CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

LECTURE 3
in unconsciousness; to be unconscious of one’s passion is much worse
than to suffer from passion. And that is expressed by Aries, the ram; it is
a small sacrificial animal of which you don’t need to be afraid, for it is no
longer equipped with the strength of the elephant or the leviathan. You
have overcome the worst danger when you are aware of your fundamental
desires or passions.
The next animal is the gazelle, again a transformation of the original
force. The gazelle or antelope is not unlike the ram, living upon the
surface of the earth—the difference being that it is not a domesticated
animal like the male sheep, nor is it a sacrificial animal. It is not at all
offensive; it is exceedingly shy and elusive, on the contrary, and very fleet
of foot—it vanishes in no time. When you come upon a herd of gazelles,
you are always amazed at the way they disappear. They just fly into space
with great leaps. There are antelopes in Africa that take leaps of six to ten
meters—something amazing; it is as if they had wings. And they are also
graceful and tender, and have exceedingly slender legs and feet. They
hardly touch the ground, and the least stirring of the air is sufficient to
make them fly away, like birds. So there is a birdlike quality in the gazelle.
It is as light as air; it touches the earth only here and there. It is an
animal of earth, but it is almost liberated from the power of gravity. Such
an animal would be apt to symbolize the force, the efficiency, and the
lightness of psychical substance—thought and feeling. It has already lost
a part of the heaviness of the earth. Also, it denotes that in anvhata the
psychical thing is an elusive factor, hardly to be caught. It has exactly the
quality that we doctors would mean when we say that it is exceedingly
difficult to discover the psychogenic factor in a disease.
Mr. Dell: Would you compare it also to the unicorn?
Dr. Jung: I would say it is a close analogy, and you know the unicorn is
a symbol of the Holy Ghost—that would be a Western equivalent. 7
Mrs. Sawyer: The unicorn derives from the rhinoceros, so that would
also be an analogy.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the rhinoceros has survived in the legend of the unicorn.
The unicorn is not a real animal, but the rhinoceros has been a very real
animal in this country. For instance, one half of a rhinoceros has been
found, well preserved, in an oil pit somewhere in Eastern Europe—I
think in Poland. It was of the glacial period, a European rhinoceros. So
the unicorn is most probably a faint echo of those days when man saw the
actual rhinoceros here. Of course, one cannot prove it, but it is at least
7 Jung gave an extended commentary on the symbolic significance of the unicorn in
Psychology and Alchemy, inCW, vol. 12, §§518–54.
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