original sulcus primigenius was dug to create a protected temenos.]
Early in 1944, at the age of sixty nine, Jung fell and broke his foot, which was followed then by a heart attack. In a drugged state and close to death, he had an 'out of body' experience; he saw a tremendous dark block of stone in space, like a meteorite, hollowed out into a temple; the entrance led into the antechamber and he entered and saw a Hindu who had been expecting him. At that moment a face floated up from the earth, a Greek king from the Island of Kos, on which the temple of the healing God, Asklepios, was sited. As soon as the doctor, in the primal form as king of Kos, came in and said that he must return, the vision ceased. Jung resented coming back to life and he also worried that the doctor had appeared in his primal form because it meant a fatal exchange had been made, he felt that this meant that the doctor would die in his place and despite the warning the doctor said "don't worry, you're just hallucinating". On the day that Jung was allowed to sit up for the first time the fourth of the fourth, nineteen fourty four, the doctor took to his bed and died soon afterwards of septicaemia.
As he slowly recovered Jung had further visions and night after night he lived in a state of bliss. His experiences were utterly real with the quality of objective truth. After this illness and 'near death' experience, Jung's principal works were written. During his seventies, that strange "something" called the 'soul' was proving stronger than ever and Jung was prepared now to give it voice. He developed now the psychology of religion.
All the religious figures at every stage of history shared one thing in common, the inner experience of divinity. Jung called this experience numinous from the Latin numina (the presiding God). When the Shaman hears the voice of the Great Spirit, or the Christian mystic experiences the Christ within, both are referring to an archetypal wholeness, the archetype of 'self' represented as the spirit of God. All religions confirm the existence of "something whole", independent of the individual 'ego' and whose nature transcends consciousness.
What the numinous experience of inner divinity really points to is the process of individuation, the archetype of wholeness manifests itself also in dream, myths and fantasies, occupying a central position in the unconscious and tending to relate all other archetypes to this centre which is approximate to the God image. When the Christian faith speaks of salvation through Christ it is referring to the individuation process (salvation) and an image of wholeness or 'self' (God image, Christ). This individuation process is ritually dramatized by the Catholic mass in which the bread and wine symbolize Christ. The eating of Christ's body and blood in the Catholic mass not only commemorates his sacrifice and death but also symbolizes his resurrection and transmutation into the mortal body of his church.
Sacrificial dismemberment, death and re-birth are ritual steps of a transmutation process, also undergone by tribal Shamans from archaic times, even to this day. A Shaman's spirit leaves his body and goes on a visionary pilgrimage through which he experiences sickness, torture, death and re-birth, similar to Christ's passion and paralleling the soul's after-life voyage towards re-birth, in Tibetan Buddhism the Egyptian Book Of The Dead and many other religions. In other words, these spiritual experiences of death and re-birth communicate a process of becoming whole through sacrifice. The drama of the Catholic mass arose through the same psychic process underlying other ancient Pagan rituals.
From a psychological point of view, Christ is the Original Man, representing the wholeness of personality which surpasses and includes the ordinary man. Such titles are those of King, Messiah, Son of Man, the second Adam, Shepherd, Sacrificial Lamb of God, Fish and Fisher of Men. Jung defines the whole person as the Self. In the archetypal symbolism of the mass Christ represents the Self and the Mass itself dramatizes the individuation process. The mystery of the Eucharist transforms the soul of the empirical man, who is only part of himself, into his totalities, symbolically expressed by Christ. In early mystical Christianity Christ represented a totality that even embraced anima (or shadow side of man) but the Church later developed an extremely one-sided image of Christ who was conceived 'immaculately'; he was a redeemer, all goodness and light, who reflected a perfectly good father, a God opposing the devil and the dark forces of evil; and so the Shadow was excluded and Christ's symbol lost its wholeness and in a psychological sense created an opponent Shadow.
For Jung there was a problem that had been brewing for centuries, that is, how to free ourselves from the opposites of good and evil, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge. The Faust drama, a story of the 16th century German alchemist who sold his soul to Satan in exchange for diabolical powers exemplified the difficulties of individuation for persons in the Christian and scientific world. Western man's Faustian struggle with the dark side of human nature is rooted in the theological age-old problem; how can an omnipotent, all good God allow the existence of evil? God did not create the devil. The latter must be self-creating, implying that God is not omnipotent. Evil must therefore be created by man's choice, by his original sin, which Christ's sacrifice was meant to redeem.
Such an irreducible divide between good and evil means that the Christian community cannot unite the opposites found in nature. Most religions address the problems of good and evil, male and female, yin and yang, etc. Christianity equates the feminine, either with an immaculate Virgin Mary or the wicked temptress, Eve. The sexual nature of the feminine is darkened and repressed leaving the Christ figure so over-identified with life he inevitably casts a strong Shadow. An early sect of heretic Christian mystics, the Gnostics, had tried to complete the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost to a fourth term, darker, mysterious, feminine dimension of nature.
In 1950 the Pope declared the doctrine of the blessed Virgin Mary's assumption a literal heavenly transportation and reunion with the Son as the Celestial bride. Jung saw this as the church's unconscious recognition of the fourth term and regarded it as the most important religious event since the reformation. From a Pagan point of view it certainly was the re-ascent of the Goddess into a position of primacy with a perfect Son.
The hero's main task is to overcome the monster of darkness to achieve victory over the powers of darkness to bring triumph of good over evil and the dominance of conscious over the unconscious. Rites of passage and rites of initiation are associated with the mythological progression of the hero from a primitive trickster to a redeemer hero. The hero/myth cycle comes in six stages:
The hero has been called the collective ego, another archetype of the collective unconscious.
Eventually everything runs into its opposite - shadow to hero, hero to shadow, trickster to redeemer, good to bad. This process is called enantiodromia, meaning running contrary wise, of everything turning into its opposite.
"Every psychological extreme secretly contains its own opposite or stands in some sort of intimate and essential relationship to it. Indeed it is from this tension that it derives its particular dynamism. There is no hallowed custom that cannot on occasion turn into its opposite and the more extreme a position is the more easily may we expect an enantiodromia, a conversion of something into its opposite. The best is most threatened with some devilish perversion just because it has done the most to suppress evil". (Jung).
We have therefore the cycle of initiation of the hero, hero redeemer, hero trickster. The hero is always at risk of regression, the low ebb being tricksterism and the high point redeemer. The cyclic flow is like a river. Hermes if both the wise man and the trickster, Ulysses is both hero and trickster. The trickster's characteristics are chaotic caprice, malicious prankishness and meddlesome cunning wit, he is both stupid and primitive, unconscious and non-conforming but also a genuine gold shadow, divine, demonic, good and evil. Enantiodromia is the balance of the yin/yang opposites.
The wounded healer archetype is an amalgam of opposites. To see health and sickness as either/or is to create an arbitrary total separation. A wounded healer who sees the patient as wholly sick does not see the healthy part. When the doctor sees only the sickness in the other he assumes an all healthy role himself. The patient learns the sick role as a way of surviving this one-sided connection and the sick role can then become a way of life. At one extreme in the wounded healer archetype is the medicine man, Shaman, trickster, charlatan; at the other is the healer of the highest technical and human skills, in the middle is the balanced, centred healer. The wounds of the wounded healer who is unconscious of his own wounds may be stirred up when he devotes day in and day out to listening to and helping others in distress. His tendency to see the patient as all sick and all wounded blinds him to the inner physician. It is the health/sickness archetype which is the spectrum of all who are wounded.
In antiquity the entire art of healing was the domain of the divine physician.
"He was the sickness and the remedy. These two conceptions were identical. Because he was the sickness, he himself was afflicted, wounded or persecuted like asclepius or trophonius; because he was the divine patient he also knew the way to healing. To such a God the oracle of Apollo applies: he who wounds also heals". (Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy).
The 'I' of the balanced, wounded healer sees both the wounded and the healthy parts of the patient, not just organs and psychopathology, not just a bevy of neurotransmitters and disease, not as a soul-less body but all-being. It is the physician within the patient himself and its healing action is as great as that of the doctor who appears on the scene externally. Neither wounds nor diseases can heal without the curative action of the inner healer. Wellness is not happiness. Some happiness is just plain sick. Sickness is not necessarily depression or anxiety, some depression and anxiety is just plain healthy. Don't run for the medications but be patient for the medicine of misery and gloom may very well enantiodromia itself.
The Piscean Age was also commented upon by Jung. The constellation of Pisces is pictured as two fishes joined to each other by a cord of stars. The fish on the left appears to swim vertically and the one on the right horizontally to the ecliptic (the ecliptic being the yearly great circle which the sun appears to trace in the sky of fixed stars). On the 21st of March the sun crosses the equator, making day and night of equal length, this is called the Spring Equinox in the Northern hemisphere.
At the annual Spring Equinox the sun comes back to almost the same position on the ecliptic but it slips back by a smaller cut every year and in 72 years the Spring point is one fourth degree further along the ecliptic. Jung showed that Christ's death occurred when the Spring Point is aligned with a star called Al Rischa (or the knot) where the cord linking the two fishes and the first fish itself begin. At about this time in 7BCE the star of Bethlehem appeared, being an unusual triple conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn; with the sun it heralded the coming of the King, Jupiter, of the Jews, Saturn. Christ is symbolized by Pisces 1, the fish of the spirit, who announces the New Age. It is also intriguing that in this Age the fish is used as a name and symbol for Christ/God who became a man. He was born as a fish who had fishermen for disciples and said he had come to make fishers of men; he fed the multitude with miraculously multiplying fish, he was himself eaten as a fish - a holier food, his followers were known as 'little fishes' and the fish symbolism to denote Christianity standing for the name of Christ in Greek is also commonly known, yet there is no evidence that fish symbolism was consciously employed. It seemed to have happened naturally without anyone thinking about it.
As the Spring point moved along the ecliptic in alignment with the stars and Pisces 1, the Christian church grew, strengthened and developed its image of the unblemished, all good Christ, the king or all-powerful pancreator. But then, as the Spring point passed along the cord uniting the two fishes radical doctrines began to flourish, culminating in the Reformation and violent religious conflicts throughout Christendom. Christianity itself was disintegrating as Europe underwent the Renaissance, nationalism, people's revolutions, the discovery of science and now Neo Paganism.
Prediction of the Antichrist's coming were frequently made in this cord period, often dated as 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which, incidentally, was forecast by Nostradamus. Jung interpreted the coming of the Antichrist as a Shadow cast by the Christ image. The Antichrist was seen as an inexorable, psychological law.
In 1818 the Spring point reached the first star in the tail of Pisces II and we have now come to the enantriodromian, or mirror image, opposite of Christianity - the mirror of general anti-Christian ways of thinking - anti-Christian materialism which had been established by Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. Western thinking in the 19th and 20th century eliminated the mythopoeic imagination.
In a sense Faust has gained material power of science but lost his soul, western man no longer experiences the uncanny. The bridge of spiritual experience which once crossed the divide of opposites has collapsed because it has failed the empirical "cause and effect" test of science.