Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2018, 63, 3, 322–335

‘Who is my Jung?’ The progressive, though

sometimes ambivalent, expansion of Jung’s
idea of the collective unconscious: from an
‘unconscious humanity’ to – in all but name –
the soul of the world

Jules Cashford, London

Abstract: This paper discusses Jung’s idea of myth as a projection of the collective
unconscious, suggesting that the term ‘projection’ separates human beings from
nature, withdrawing nature’s life into humanity. Jung’s discovery of a realm
independent of consciousness – in conversations with his soul in The Red Book, and in
synchronicity, began a dialogue which finally brought him, through the Alchemical
Mercurius, closer to the idea of a world-soul.

Keywords: anima mundi, collective unconscious, Mercurius, myth, nature, projection,

world-soul

In the second paragraph of his Prologue to his Memories, Dreams, Reflections,

written in the late 1950s, Jung says: ‘What we are to our inward vision and
what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way
of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does
science’ (Jung 1967/1983, p. 17).
He seems to be suggesting that because myth tells the universal stories of
humanity it is precisely honed to what is essentially true in human nature,
and so can offer a way of understanding our own particular stories from the
aspect of the eternal, as being – each one – the Self’s unique experiment.
Nearly 30 years before, he set out his premise for this:
The collective unconscious – so far as we can say anything about it at all – appears to
consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all
nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort
of projection of the collective unconscious…. We can therefore study the collective
unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual.

(Jung 1931, para. 325)

0021-8774/2018/6303/322 © 2018, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Wiley Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12413
The collective unconscious and the soul of the world 323

Figure 1. Goddess of Laussel, limestone bas-relief, Dordogne, France. 18 inches high. c.

20,000 BC. wikicommons. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

The goddess holds a bison’s horn as a crescent moon, with seven lines notched
upon it – the waxing mode of fertility. Her left hand, resting on her pregnant
womb, draws the eye upwards through her arm to the head inclined towards
the moon-horn, relating the waxing of the moon in the heavens to the
waxing of human beings, and also, from the positioning of the figure as the
summit of the rock shelter overlooking the valley, to the fertility of earth
below.
Myth for Jung was the language in which the collective unconscious spoke –
‘the primordial language natural to [unconscious] psychic processes’ (Jung
1953a, para. 28) – ‘fantasy images,’ as he called them, which the Romantic
poets called Imagination. As, on occasion, did Jung himself:
324 Jules Cashford

Figure 2. Mercurius (1581). Cartari, Le imagini de I dei. (Jung 1944/1968a, fig. 165,
p. 326). [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Analogous to Plato’s forms … in accordance with which the mind organizes its
contents, we are not dealing with categories of reason but with categories of the
imagination. As the products of imagination are always in essence visual, their
forms must, from the outset, have the character of images and moreover of typical
images, which is why, following St. Augustine, I call them ‘archetypes’ …. The layer
of unconscious psyche which is made up of these universal dynamic forms I have
termed the collective unconscious.

(Jung 1953b, para. 845)

It is sometimes difficult to work out which is primary – myth, archetype,

primordial image or collective unconscious – except perhaps etymologically,
where archetype has the original imprint upon the psyche (arche – ‘first’,
tupos – ‘stamp’), yet is also given the name of ‘myth-motifs in general’ (Jung
1931, para. 334), while the collective unconscious acts more as a containing
The collective unconscious and the soul of the world 325

whole, ‘compris(ing) in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the
earliest beginnings’ (Jung 1929, para. 230).

***

At this point, mindful of Dale Mathers’ reminder in his paper that ‘We can use
MY Jung to create MY discourse. This is not a good idea’, I have to declare an
interest:
Many years ago, when I was teaching literature and had begun reading Jung,
but before training with AJA (Association of Jungian Analysts), I had what I
can only describe as a numinous dream. I mention it now because as soon as
I proposed this particular topic to discuss, the dream kept coming at me,
seemingly out of nowhere, to the point where I thought it would be
disrespectful to the unconscious, and maybe also to the spirit of the day, to
leave it out. I never wrote it down till now, though I visited it occasionally to
see if it was still there, and it is almost as vivid now as then.

I was just a kind of presence, standing on a sandy shore with the sea on my right.
Before me were two great white cliffs, half facing the sea, like one massive cliff
separated into two. The cliff on the left furthest from the sea, was just sheer white
rock; not shining, as though out of the sun, but with grass all over the top. It
swung away backwards at an angle to the other cliff on the right, closer to the sea,
which was the mesmerising one. It was covered in a waterfall of shimmering
colours, almost hanging over the white cliff like a sheen of sparkling water and
light. There was an unearthly blue sky behind them both. The overwhelming
thought that came with this – almost out of the air – was that the waterfall cliff on
the right, closer to the sea, was nature – the biological universe – and the bare white
cliff on the left, with the grass on top, was the collective unconscious; but the
essential thing was that both cliffs – the natural and the human – were one and the
same.

I wondered at the time about the angle that the ‘human’ cliff made to the
‘nature’ cliff – thinking of Rilke’s lines from the Duino Elegies: ‘Already the
knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted
world’ (Rilke 1923, I, 11-13).
However, talking of an interest, I have to say, astonishingly, I did not make
any conscious connection between my choice of subject and the dream until it
came forward all by itself many weeks later!

***

As we all know, Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious made possible his
meeting with Philemon who taught him the objectivity of the psyche, and this
opened up the imaginative space that it is now almost impossible to think
without. And, further, in trying to think how Philemon thought, Jung set
Imagination at the heart of the exploration of the psyche: ‘I was compelled
326 Jules Cashford

from within, as it were, to formulate and express what might have been said by
Philemon. That’s how Septem Sermones ad Mortuos with its peculiar language
came into being’ (Jung 1967/1983, pp. 214-5). ‘Those images that yet/ Fresh
images beget’, was how W. B. Yeats put it in his poem ‘Byzantium’ (Yeats
1965, p. 281), whose writings on the ‘Great Memory’ were very similar to
Jung’s collective unconscious, though they never read or corresponded with
each other.
‘My Jung’ is the one who brought mythology alive, and guided us to think
through images as inherently meaningful in their own right, expressing our
unconscious life more directly than our rational thoughts. Jung taught us to
feel images as well as to think about them, arriving at a meaning that comes
from feeling and thinking together as one. His intensive study of the universal
stories and images of myth as manifestations of the collective unconscious,
allowed him in his own personal journey to find his way back to the truths of
the ancient myths and make them available to the human psyche at a
completely new level – no longer simply other peoples’ tales from earlier
times, but radical disclosures of a common archetypal inheritance.

The language of projection

Jung says:

All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the
moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective
occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama
of the psyche which becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projection
– that is, mirrored in the events of nature. The projection is so fundamental that it
has taken thousands of years of civilization to detach it in some measure from its
outer object.
(Jung 1954, para. 7)

When I first read this, I thought we could understand ourselves not only as
telling stories about these phenomena of nature, but also as participating with
them, drawing nature and human nature closer together. Elsewhere, Jung
speaks of the collective unconscious as a ‘widened consciousness’, beyond the
ego, ‘bringing the individual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble
communion with the world at large’ (Jung 1938, para. 275). If this ‘supra-
individual psyche’ became conscious, he says, it would appear to us ‘not as
my sorrow but as the sorrow of the world; not a personal isolating pain, but
a pain without bitterness that unites all humanity’ (Jung 1931, para. 316).
But I became increasingly concerned about the exclusive language of
‘projection’ to describe our complex, intimate and ever-changing relationship
with nature. The final goal of seeing our inner unconscious dramas reflected
in the mirror of nature was an achievement too full of distance and loss, and
The collective unconscious and the soul of the world 327

also it did not seem to allow for the idea to grow – to imagine itself onwards
into a future, one which, as it were, took nature with us. Yet this future was
the very possibility promised in Jung’s extraordinary statement that ‘In the
collective unconscious of the individual, history prepares itself’ (Jung 1935,
para. 371). By ‘history’, he surely did not mean human history alone, a
history of humanity apart from the world of nature?
‘Projection’, coming from the Latin, and meaning literally to ‘throw forth’
(with undertones of ‘on behalf of’), puts a space between the self and the
world, essentially dividing them into two distinct entities. It is a term
predicated on an initial separation that is then bridged by the human mind
which created it in the first place. This is in contrast to a symbol, meaning,
literally from the Greek to ‘throw together’, which is the language of myth
and poetry, and brings about the union of the perceiver with the perceived.
Yet, is it not confusing to use the same term for both personal and impersonal
projections? With personal projections we are ultimately glad when we have
managed to ‘take back’ an unconscious projection, freeing ourselves and the
other from our infantile grasp.
But what happens when we use the same term for the ‘projection’ of the
collective unconscious onto nature? If we take that ‘back’, are we not bereft?
Diminishing the other do we not diminish ourselves? The idea of ‘projection’,
coming with predominantly negative connotations from the language of
complexes, implicitly assumes that any spirit, soul, psyche, consciousness, life
or meaning – whatever we want to call it – that we find in nature, or see as
nature, comes only from the human mind, further implying that the world
has no consciousness, no inherent life of its own. The danger is that the
language of projection – albeit often unintentionally – keeps referring the
world of nature back to human nature, and so continually emptying the
natural world of numinosity. No wonder ‘man feels himself isolated in the
cosmos’, as Jung says (Jung 1961, para. 585), and also, we might add, the
cosmos suffers from the isolation of human beings, which results in a lack of
care and compassion for the world we share with the rest of creation. Once
projection is primary, and detachment a virtue – assuming ‘spirit’ for the
human perceiver and ‘nature’ or ‘matter’ for the ‘outer object’ perceived – any
idea of life in nature is ruled out as ‘animism’. Although ‘anima’ means soul,
and is the root of ‘animal’, once an ‘ism’ is attached to it the term is used
pejoratively, reminiscent of the Roman Christian Church’s dismissal of
‘paganism’ - where the Greek word paganos meant simply ‘from the country’
– that is, too close to nature, and so, presumably, a threat to spirit. The idea
of projection leaves no room to explore a different kind of relationship which
could perceive numinosity in the natural world through an imaginative
participation with the myriad of forms within nature – illuminating, through
the motive of our attention, the animate life that is already there, as we do
with each other. But this requires that the possibility be not trapped, as it
were, in its origins, and especially the language of its origins, in its habit of
328 Jules Cashford

looking backwards to no less than ‘the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s

evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual’ (Jung 1931,
para. 342), while looking forwards only to its reflection in a mirror.
We might compare Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s relationship to the Moon
where he muses on similar questions to Jung’s, but without taking anything
away:

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon

dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were
asking, a symbolical language within me that already and forever exists, than
observing any thing new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an
obscure feeling as if that new phaenomenon were the dim Awakening of a forgotten
or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is
Logos, the Creator! and the Evolver!
(Coleridge 1804, II, 2546)

Or Meister Eckhart: ‘When the Soul wishes to experience something, she

throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it’ (Walsche 2009, p.
143).

The loss of nature

Yet Jung himself in other ways persistently mourned the loss of an instinctive
home in the world of nature: ‘Loss of instinct is largely responsible for the
pathological condition of our contemporary culture’ (Jung 1950b, para.
1494). ‘We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing
is holy any longer’ (Jung 1964, p. 94). It is often as though he is trying to
draw spirit and nature back together again and free us from the separation
which the language of projection fosters: ‘Nature is not matter only, she is
also spirit… the lumen naturae is the natural spirit’ (Jung 1942, para. 229).
Again, psyche is a ‘quality of matter, it is simply the world seen from within’
(Jung 1977, p. 303). Even if spirit is not identified with intellect, our present
‘dry and purely intellectual’ concept of ‘matter’ shows what we have lost –
deriving originally, via Latin matrix and mater, to the profound symbol of the
Great Mother, Mother of All (Jung 1964, p. 95). For ‘the psychic depths are
nature, and nature is creative life’ (Jung 1933, p. 215). In a late letter, written
in 1960, Jung referred to the collective unconscious as Nature:

The collective unconscious is simply Nature – and since Nature contains everything it
also contains the unknown…. So far as we can see, the collective unconscious is
identical with Nature to the extent that Nature herself, including matter, is
unknown to us. I have nothing against the assumption that the psyche is a quality of
matter or matter the concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that ‘psyche’ is defined
as the collective unconscious.
(Jung 1975 II, p. 540)
The collective unconscious and the soul of the world 329

Jung writes that, ‘The earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own’ (Jung
1976/1997, pp. 133-4), and in 1958 he talks of ‘the old idea that every country
or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul’ (Jung 1975 II, p. 432).
But is this only an old idea? We might ask why is a union with nature habitually
placed back in the past, as though participation mystique is not a frequent and
joyous dimension of contemporary life, and as though the ‘symbolic life’ cannot
be lived at any time in history? The problem is that, once separated, the two
terms – spirit and nature – cannot be brought together at the same level that
originally separated them. Hence the importance of Jung’s change of priorities.

***
There were two decisive turning points in Jung’s experience which led him to
reconsider the absolute priority of human consciousness. In ‘Refinding the
Soul’, in Liber Primus of The Red Book, after his vision of the flood, he
writes of how the ‘spirit of the depths’ drove him on and he said:

‘My soul, where are you?’ … I thought and spoke much of the soul. I knew many
labored words for her, I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object. I did
not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge;
much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my soul.… Hence I had
to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown, which did not exist
through me, but through whom I existed.… I had to recognize that I am only the
expression and symbol of my soul.
(Jung 2009, pp. 232-4)

The other turning point was Synchronicity (first mentioned in 1920, but not
expressed until 1951), which he came to in collaboration with the physicist
Wolfgang Pauli – the idea that events happening at the same time can be
connected not by cause but by meaning. So events may be seen as a
meaningful coincidence, ‘a falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity’
(Jung 1952, para. 840), which leads us to reflect at a deeper level.
Synchronistic experiences, he elaborates, ‘point to a latent meaning which is
independent of [our] consciousness’ (Jung 1975 II, p. 495), giving rise to the
possibility that it ‘might also occur without the participation of the human
psyche’ (Jung 1952, para. 942, note 71). There must therefore be a
correspondence and kinship between humans and the world. This made sense
of his paranormal experiences and gave him the idea of the quality of time
through which to understand astrology and divination.
These reversals of autonomy suggest that the collective unconscious could
make sense not only as an ‘unconscious humanity’ (Jung 1946, para. 408) or
‘the mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of
years’ (Jung 1927, para 729), but as something out of which both human
beings and the natural world originally arose. They would carry, therefore,
affinities far beyond the realm of human consciousness, and certainly beyond
what would be immediately available to our rational minds. Then the timeless
330 Jules Cashford

world-image which Jung sees as the mirror to humanity would also mirror the
rest of creation.

The soul of the world

The idea of the ‘soul of the world’, coming into the west from Plato’s Timaeus,
but found in myths of many other times and places, offers itself as a symbol of
this: ‘This world is indeed a living being endowed with soul and intelligence … a
single living visible entity containing all other living entities, which by their
nature are all related’ (Plato 1961, 30b, d).
Yet even in the 1950s Jung was still making projection primary, certainly in
relation to the idea of a world soul, which he dismissed as metaphysical or
transcendental:

The world-soul or … the world-spirit is a projection of the unconscious, there being no

method or apparatus which could provide an objective experience of this kind and
thus furnish objective proof of the world’s animation. This idea is nothing more
than an analogy of the animating principle in man, which inspires his thoughts and
acts of cognition. ‘Soul’ and ‘spirit’, or psyche as such, is in itself totally
unconscious. If it is assumed to be somewhere ‘outside’, it cannot be anything
except a projection of the unconscious. This may mean a lot or a little, according to
the way you look at it.
(Jung, 1950a, para. 219)

Von Franz agrees: ‘It is naturally very tempting to identify the hypothesis of the
collective unconscious historically and regressively with the ancient idea of an
all-extensive world-soul’ (Von Franz 1985, p. 85).
But calling it regressive does not allow for the possibility that it might itself be
a universal primordial image animating us!
As a symbolic perspective rather than as empirically verifiable fact, it would
never be a candidate for the science of the time – much influenced by logical
positivism – any more than the collective unconscious once was. For the
collective unconscious was not so much empirically proved as ‘validated’
through the lived experience of individuals, whose understanding of themselves
and their world was undeniably enriched through the ‘encouragement’, as it
were, of the hypothesis, which in turn made possible the means of its own
verification.
Similarly, how do we know that the ‘objective’ evidence which Jung finds
missing does not belong to the very categories of rationalism that he at other
times evocatively regrets? ‘Hemmed around by rationalistic walls we are cut
off from the eternity of nature’ (Jung 1927, para. 739). For if the human
psyche is ‘also nature’, these rationalistic walls may here be hemming in an
aspect of ourselves – the ‘eternal’ dimension which seeks for new forms of
expression. Jung lays the ground for this when he talks of the ‘timeless and
The collective unconscious and the soul of the world 331

eternal world-image’ of the collective unconscious as a mirror world which

counterbalances our conscious momentary picture of the world, and,
‘independent of our consciousness’ (like the soul and synchronicity) also
reveals the ‘inside’ of the whole of the world itself:

It means nothing less than another world, a mirror world if you will. But unlike a
mirror image, the unconscious image possesses an energy peculiar to itself,
independent of our consciousness. By virtue of this energy it can produce powerful
effects which do not appear on the surface but influence us all the more powerfully
from within.… That the world has an inside as well as an outside, that it is not only
outwardly visible but acts upon us in a timeless present, from the deepest and
apparently most subjective recesses of the psyche—this I hold to be an insight
which, even though it be ancient wisdom, deserves to be evaluated as a new factor
in building a Weltanschauung.
(Jung 1927, para. 729)

Is he suggesting that this timeless world-image which he sees as the mirror to

humanity would also mirror the whole of creation?

Mercurius as anima mundi

It is significant that the focus of the later stages of Jung’s thought was devoted to
Alchemy, as though implicitly to rectify an earlier and probably inevitable
imbalance towards the human and the inner at the potential expense of the
natural and the outer – the world beyond the human. As a pioneer exploring
our personal and collective psychic inheritance, he had to reorient the
consciousness of the time away from an identification with the outer world,
redirecting the over-confident rational mind inwards, towards the darker
roots of the psyche. However, continually moving him in the other direction
was myth, the language of the collective unconscious, bringing the worlds of
humanity and nature together. It may even have been this fruitful conflict
which led him in his own mythic journey to explore the depths of subjective
humanity and find there the objective psyche, drawing him beyond the human
psyche into the psyche of the world. So he was able to rediscover for a new
age the ancient wisdom, expressed in the myths of the Goddess and all the
dying and resurrected son-lovers and daughters, whose rebirth was never a
human act alone but a rebirth of all creation.
Interpreting a dream where ‘under the guise of the unknown woman the
dreamer has to discover the Pole at the risk of his life’, Jung says: ‘Mercurius
is the world-soul and the Pole is its heart. The idea of the anima mundi
coincides with that of the collective unconscious whose centre is the self’
(Jung 1944/1968b, para. 265). ‘As the anima mundi, Mercurius can in fact be
compared with the Gnostic ‘virgin of light’ and the Christian Virgin Mary’
(ibid., para. 506), and ‘in his volatile form of spiritus he is a parallel of the
332 Jules Cashford

Holy Ghost’ (ibid., para. 518). Alchemy then completed what Christianity had
begun, for ‘in the alchemical view Christianity has saved man but not nature.
The alchemist’s dream was to save the world in its totality: the philosopher’s
stone was conceived as the filius macrocosmi which saves the world’ (Jung
1977, p. 227). Cosmic salvation was the ultimate aim of the alchemical opus.
To redress this imbalance in ourselves, in relation to our own ‘depreciation of
earth’ (Jung 1941, para. 375), and the loss of ‘our mystical identity with nature’
(ibid.), Jung quotes Nietzsche’s advice to ‘become friends of the immediate
things’. The ‘immediate things’, Jung declares, are ‘this earth, this life’ (Jung
1976/1997, pp. 192-3). This is immanence, which he describes – ‘by way of
myth’ – in relation to Mercurius, who, he says, is ‘a kind of water: the
“divine water” … and the spirit of life, not only indwelling in all living
things, but immanent in everything that exists, as the world-soul’ (Jung 1944/
1968c para. 528).
In Bollingen, it was almost as if Jung embraced in himself the immanence that
his earlier theory often transcended, no longer confining this way of thinking to
the distant past of humanity – free, perhaps, to allow his own personal feelings
to speak for him in the confidence that they would not jeopardise his lifelong
work exploring the human psyche. As he said at the end of his
Autobiography: ‘The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there
has grown in me a feeling of kinship with all things’ (Jung 1967/1983, p. 392).

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself
living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that
come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that
has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not
linked. Here, everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless
kingdom of the world’s and the psyche’s hinterland.
(Jung 1967/1983, pp. 225-6)

In 1959, he gave a moving warning of the great danger that an ignorance of the
human psyche presents to the world: “The world hangs by a thin thread, and
that thread is the psyche of man....” (Jung 1959, film interview).
Yet might it be more in accord with his revelations on the soul and
synchronicity if he had put it the other way round as well? ‘Man hangs by a
thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of the world’? Whether as symbol
or fact, and at least in the language of myth, would this not invite our
thought towards an experience of the soul of humanity and the soul of the
world as forming one complete mysterious whole?

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TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article discute l’idée de Jung du mythe en tant que projection de l’inconscient
collectif, suggérant que le terme de ‘projection’ sépare les êtres humains de la nature,
334 Jules Cashford

en enlevant sa vie à la nature pour la mettre dans l’humanité. La découverte de Jung d’un
royaume indépendant de la conscience – dans les conversations avec son âme dans le
Livre Rouge, et en synchronicité, fut le point de départ d’un dialogue qui l’amena
finalement plus près, à travers le Mercure alchimique, de l’idée d’une âme du monde.

Mots clés: inconscient collectif, mythe, projection, nature, anima mundi, âme du monde,
Mercure

Dieser Artikel behandelt Jungs Idee des Mythos als einer Projektion des Kollektiven
Unbewußten, was andeutet, daß der Begriff ‘Projektion’ den Menschen von der Natur
trennt und das Leben der Natur in die Menschheit zurückzieht. Mit Jungs Entdeckung
eines vom Bewußtsein unabhängigen Reiches – in Gesprächen mit seiner Seele im
Roten Buch und in Synchronizität – begann ein Dialog, der ihn schließlich, durch den
alchemistischen Mercurius, der Idee einer Weltseele näherbrachte.

Schlüsselwörter: kollektives Unbewußtes, Mythos, Projektion, Natur, anima mundi,

Weltseele, Merkur

Abstract: Questo lavoro discute l’idea di Jung del mito come proiezione dell’inconscio
collettivo, suggerendo che il termine “proiezione” separa gli esseri umani dalla natura,
segregando la vita naturale dentro l’umanità. La scoperta di Jung di un dominio
indipendente dalla coscienza – nelle conversazioni con la sua anima nel Libro Rosso, e
nella sincronicità, iniziò un dialogo che alla fine lo portò, attraverso il Mercurio
alchemico, più vicino all’idea dell’anima del mondo.

Parole chiave: inconscio collettivo, mito, proiezione, natura, anima mundi, anima del
mondo, Mercurio

В статье обсуждается идея Юнга о мифе как о проекции коллективного

бессознательного. Предполагается, что термин «проекция» разделяет людей и
природу, убирает природную жизнь в человека. Открытие Юнгом независимой от
сознания области, которое произошло в его беседах со своей душой в Красной Книге
и в синхронии, в конечном итоге с помощью Алхимического Меркурия подвело его к
идее о мировой душе.

Ключевые слова: коллективное бессознательное, миф, проекция, природа, anima mundi,

мировая душе, Меркурий

El presente ensayo presenta la idea de Jung sobre el mito como una proyección del
inconsciente colectivo, sugiriendo que el término ‘proyección ‘separa a los seres
humanos de la naturaleza, retirando la vida natural de la humanidad. El
descubrimiento de Jung de una dimensión independiente de la conciencia – en
conversación con su alma en el Libro Rojo, y en sincronicidad, comenzó un diálogo
The collective unconscious and the soul of the world 335

que finalmente, lo condujo, a través del Mercurius Alquímico, más cerca de la idea del
alma del mundo.

Palabras clave: inconsciente colectivo, mito, proyección, naturaleza, anima mundi, alma
del mundo, Mercurius

我的荣格是谁?尽管时常矛盾,却不断前进的对荣格关于集体无意识观点的扩展,从“无
意识的人性”到(通过神话及各类名目)对世界的灵魂
这篇文章讨论了荣格关于神话是集体无意识投射的观点,提出“投射”的概念把人类从
自然中分离了出来,并把自然的生命从人性中撤离。荣格所发现的这个领域独立于意
识,在他《红书》中所记载的与自我灵魂的对话中,以及在共时性中,他开始了一个对话,
通过炼金术的墨丘利,这一对话最终使他更贴近世界灵魂的观念。

关键词: 关键词集体无意识, 神话, 投射, 自然, 阿尼玛之地, 世界灵魂