Boyhood Soul-Searching
Carl Gustav Jung was a strange melancholic child who had no brothers or sisters until he was nine, so he played his own imaginary games.
This was his secret stone with a life of its own.
He was born 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the only son of a Swiss Reformed Church Evangelical minister.
The family were steeped in religion. Jung had eight uncles in the clergy, as well as his maternal grandfather. His earliest playgrounds were churches and graveyards. Men in black would bring a black box and talk of “Jesus”.
He even heard his father talk of a “Je-suit” (sounds like Je-sus), and that was “something specially dangerous”.
Jung says that his intellectual life began with a dream at the age of three. In his dream, he descended into a hole in the ground.
It leads him into a large chamber, a red carpet and a golden throne on which a strange being sits.
Decades later, Jung came across a reference to the motif of cannibalism in the symbolism of the Mass. And only then did the image of the “man-eater” make sense to him. He realized that the “dark Lord Jesus, the Jesuit and the phallus were identical”. They represented a dark creative force in nature, the investigation of which he pursued throughout his life.
But it was God who really interested Jung. God tested him out by tempting him to think unutterable sinful thoughts.
“I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world – and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder”
What a relief! Instead of damnation, Jung felt this vision was an act of grace. He had been shown another side of God altogether, different to the one his father and uncles spoke of in their sermons.
Those around him seemed hypocritical and empty. He brooded on the secret, searching in vain in his father’s library for more information.
Then he would sit on his stone and it would free him from his turmoils. Jung had a strong suspicion there was something eternal in himself too, some “Other” in him which was like the stone.
There were other religious influences on Jung, stemming from his mother and maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, a respected pastor in Basel, who had contact with a different world altogether – the spirit world. Every week he had conversed with his deceased first wife, while his second wife (Jung’s grandmother) and his daughter (Jung’s mother), listened in.
Contact with the spirits was not unusual amongst Swiss rural folk. Jung experienced his mother as dark and unpredictable, “rooted in deep, invisible ground”. She knew the world of the uncanny and she could be frightening and erratic.
These dual religious influences of Swiss Protestantism and pagan spirituality reflected a dualism in Jung himself. He believed he had two different personalities which he named “Number 1” and “Number 2”.
Jung associated his Number 2 dimension with the uncanny world of his mother. He carved a little man wear...