The first five chapters of Part Two of C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation — a Roman lawyer's definition of libido set beside Freud's; a woman boring a hole in her own temple with one finger; Australian men dancing all night round a pit dug in the shape of a woman and shouting that it is not a pit; a god the size of a thumb seated forever in the heart; and a series of visions that ends in a confusion of sounds, wa-ma, wa-ma. Read from
RAW/books/Symbols of Transformation-Carl Jung.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.This is the theoretical half. Part One read a young woman's poems. Part Two stops to redefine the central term of the psychology of its day, and then builds the machinery — symbol against sign, libido as neutral energy, the hero as a figure the energy takes, and the mother as the thing it keeps trying to get back to.
Siblings: Part 1 — Prefaces and Part One · Part 3 — Part Two, chapters VI–IX and the Appendix · What Runs Through All of It.
Pairs with the Le Bon and Hoffer build and the Meerloo build.
Source ingest: C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation
What is real. The sun, and Jung says it is the only image of God that survives translation.1 Following the longing in the moth poem has led into astrological territory. The Creator whose double nature was plain in Job has become the sun, and in doing so has found a natural expression that transcends his moral division into a Heavenly Father and a devil. Renan's line is borrowed for it: the sun is the only truly rational image of God, whether you take the standpoint of the primitive or of modern science.
The reason it works is that it does not have to be reconciled with itself. From the sun all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and the source of energy. The discord the human soul has fallen into can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict. And the sun is not only beneficial. It is destructive too, which is why the zodiacal sign for the August heat is a devourer.
What a person is. A house with something enormous living in a very small room. The Upanishadic material is quoted at length and its paradox is the point. Rudra has eyes on all sides, faces on all sides, arms and feet on all sides, and created heaven and earth. The same being is then located: that Person, no bigger than a thumb, the inner Self, seated forever in the heart of man. Thousand-headed and thousand-eyed, and ruling over the ten-finger space. Smaller than small, greater than great.
Jung takes the size paradox as a formal feature rather than a curiosity. It reappears as the creative dwarf, the Cabiri, the Idaean dactyls, and the divine boy — and in the vase-painting where a bearded Dionysus labelled Kabiros stands next to a boy labelled Pais, with caricatured figures beside them. One might call it the cult of the big and the little man. The Upanishad's giant and dwarf becomes, in Greece, father and son.
How you know. By refusing to read an image as a code, and this is the distinction the rest of the book runs on. Sexual images in dreams and in everyday speech should not be taken literally, because they are not to be understood as signs. A sign has a fixed meaning: it is a conventional abbreviation for something already known. A symbol is an indefinite expression with many meanings, pointing to something not easily defined and therefore not fully known.
From which a working rule follows, and it is the opposite of the one a code-breaker would use. A symbol has a large number of analogous variants, and the more of them it has at its disposal, the more complete the image it projects. So amplification is not padding. Piling up the variants is the only way of getting at what the thing is a symbol of, which is why the book is the length it is.
What makes things happen. A force that finds its own way, and Jung reaches for Faust to describe it. Mephistopheles hands Faust a key that glows and grows in his hand, and tells him it will smell the right place from all others — follow it down, it leads you to the Mothers. The same devil had earlier introduced himself as part of that power which would ever work evil and engenders good.
What is being described, Jung says, is the libido. It is creative and procreative, and it also has an intuitive faculty, a strange power to smell the right place, almost as if it were a live creature with a life of its own. That is why it is so easily personified. It is a force of nature, good and bad at once, or morally neutral. The realm of the Mothers has more than a few connections with the womb, which frequently symbolises the creative aspect of the unconscious.
How people should relate. Through figures who are marked, and the marking is consistent enough to be a rule. The seers, artists and wonder-workers of mythology carry phallic characteristics, and they are also crippled. Hephaestus, Wieland the Smith and Mani all had damaged feet. The ancient seer who is said to have introduced the phallic cult was called Blackfoot, and it seems characteristic of seers to be blind. Ugliness and deformity belong especially to the chthonic gods, the sons of Hephaestus, to whom mighty wonder-working powers were ascribed.
What is worth having and The shape of time are not developed separately in this run. The chapter's work is to install two instruments — the sun as an image that resolves a moral split, and the symbol as something that cannot be cashed out into a sign.
Read: lines 1867–1970.
What is real. Energy, and not one instinct among others.2 Freud defined libido sexually and compared it to a stream, divisible, dammable, overflowing into collaterals. So he does not explain everything by sex, as is commonly supposed, and he does posit other instinctual forces whose nature is unclear but which can take up these libidinal affluxes.
Jung's objection is a test case, and it is a hard one. If libido were really nothing but sexuality, what would happen in the case of eunuchs? Their libidinal interest has been cut off, and they do not therefore react with schizophrenia. Meanwhile in schizophrenia far more is missing from reality than could ever be laid at the door of sex. The relation to the world goes almost entirely, and no one in his senses would maintain that reality is nothing but a function of sex.
The second test is a comparison of outcomes. Introversion and regression of sexual libido lead, at worst, to neurosis, and not to schizophrenia. Freud himself had pointed that out. So the loss of the reality function in the graver illness needs a wider term, and Jung says he had used psychic energy for it years earlier in his work on dementia praecox.
How you know. From the word's own history, and the etymology chapter is the most patient thing in Part Two. Cicero uses libido for wanting in general. Will is a rational desire, and when it is divorced from reason and too violently aroused, that is libido — unbridled desire, found in all fools. Sallust makes rage a part of it, and can also use it to mean taking more pleasure in fine weapons and war-horses than in whores and drinking parties.
Augustine is quoted at length and quoted approvingly. There is a lust for revenge, which is called rage. A lust for money, which is called avarice. A lust for victory at all costs, which is called stubbornness. A lust for self-glorification, which is called boastfulness. And who could easily name the lust for domination, which the civil wars showed to be so powerful in the minds of tyrants? For Augustine, libido is an appetite like hunger and thirst.
The philology follows. Libet, it pleases; Sanskrit lubhyati, to experience violent longing; Gothic liufs and Old High German liob, love; and, alongside them, Gothic lubains, hope, and Old High German loben, praise. The word has always meant more than one thing, and Jung's claim is that the narrowing was recent.
What makes things happen. One neutral quantity moving between channels. Instinctual processes of any kind can be intensified by an influx of energy, no matter where it comes from — sexuality, hunger, thirst. One instinct can be temporarily depotentiated in favour of another. To assume it is always and only sexuality that is subject to this would be a psychic equivalent of the phlogiston theory.
So the concept expands into something closer to intentionality in general. We know far too little about human instincts to give priority to any one of them. Libido is better understood as an energy value able to communicate itself to any field of activity whatsoever — power, hunger, hatred, sexuality or religion — without being itself a specific instinct.
What a person is. Something that experiences a force it cannot see, and Jung is careful about what that licenses. The concept has the same standing in psychology that energy has had in physics since Robert Mayer. Schopenhauer's Will is the philosophical cousin: a movement perceived from outside can only be grasped as the manifestation of an inner will. Galileo had said the concept of force originates in the subjective perception of our own muscular power, and Jung says libido is the same kind of interpretation. We know as little about what underlies it as we know about what the psyche is in itself.
How people should relate. Through analogy, and this is where the chapter turns into a history of culture. Specially intense contents get reflected in countless analogies, which draw their objects into the magic circle of the psyche. Lévy-Bruhl's participation mystique is borrowed for the resulting relationships. A positively overwhelming importance attaches to the little word like in the history of human thought.
Jung then makes the claim that gives the process its dignity. The canalisation of libido into analogy-making was probably responsible for some of the most important discoveries primitive man ever made. And the mechanism is stated in the grammar itself: a conception gives us a handle by which to grasp things, and the resulting concept lets us take possession of them. Functionally, the concept corresponds to the magically powerful name which gets a grip on the object. That renders the object harmless and incorporates it into the psychic system.
The shape of time. Layered, and the layers can be fallen back through. A disturbed reality function gets replaced by an archaic substitute, on a biological principle: when a recent system deteriorates it is likely to be replaced by a more primitive one. To use Freud's simile, one begins firing with bows and arrows instead of with guns. Patients set up in place of reality fantasies very like archaic ideas which once had a reality function of their own.
What is worth having is not developed separately here; the chapter's whole value claim is that a wider term buys a wider set of facts.
Read: lines 1971–2020.
What makes things happen. A gesture that outlives the situation that produced it, and the case is disturbing on purpose.3 Jung treated a woman with catatonic depressions. Early in the treatment, while telling him of a painful experience, she fell into a dream-state showing all the signs of sexual excitement, completely unaware of his presence, ending in masturbation. The act was accompanied by one strange movement. She kept making a violent rotary motion with the forefinger of her left hand against her left temple, as though boring a hole there. Afterwards there was complete amnesia and nothing could be elicited about the gesture.
Weeks later her mother supplied the history. The boring goes back to a stage of childhood earlier than the masturbation, from a period with no individual memories. Years later, after her marriage, the death of a child with whom she had identified through overindulgent love brought the infantile symptoms back onto the still healthy mother, and the boring came with them.
What is real. A ladder of transferred rhythms, and Jung lays it out as ordinary development. In infants the libido first shows in the nutritional zone, in the rhythmic movement of sucking, and in pleasurable rhythmic movement of arms and legs. The primary model of rhythmic movement is then transferred to other zones, with sexuality as its eventual goal. Sucking still belongs to nutrition and outgrows it by becoming an analogous rhythm with no food in it.
The claim he builds on that is the chapter's engine. If earlier phases can be reactivated regressively in illness, then in earlier stages of human development this transformation was probably not pathological at all but a frequent and normal occurrence. So it should have left historical traces, and the rest of the chapter goes looking for them.
How you know. By finding the same act in a ritual, and the trail runs through fire. Abraham had connected boring with fire-making. The Indian fire-stick is the pramantha, and fire-making is always referred to by a verb meaning to shake, to rub, to bring forth by rubbing. The line from pramantha to Prometheus does not run through the word so much as through the image, which Jung calls an archetypal parallel rather than a case of linguistic transmission. What can be established is that thinking, precaution and foresight are somehow connected with fire-boring.
The rite itself removes any doubt about the reading. The fire-sticks are personified as man and woman. A priest takes one up saying thou art the birthplace of fire, lays two blades of grass on it saying ye are the two testicles, names the lower stick Urvasi and the upper Pururavas, anoints it with butter, and rubs. The fire that results is the child, the divine son Agni, born from the genitals of the woman. The Rig-Veda hymn says the same in verse: in the two fire-sticks lies Jatavedas, safe as the seed in pregnant women.
How people should relate. In ceremonies that keep the old discovery alive, and Jung's examples run from Australia to Scotland. The Wachandi dig a hole in the ground and set it about with bushes so that it looks like a woman's genitals. They dance round it all night holding their spears in front of them, thrusting them into the hole and shouting that it is not a pit.
The European survival is a plague measure. Ceremonial fire-making lingered as superstition into the nineteenth century, used mainly against cattle epidemics. The chronicle entry Jung reprints is from 1268: when the herds in Laodonia were ravaged by lung-sickness, certain cattle-breeders, monastery folk by habit or dress but not by disposition, taught the rustics to make fire by rubbing wood and to set up an image of Priapus. A Cistercian lay brother then dipped the testicles of a dog in holy water and sprinkled the animals.
The shape of time. Persistent past the point of understanding. These examples come from different periods and different peoples, and prove a widespread tendency to equate fire-making with sexuality. The ceremonial repetition of an age-old discovery shows how persistently the human mind clings to old forms. German colloquial speech still carries the traces: a lout is a Bengel, a cudgel, or in Hessian a Stift, a peg; and a plant called stick-root in German is called boy's-love in English.
What a person is and What is worth having are carried by the same argument here. A person is a creature whose energy keeps being handed on from one function to the next. What is worth having, on this account, is what that handing-on produced — which is fire, and, on the next page, everything else.
Read: lines 2021–2252.
What is real. A human figure, and Jung says it is the best symbol the material has.4 The finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure conceived as a demon or hero. Here the symbolism leaves the objective realm of astral images and takes on human form — a figure who passes from joy to sorrow and back, who stands at the zenith like the sun and is plunged into darkest night, only to rise again.
Miss Miller's third and last creation follows that pattern. She calls it Chiwantopel, a hypnagogic drama, and describes how it arrived. After an evening of trouble and anxiety she went to bed at half past eleven, restless and unable to sleep though very tired. She had the impression of being in a receptive mood. There was no light in the room. She closed her eyes, felt a great relaxation, and remained as completely passive as possible.
How you know. From what is missing in the record, and Jung says so. Four whole years separate the first poem from this fantasy, and there is no information at all about them. He regrets it and then finds an advantage in it: our interest in the general validity of the fantasy is not obscured by sympathetic concern for the personal fate of the author. That sentence is worth keeping, because it is the moment the woman becomes a specimen.
The state she describes he identifies precisely. It resembles what usually precedes intentional somnambulism and has often been described by mediums. A certain willingness to give ear to these faint nocturnal voices must be there, or the experiences pass unnoticed. What can be discerned in the listening attitude is an inward-flowing current of libido, heading for an invisible goal.
What a person is. Someone whose world is only as full as their capacity to love it, and this is the run's hardest sentence about her. Introversion of this kind requires an exceptional condition — a lack of external objects that forces the person to seek a substitute in his own psyche. Jung refuses that explanation outright. It is hard to believe that this teeming world is too poor to provide an object for human love. It offers boundless opportunities to everyone, and it is rather the inability to love which robs a person of them.
Then the sentence itself: the world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. What compels a person to create a substitute from within is not an external lack. Part of the psyche really wants the external object, and another part strives back to the subjective world, where the airy palaces of fantasy beckon.
What makes things happen. A third thing that unbalances a pair, and the mechanics come from muscles. Jung takes Bleuler's term ambitendency as a constant: the most primitive motor impulses are antithetical, since even in a simple stretch the flexor must be innervated. Normally that never prevents the act — it is necessary for co-ordinating it. Resistance appears only when an abnormal quantity on one side loosens the paired opposites, so they show up as a genuine will and won't that get in each other's way.
The passion he names behind that is not the one a reader expects. La Rochefoucauld is quoted at length on idleness: the most violent and mischievous of the passions, and the one we are never sensible of. It is a remora that can stop the largest ships, and a calm of worse consequence in our affairs than any rocks or storms. Jung calls this the dangerous passion hidden beneath the hazardous mask of incest, confronting us in the guise of the Terrible Mother.
How people should relate. Through a figure that is not a man, and the theology in the run is deliberate. The cultural point of view gives a man a meaning apart from the mass, and over centuries that produced the cult of the hero. Rationalist theology tries to preserve the personal Jesus as the last precious remnant of a divinity nobody can imagine any more. The Catholic Church proved more adaptable, since she met the universal need for a visible hero by recognising God's vicar on earth.
Jung then says what is actually being looked for. What we seek in visible human form is not man but the superman, the hero or god — the quasi-human being who symbolises the forces that grip and mould the soul. In loving that inheritance people love what is common to all, and turn back to the mother of humanity, the psyche, which was before consciousness existed. He calls it the problem of Antaeus, who kept his giant strength only through contact with the earth.
The shape of time. Regression measured in stages, and each stage has its own furniture. Repression is not directed solely against sexuality but against the instincts in general. The regression it causes leads back to the psychic past, and so to childhood, where the parents appear to be the decisive factors. A child cannot distinguish its own instincts from the will of its parents, which is how animals representing the instincts come to appear as attributes of the parents — the father as a bull, the mother as a cow.
Go back further than childhood and something else appears. Beyond the personal, in the preconscious and prenatal phase, archetypal images arise which are no longer connected with the individual's memories but belong to the stock of inherited possibilities of representation that are born anew in every individual. Their guise depends on the attitude of the conscious mind: hostile to the unconscious and the animals are frightening; positive and they are the helpful animals of fairytale.
What is worth having. A meaning that survives the individual, and the Sphinx is where the run lands. Miss Miller's first vision after the prayer is the head of a sphinx in an Egyptian setting, which appears and immediately goes. The word suggests an enigma and a creature who propounds riddles, standing on the threshold of a man's fate as though announcing the inevitable. Jung reads her as a half-animal figure of the Terrible Mother, and reminds the reader that in the legend the Sphinx was sent by Hera. Oedipus thought he had overcome her because he solved a childishly simple riddle, and then married his mother for the throne.
Read: lines 2253–2593.
What is real. A crowd that means a secret, and the reading is stated as a working rule.5 Miss Miller's next vision is a swarm of people, which Jung says symbolises a secret, or rather the unconscious. The possession of a secret cuts a person off from other people, and since the economy of the libido depends on rapport with the environment being unimpeded, holding important secrets is disturbing. It is especially good for a neurotic to be able to unburden himself of them in treatment.
He then generalises from clinical experience. The symbol of the crowd, and particularly of a streaming mass in motion, expresses violent motions of the unconscious. Such symbols always indicate an activation of the unconscious and an incipient dissociation between it and the ego. Horses appear next, and a battle, which he reads for the moment as the rush of thoughts arriving.
How people should relate. To a city as to a woman, and the evidence is a run of texts rather than an assertion. The dream-city is a maternal symbol, a woman who harbours her inhabitants in herself like children. That is why the three mother-goddesses, Rhea, Cybele and Diana, all wear the mural crown. The Old Testament treats Jerusalem and Babylon exactly as if they were women, and Jung quotes Isaiah at length: come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon.
The grammar of the thing is then set out. Strong, unconquered cities are virgins. Colonies are sons and daughters. Cities are also harlots — how is the faithful city become an harlot. The prehistoric king Ogyges reigned in Thebes and his wife was called Thebe, which Jung reads as the city and the woman being identical rather than as a coincidence.
The political version of the same idea is the most concrete material in the run. In Hindu myth Indra is the husband of Urvara, which means fertile land. Seizing a country was regarded as marrying it. Princes on accession had to guarantee a good harvest, and the Swedish king Domaldi was killed for a failure of the crops. In the Ramayana the hero marries Sita, whose name is the furrow. And a Chinese emperor had to plough a furrow on taking the throne.
What makes things happen. A swallowing and a giving-birth, which are the same event seen at two ends of the night. Frobenius supplies the logic and Jung reproduces it. If the blood-red sunrise is the birth of the young sun, the question is how the woman became pregnant. The primitive answer is that the sea had previously swallowed the old sun, and so became pregnant that way.
From this comes the pattern the rest of the book keeps meeting. The sea-going gods are solar figures, shut in a chest or an ark for the night sea journey, often with a woman. During the night sea journey the sun-god is shut up in the mother's womb and threatened by all kinds of dangers. Jung reproduces Frobenius's diagram rather than list the myths separately, which is a rare economy in this book.
What a person is. Someone made by a prohibition, and this is the chapter's largest claim. The separation of the son from the mother signifies man's leave-taking from animal unconsciousness. It was only the power of the incest prohibition that created the self-conscious individual, who before had been mindlessly one with the tribe. And only then did the idea of the final death of the individual become possible.
Which reverses a familiar sentence. Through Adam's sin, which lay precisely in his becoming conscious, death came into the world. The neurotic who cannot leave his mother has good reasons for staying, and ultimately it is the fear of death that holds him there. Jung adds that no idea or word seems powerful enough to express the conflict, and that centuries of struggling for the expression cannot have been motivated by anything as narrow as incest crudely conceived.
The shape of time. Two mothers standing over the same death, and the medieval poem supplies the scene. The Holy Cross answers Mary: to her it owes honour, and the bright palms it bears; her fruit flourishes on it in blood colour. The Mother of Death joins the Mother of Life in lamenting the dying god, and as a token of union Mary kisses the cross and is reconciled. Jung notes that in Egypt the same union of opposite tendencies had been preserved without embarrassment in the figure of Isis.
What is worth having. A way out through the narrowest possible opening, and Faust says it. Jung takes the bay in Miss Miller's next vision through its etymology — bay, gulf, gouffre, abyss, and Greek kolpos, meaning bosom, lap, womb, and also the deep hollow between two waves. Faust's desire, like every hero's, is a yearning for the mystery of rebirth, so his way leads out to sea and down into the maw of death. He resolves not to shrink before the cavern, but to strive towards that passage at whose door, a narrow mouth, burn all the flames of hell.
How you know. From a sound she could not explain, and the run ends on it. The next vision is a perpendicular cliff. Then the whole series ends, she says, in a confusion of sounds resembling "wa-ma, wa-ma." Jung notes that she tells us nothing about where it came from, so only one conjecture is open: in the context as a whole, it might be a slight distortion of the well-known cry Ma-ma.
Read: lines 2594–3664.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious in 1912.
Ethnographic reports as transparent evidence. The Wachandi rite, the "primitives" of the fire ceremonies, and Lévy-Bruhl's participation mystique are all quoted as data with no question about who collected them or under what conditions.
Inherited possibilities of representation. That archetypal images are transmitted like an organ, born anew in each individual, is asserted as a biological fact of the same kind as the structure of the brain.
Race and species arranged in one series. The animal psyche, the primitive, the child and the schizophrenic are ranged along a single axis of differentiation, and the axis is not defended.
The classical languages as common property. The whole argument of chapter II is a philological one, and it assumes a reader who will follow Cicero, Sallust and Augustine in Latin without translation.
Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Taking Freud's central term away and giving it back with a wider meaning. Jung does it in public, with the eunuch case and the schizophrenia comparison as evidence, and the cost is the one the prefaces already recorded: the man whose term it was suspected personal motives.
Insisting that a symbol is not a sign. That refusal removes the possibility of a translation table, which is what most readers wanted from the new psychology and what its rivals were offering.
Saying the world is empty only to those who cannot direct their love into it. It is aimed at a woman who is not present to answer, and the cost is that the same sentence indicts the introversion the book depends on for its material.
Naming idleness, on La Rochefoucauld's authority, as the passion hidden under incest. In a book written inside the psychoanalytic movement, that puts the least dramatic vice in the place reserved for the most dramatic one.
Reading Adam's sin as becoming conscious, and the incest prohibition as the thing that made the individual. It is a large theological claim from a physician, and it is the point on which the rest of the book turns.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: deciding whether a term in an argument is doing work or hiding a gap.
The instrument is the sign-and-symbol distinction, and its value is in the direction it points. A sign is a conventional abbreviation for something already known, and it has one fixed meaning. A symbol is an indefinite expression pointing at something not fully known. So the two call for opposite handling. A sign is cashed out and discarded. A symbol is surrounded.
The rule that follows is counterintuitive and testable. A symbol's variants are not noise around the real meaning — the more of them there are, the sharper the image gets. Which means the honest response to a rich image is to collect its parallels rather than to pick the best reading. That is why amplification takes the space it does, and Jung's own defence of the practice is the one from Part One: the deeper you go, the broader the base becomes.
Scope conditions. This holds where the thing being pointed at is genuinely not yet known — a live symptom, an image that keeps recurring, a phrase in a culture that will not settle down. It fails where a fixed convention actually exists, and treating a sign as a symbol there is how a reader ends up finding depths in a road marking. It also fails as a defence: an unfalsifiable reading cannot be rescued by calling its object a symbol.
The general form. Ask whether the thing has one agreed meaning or many analogous variants, and let that decide the method. Modern equivalent: any recurring image in an organisation — a slogan that will not die, a story everybody tells about the founding. Cashing it out into one meaning destroys the information; collecting the versions is what shows the shape.
The second-order finding is the one about naming, and it is the most usable line in the chapter. A concept works like a magically powerful name: it gets a grip on the object, renders it harmless, and incorporates it into the system. That is offered as an account of how primitive thought worked. It reads equally well as an account of what a diagnosis does to a patient, and Jung does not make that application himself.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: judging where a culture's technical discoveries actually came from.
The claim is that the useful ones were not aimed at. Energy that could not go where it was going gets canalised into analogy-making, and analogy-making is what produced the discoveries. Jung says the little word like has a positively overwhelming importance in the history of human thought, and that the canalisation of libido into analogy was probably responsible for some of the most important things primitive man found out.
The worked example is fire, and its structure is the transferable part. The rite is an analogy held with total seriousness: two sticks named as man and woman, grass named as testicles, butter as semen, and the fire that results named as the child. Nobody in that ceremony is making fire in order to cook. The ceremony is a sexual act performed on wood, and fire is what falls out of performing it.
Scope conditions. This bites where the activity is rhythmic, repeatable and charged, and where a real technique happens to sit inside the charged act. It fails as a general theory of invention — most tools were not discovered inside a rite. And it fails as a reading of any particular rite whose history is actually known, which is why Jung has to lean on the recurrence across unconnected peoples rather than on any single case.
The general form. A practice charged enough to be repeated for its own sake will be repeated long enough for whatever is useful in it to be found, and the finder will not be looking. Modern equivalent: any discipline that keeps a costly ritual nobody can justify — and whose practitioners turn out, decades later, to have the only trained hands for something else.
The uncomfortable half is the 1268 chronicle. Cattle were dying, and men in monastic dress taught the villagers to rub wood, raise a Priapus and sprinkle the herds with holy water in which a dog's testicles had been dipped. That is the same rite, performed in a Christian country, by people who knew better, in an emergency. It is the strongest evidence in the chapter and it is evidence for persistence rather than for discovery.
[SPECULATIVE]Take the person Jung describes in one line and then leaves. Not Miss Miller only — the type. Somebody who has an inward-flowing current and no object for it. Jung's diagnosis is blunt and it is not a diagnosis of circumstance. The world is empty only to him who does not know how to direct his libido towards things and people, and to render them alive and beautiful. The palaces of fantasy beckon, and part of the psyche really does want the external object, and cannot get to it.
His counsel is nothing, because he is describing rather than treating. He names the passion underneath — idleness, on La Rochefoucauld's account, a calm of worse consequence than any storm — and moves on to the Sphinx.
An advisor working from love withdrawn would recognise the person at once and would refuse the word idleness. This is a man whose feeling is entirely intact and has been severed from anything it could reach. He loves, he is moved by beauty, and he has made himself unreachable — emotional capacity that exists internally and has been cut off from vulnerability and from mutual exchange. The counsel is that nothing is missing and nothing is asleep. The capacity is at full strength and has no outward channel, which is exactly why the inner palaces are so well built. So telling him the world is full is useless. He already knows. What he does not have is a way of being seen while reaching for it.
An advisor working from devotion routed through the senses would agree about the diagnosis and give an actual procedure. This tradition's answer to a love with no object is not to find the right object and hope. It is to assign the senses their work one at a time — eyes to this, ears to that, hands to the other — so that the feeling has somewhere to go before the person has decided how he feels. The counsel is that direction is trained rather than chosen, and that it is trained on things rather than by resolution. On this reading Miss Miller had one of these disciplines available and used it for four days a week: writing to absent friends, teaching officers English, making a painter draw a lake. What she did not have was anybody telling her that this was the practice.
They disagree about the first move. The first says the fault is in the severing, so the repair is relational and slow. The second says the fault is in the routing, so the repair is procedural and can start on Tuesday.
Where they converge is on the thing Jung's sentence assumes. He treats the ability to direct libido as something a person either has or lacks, and the lacking as a fault. Both advisors treat it as a capacity with a history — cut in the first case, untrained in the second — and neither would say the world's fullness is the relevant fact. Which matters because Jung's own case ends badly, and the sentence he wrote about her is the one thing in Part Two that would have been no use to her at all.