Just as the maternal side of the uroboros gives birth without procreation, so the paternal side procreates without the maternal womb.  The two sides are complementary and belong together.  The original question asks about the origin of that which moves all life.  To this question the creation myths give one answer: they say that creation is something not altogether expressible in the symbols of sexuality, and they proceed to formulate the unformulable in an image.

The creative word, creative breath - that is creative spirit.  But this breath concept is only an abstraction from the image of the procreative wind-ruach-pneuma-animus, which animates through “inspiration.”  The solar phallus symbolizing the creative element is the source of the wind, both in an Egyptian magic papyrus and in the vision of a modern psychotic.³²  This wind, in the form of the ruach-dove of the Holy Ghost, is wafted under the robe of the immaculately conceiving Virgin Mary, through a tube held out to her by God the Father in the sun.  The wind is the fructifying bird known to the primitives, the ancestral spirit that blows upon the women, and also upon tortoises and female vultures, and makes them fruitful.³³

Animals as fructifiers, gods as fructifiers, gods as animals, animals as gods – everywhere the enigma of fructification is ranged alongside that of creative “inspiration”  Mankind asks about the origin of life, and immediately life and soul fuse into one, as living psyche, power, spirit, motion, breath, and the life-giving mana.  This One who stands at the beginning is the creative force contained in the uroboric unity of the World Parents, from whom it blows, begets, gives birth, moves, breathes, and speaks.  “As the wind blows, everything grows,” says the Upanishad.³⁴

Although the ego experiences - and must experience - the uroboros as the terrible dark power of the unconscious, mankind does not by any means associate this stage of its preconscious

32. Jung, “The Structure of the Psyche,” p. 150.

33. Briffault, The Mothers, Vol. II, p. 452.

34. Brihadaranyaka 3. 9. 9, in The Ten Principal Upanishad.s, trans. by W. B. Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami.

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existence only with feelings of dread and drowsiness.  Even if, for the conscious ego, light and consciousness cleave together, like darkness and unconsciousness, man still has inklings of another and, so he thinks, a deeper “extraworldly” knowledge.  In mythology this illumination is usually projected into a knowledge acquired before birth or after death.

In the Bardo Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the dead man receives instruction, and the instruction culminates in the doctrine that he shall know himself identical with the great white light that shines beyond life and death:

Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and is the Immutable Light— Buddha Amitabha.³⁵

This knowledge is postconscious, outside and not of this world, a knowing and being in the perfection that comes after death, but it is also preconscious, preworldly, and prenatal.  This is what the Jewish midrash means when it ascribes knowledge to the unborn babe in the womb, saying that over its head there burns a light in which it sees all the ends of the world.³⁶  Also, existence in the time before the beginning is supposedly connected with foreknowledge.  The creature that still exists in the round participates in the knowledge of the unformed, is merged in the ocean of wisdom.  The prima1 ocean, likewise an origination symbol – for as a ring-snake the uroboros is also the ocean – is the is source not only of creation but of wisdom too.  Hence the early culture heroes often come up from the sea in the shape of a half fish, like the Babylonian Oannes, and bring their wisdom as a revelation to mankind.

Since the original wisdom is preworldly, i.e., prior to the ego and the coming of consciousness, the myths say it is prenatal.  But existence after death and prenatal existence in the uroboros are the same thing.  The ring of life and death is a closed circuit; it is the wheel of rebirth, and the dead man instructed in the

35 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, p. 96.

36 Wunsche, Kleine Midraschim, Vol. III, pp. 213 f.

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Bardo Thödol will infallibly be born again if he fails to attain to the highest knowledge in his afterlife. So for him the instruc­tion after death is equally a prenatal one.

The mythological theory of foreknowledge also explains the view that all knowing is “memory.”  Man’s task in the world is to remember with his conscious mind what was knowledge before the advent of consciousness.  In this sense it is said of the saddik, the “perfect righteous man” of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement dating from the end of the eighteenth century:

The Saddik finds that which has been lost since birth and restores it to men.³⁷

It is the same conception as Plato’s philosophical doctrine of the prenatal vision of ideas and their remembrance.  The original knowledge of one who is still enfolded in the perfect state is very evident in the psychology of the child.  For this reason many primitive peoples treat children with particular marks of respect.  In the child the great images and archetypes of the collective unconscious are living reality, and very close to him; indeed, many of his sayings and reactions, questions and answers, dreams and images, express this knowledge which still derives from his prenatal existence.  It is transpersonal experience not personally acquired, a possession acquired from “over there.”  Such knowledge is rightly regarded as ancestral knowledge, and the child as a reborn forebear.

The theory of heredity, proving that the child has the ancestral heritage biologically in himself, and to a large extent actually “is” this heritage, also has a psychological justification.  Jung therefore defines the transpersonal - or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious - as “the deposit of ancestral experience.” ³⁸  Hence the child, whose life as a prepersonal entity is largely determined by the collective unconscious, actually is the living carrier of this ancestral experience.

In the dawn world of consciousness, where the feebly devel-

37^. Horodezky, Rabbi Nachman von Brazlaw, p. 188.

38^{. “}Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung,” p. 376.

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oped ego is still under the dominance of the unconscious, there rules, besides the symbolism whose mythological stages we are trying to describe, another set of symbols which correspond to the magic body image in the psyche.  Certain groups of symbols are co-ordinated with certain regions of the body.  Even today, the primitive body scheme of belly, breast, and head is used in ordinary psychology, where “belly” is an abbreviation for the instinctual world, “breast” and “heart” for the zone of feeling, and “head” and “brain” for the zone of spirit.  Modern psychology and language have been influenced to this day by this original body scheme.  The scheme is most developed in Indian psychology; in Kundalini yoga the ascending consciousness rouses and activates the different body-soul centers.  The diaphragm is supposed to correspond to the earth’s surface, and development beyond this zone is co-ordinated with the “rising sun,” the state of consciousness that has begun to leave behind the unconscious and all ties with it.

The body scheme, as the archetype of the original man in whose image the world was created, is the basic symbol in all systems where parts of the world are co-ordinated with regions of the body.  This co-ordination is to be found everywhere, in Egypt as in Mexico, in Indian literature as in the cabala.  Not God alone, but the whole world is created in man’s image.  The relation of the world and the gods to the body scheme is the earliest concretistic form of the “anthropocentric world piciture,” with man standing in the middle or “at the heart” of the world.  It derives from one’s own body sensations, which are charged with mana and are commonly misunderstood as narcissistic.

The mana-charge originally associated with everything that belongs to the body is expressed in primitive man’s fear of magical influences, due to the fact that every part of the body, from hair to excrement, can stand for the body as a whole and bewitch it.  Also, the symbolism of the creation myths, where everything that comes out of the body is creative, derives from the latter’s mana potency.  Not only the semen, but urine and spittle,

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sweat, dung, and breath, words and flatus, are heavy with creation.  Out of it all comes the world, and the whole “turn-out” is “birth.”

For primitive man and the child, with his overemphasized unconscious, the main accent falls on the visceral region and its dead weight of vegetative life.  The “heart” is for him the highest center, representing what the thinking head means for us.  For the Greeks, the midriff was the seat of consciousness, for the Indians and Hebrews, the heart.  In both cases thinking is emotional, bound up with affects and passions. . The dissolution of emotional components is not yet complete (see Part II).  Only if a thought is a passion that grips the heart can reach ego consciousness and be perceived; consciousness is only affected by the proximity of the idea to the archetype.  But the heart is also the seat of ethical decision; it symbolizes the centre of personality; and in the Egyptian Judgment of the Dead, it was weighed.  The heart plays the same role in Jewish mysticism, ³⁹ and even today we still speak of a man having a “good heart” as though it were an ethical organ.  Anything situated lower down than the heart belongs to the realm of instinct.  The liver and the kidneys are visceral centers of great importance for psychic life.  “God trieth the heart and reins” of the man whose conscious and unconscious are to be searched, and the examination of the liver as the divinatory center in haruspicy is as well known as the fate of Prometheus, who, for the theft of fire and the hybristic overextension of his consciousness, was punished with the “agenbite of inwit” by Zeus, who sent an eagle to feed upon his liver.  But all visceral centers, which also function as affective centers controlling sexuality, are already centers of a higher order.  Deeper down lies the psychic plane of intestinal processes of the alimentary tract.  The instinct to eat – hunger - is one of the most elementary of man’s psychic instincts, and the psychology of the belly plays a correspondingly large part with primitives and children.  One’s state of mind is the more dependent upon whether one is satis-

39. Bischoff, Die Elemente der Kabbalah, Vol. I, p. 234.

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fied or not, or thirsty or not, the less one’s consciousness and one’s ego are developed.  For the embryonic ego the nutritional side is the only important factor, and this sphere is still very strongly accentuated for the infantile ego, which regards the maternal uroboros as the source of food and satisfaction.

The uroboros is properly called the “tail-eater,” and the symbol of the alimentary canal dominates this whole stage.  The “swamp” stage of the uroboros and early matriarchate, as described by Bachofen, is a world in which every creature devours every other.  Cannibalism is symptomatic of this state of affairs.  On this level, which is pregenital because sex is not yet operative and the polar tension of the sexes still in abeyance, there is only a stronger that eats and a weaker that is eaten.  In this animal world - since rutting is relatively rare - the visceral psychology of hunger occupies the foreground.  Hunger and food are the prime movers of mankind.

Everywhere we find in the initial creation myths a pregental food symbolism, transpersonal because_sprung from the original collective layer of symbols.  The systole and diastole of human existence center on the functions of the digestive tract.  Eating = intake, birth = output, food the only content, being nourished the fundamental form of vegetative-animal existence - that is the motto.  Life = power = food, the earliest formula for obtaining power over anything, appears in the oldest of the Pyramid Texts.  They say of the risen dead:

          The sky clouds over, the stars rain down (?); the mountains stir themselves, the cattle of the Earth-god tremble . . . at the sight of him, as he appears before them with the living soul of a god, who lives upon his fathers and devours his mothers.

             It is he who devours men and lives upon the gods. . . . The catcher of skulls . . . he catches them for him.  He of the resplendent head watches them for him and drives them to him (?)...

           Their great ones are for his breakfast, their lesser ones for his dinner, and their little ones for his supper.

             Whomsoever he meets on his ways, he eats raw.

              He has taken away the hearts of the gods.  He has eaten the Red Crown and swallowed the Green Crown.  He eats the lungs of wise men; he is con-

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tent to live upon hearts and their magic; he rejoices (?) .. . if he can devour those who are in the Red Crown.  He flourishes and their magic is in his body, and his glory is not taken from him. He has devoured the understanding of all the gods. . . ⁴⁰

We find a corresponding symbolism in India.  In one account of the creation, the first divinities fall headlong into the sea, and “Hunger” and “Thirst” are delivered up to the negative powers of the primeval waters.  The account continues:

Hunger and Thirst said to him (the Self):  “For us two also find an abode.”

To them he said: “I assign you two a part among these divinities. I make you two partakers among them.”  Therefore to whatever divinity an oblation is made, hunger and thirst become partakers in it.

He bethought himself: “Here now are worlds and world-guardians.  Let me create food for them.”

He brooded upon the waters.  And out of them that were brooded upon there arose a form.  The form that arose is food. ⁴¹

Food becomes a “cosmic content” to be seized hold of, and when the Self finally managed to seize it with apana (the digestive breath), “he consumed it.”  In another passage hunger is symbolized as death; he is the eater and devourer, as we know from the deadly and devouring aspect of the uroboros.

Even today language cannot get away from these elementary images.  Eating, devouring, hunger, death, and maw go together; and we still speak, just like the primitive, of “death’s maw,” a “devouring war,” a “consuming disease.”  “Being swallowed and eaten” is an archetype that occurs not only in all the medieval paintings of hell and the devil; we ourselves express the swallowing of something small by something big in the same imagery, when we say that a man is “consumed” by his work, by a movement or an idea, or “eaten up” with jealousy.

On this level, where the uroboros is co-ordinated with cosmogony; the world or cosmic content to be “assimilated” is food.  Food is a phase of Brahma:

40. Spells 273—74, in Errnan, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians.

41. Aitareya Upanishad 2. 5.-.3. 2 (based on Hume and Deussen translations).

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From food all creatures are produced,

All creatures that dwell on earth.

By food they live

And into food they finally pass.

Food is the chief among beings,

Therefore they call it the panacea.

Verily he obtains all food

Who worships Brahma as food.

For food is the chief among beings,

Therefore they call it the panacea.

All creatures are born of food,

By food they continue to grow.

Creatures feed on it, it upon creatures,

Therefore is it called food.⁴²

Brahma arises through tapas.

From Brahma comes food,

From food—breath, spirit, truth,

Worlds, and in works, immortality.⁴³

The same symbolism is used in the Maitrayana Upanishad,⁴⁴ where the relation between the world and God is equivalent to that between food and the eater of food.  God, once glorified as the world nourisher, is now seen as the world devourer, for the world is God’s sacrificial food.

Just as in primitive psychology and mythology the “alimentary uroboros” is a cosmic quantity, so its symbolism also appears in the relatively late philosophical speculations of India for the purpose of clarifying the relations between God as “subject” and world as “object,” and vice versa.

In this connection we must mention the “sacrifice” that is offered to the god in the form of food and “eaten” by him.  It is at once an act of incorporation or “inward digestion,” and of seizure for increase of power.

So the world in India is the “food of the gods.”  As Deussen has explained, the world, according to an early Vedic idea, was

42^. Taittiriya Upanishad 2. 2.

43. Mundaka Upanishad 1. 1. 8 (both based on Hume and Deussen translations). 44 9. 1 ff.

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created by Prajapati, who is at once life and death - or hunger.  It was created in order to be eaten as the sacrifice which he himself offers to himself.  This is how the horse sacrifice is interpreted,⁴⁵ the horse standing for the universe, like the bull in other cultures:

Whatever he brought forth, he resolved to eat.  Because he eats (ad) everything, he is called infinite (aditi).  Therefore he who knows the essence of aditi, becomes the eater of the world; everything becomes food for him.⁴⁶

From this it is clear that a later age, correctly interpreting the old symbolism, has spiritualized it, or “inwardly digested” it; for the act of eating, digesting, and assimilating the world now appears as a means to possess and obtain power over it.  To “know the essence of aditi” is to experience the infinite being of the creator who “eats” the world he has created.  Thus, on the primitive level, conscious realization is called eating.  When we talk of the conscious mind “assimilating” an unconscious content, we are not saying much more than is implied in the symbol of eating and digesting.

The examples from Indian and Egyptian mythology could be multiplied at will, for this sort of elementary food symbolism is archetypal.  Wherever liquor, fruit, herbs, etc., appear as the vehicles of life and immortality, including the “water” and “bread” of life, the sacrament of the Host, and every form of food cult down to the present day, we have this ancient mode of human expression before us.  The materialization of psychic contents, by which contents that we would call “psychic” – like (life, immortality, and death - take on material form in myth and ritual and appear as water, bread, fruit, etc., is a characteristic of the primitive mind.  Inside is projected outside, as we say.  In reality there is a “psychization” of the object: everything out-side us is experienced symbolically, as though saturated with a content which we co-ordinate with the psyche as something psychic or spiritual.  This material object outside is then “assimilated,” i.e., eaten.  Conscious realization is “acted out” in the

45. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1. 1. 1.

46^. Ibid., 1. 2. 5 (based on Hume and Deussen translations).

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elementary scheme of nutritive assimilation, and the ritual act of concrete eating is the first form of assimilation known to man.⁴⁷  Over this whole sphere of symbolism looms the maternal uroboros in its mother-child aspect, where need is hunger and satisfaction means satiety.

The body and its “autoerotic-narcissistic” sense of itself - we shall be reviewing this idea later on - is an uroboric closed circuit.  In this pregenital stage self-gratification is not masturbation, but the satisfaction of being nourished, with the infant’s finger-sucking as a substitute.⁴⁷   To “obtain” is to “eat,” it does not mean to “be fertilized”; to “produce,” to “express,” means to “excrete” “spit,” “urinate” - later to “speak” - but not to “give birth” or “beget.”  The masturbatory stage of uroboric creation is, on the other hand, genital in character, and precedes the sexual stage of the World Parents, which is the stage of propagation in duality, and both are preceded by the stage of the alimentary uroboros.

All the above bodily functions symbolize something that is at the same time a psychic process.  The rites of cannibalism and the funeral feast, the eating of gods in the Pyramid Texts, and the communion mysteries, represent a spiritual act.

The assimilation and ingestion of the “content,” the eaten food, produces an inner change.  Transformation of the body cells through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes experienced by man.  How a weary, enfeebled, and famished man can turn into an alert, strong, and satisfied being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating drink: this is, and must remain, a fundamental experience so long as man shall exist.

47. [Cf. Guenon, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanata.  It is here pointed out (p. 79, n. 2) that from the Latin word sapere, “to taste, perceive, know,” are ultimately derived two groups of words, namely “sap”, Saft, seve, “savour”, “sapid,” etc., on the one hand, and savoir,  “sapient,” “sage,” etc., on the other, “by reason of the analogy which exists between nutritive assimilation in the bodily order and cognitive assimilation in the mental and intellectual orders.” TRANS.]

47a. See illus. 1 (frontispiece).  The creator god Vishnu as a child sucking his big toe combines in himself the living circuit of the uroboros and its autonomy.

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The emergence of corresponding symbolisms does not mean “regression to the oral zone” in the sense that this is an “infantile-perverse” zone of sexual pleasure which we ought to overcome, but simply a return to uroboric symbolism (illus. 1), positively accented by the unconscious.  Being fertilized by eating does not imply ignorance of the sexual act, nor is it in any sense an “unenlightened substitute”; it means “total assimilation” rather than “union with.”  It is something different from the above-mentioned fertilization by the wind; in eating, the accent falls on the bodily intake, but in the latter case, on the invisibility of the animating and fertilizing agent.⁴⁸

Accordingly, at the stage of the maternal alimentary uroboros, the breasts are always emphasized, as for instance in the mythological pictures of the many-breasted Great Mother (illus. 12) or in the innumerable statues of the goddess who presses her breasts.  Here the nourishing Great Mother is more generative than parturient.  Breast and lactic flow are generative elements which can also appear in phallic form, because the milk is then understood symbolically as a fertilizing agent.  The milk-giving mother, whose commonest symbol is the cow, is procreative and on that account may even have a paternal character.  Her child, as something she “fertilizes,” is then receptive and feminine, regardless of its sex.  The maternal uroboros is still hermaphroditic and presexual, like the child.  So the mother propagates by nourishing, just as the child is fertilized by eating and gives birth by evacuating.  For both of them the nutrient flow is a symbol of life without polar tension, and entirely unsexual.

The accentuation of the Mother’s breast and its phallic char­acter, however, already forms the transition stage. The original situation is one of complete containment in the uroboros. When the phallic character of the breast emerges, or the Mother is seen as the phallus bearer, it is a sign that the infantile subject

48. A psychoanalytical interpretation (Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido”; Jones, “Psychoanalysis of Christianity”) which would reduce. the one to the cannibalistic oral stage of libido organization, and the other to flatus at the anal level, is profoundly hurtful to the man whose symbolic products are misunderstood and depreciated in this way.

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is beginning to differentiate himself.  Active and passive strivings gradually become distinct; the opposites make their appearance.  Conceiving by eating and giving birth by excreting are differentiated as separate acts within the nutrient flow, and the ego begins to distinguish itself from the uroboros.  This means the end of that beatific uroboric state of autarchy, perfection, and absolute self-sufficiency.  So long as the ego was swimming in the belly of the uroboros, a mere ego germ, it shared in that paradisal perfection.  This autarchy holds absolute sway in the womb, where unconscious existence is combined with absence of suffering.  Everything is supplied of its own accord; there is no need of the slightest exertion, not even an instinctive reaction, let alone a regulating ego consciousness.  One’s own being and the surrounding world - in this case, the mother’s body - exist in a participation mystique, never more to be attained in any environmental relationship.  This state of egolessness, interrupted by no pleasure-pain reactions, is naturally experienced by the later ego consciousness as one of the most perfect forms of autarchy, bringing utter contentment.  Plato describes the formation of the world in words that recall this containment within the uroboros:

It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside it to be heard.  There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested.  Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing.  Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely within and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything.⁴⁹

Once more we meet the uroboric cycle of self-propagation on the alimentary level.  Just as the uroboros fertilizes itself in the mouth by eating its own tail, so “its own waste provides its own food,” an ever-recurrent symbol of autonomy and self-sufficiency.  This primordial image of the autarchic uroboros un-

49. Timaetss, 33 (based on the Cornford trans.).

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delies the homunculus of alchemy, who is begotten in the round - the retort - by rotation of the elements, and it even underlies the perpetuum mobile of physics.

We shall have to concern ourselves with the problem of autarchy at all stages of our inquiry, because it is bound up with an important trend in man’s development, namely, with the problem of his self-formation.  So far we have distinguished three stages of uroboric autarchy: the first is the pleromatic stage of paradisal perfection in the unborn, the embryonic stage of the ego, which a later consciousness will contrast with the sufferings of the nonautarchic ego in the world.  The second stage is that of the alimentary uroboros, a closed circuit whose “own waste provides its own food.”  The third, genital-masturbatory phase is that of Atum “copulating in his own hand.”  All these images, like the self-incubation of one made pregnant through tapas - a later spiritual form of autarchy - are images of the self-contained creative principle.

Uroboric autarchy, even when it appears as a dominant archetype, must not be reduced to the level of autoeroticism and narcissism.  Both these conceptions are only valid in cases of misdevelopment, when the evolutionary stage ruled by the uroboros persists for an unnaturally long time.  But even then the positive aspect must be borne in mind.  Autarchy is just as necessary a goal of life and development as is adaptation.  Self-development, self-differentiation, and self-formation are trends of the libido no less legitimate than the extraverted relation to the object and the introverted relation to the subject.  The negative evaluation implied by the terms “autoeroticism,” “autism,” and “narcissism” is only justified in pathological cases where there are deviations from this natural basic attitude; for the development of the ego, of consciousness, of personality, and, lastly, of individuality itself is actually fostered by the autarchy whose symbol is the uroboros.  In many cases, therefore, the appearance of uroboric symbolism, especially if its formative and stabilizing character is strongly marked, as, for instance, in the

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mandala, indicates that the ego is moving toward the self, rather than in the direction of objective adaptation.

Detachment from the uroboros, entry into the world, and the encounter with the universal principle of opposites are the essential tasks of human and individual development.  The process of coming to terms with the objects of the outer and inner worlds, of adapting to the collective life of mankind both within and without, governs with varying degrees of intensity the life of every individual.  For the extravert, the accent lies on the objects outside, people, things, and circumstances; for the introvert, it lies on the objects inside, the complexes and archetypes.  Even the introvert’s development, which relates mainly to the psychic background, is in this sense “bound to the object,” despite the fact that the objects lie inside him and not outside, being psychic forces rather than social, economic, or physical ones.

But besides this trend of development there is another, equally legitimate, which is self-related or “centroverted,” and. which makes for the development of personality and for individual realization  This development may derive its contents from outside and inside equally, and is fed by introversion as much as by extraversion.  Its center of gravity, however, lies not in objects and objective dealings, irrespective of whether the objects be external or internal, but in self-formation; that is to say, in the building up and filling out of a personality which, as the nucleus of all life’s activities, uses the objects of the inner and outer worlds as building material for its own wholeness.  This wholeness is an end in itself, autarchic; it is quite independent of any utility value it may have either for the collective outside or for the psychic powers inside.

That we are nevertheless concerned here with a creative principle of decisive importance for civilization will be shown in its proper place.

Self-formation, whose effects in the second half of life Jung has termed “individuation,”⁵⁰ has its critical developmental

50. Psychology and Alchemy, index, s.v.

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The same uroboric symbolism that stands at the beginning, before ego development starts, reappears at the end, when ego development is replaced by the development of the self, or individuation.  When the universal principle of opposites no longer predominates, and devouring or being devoured by the world has ceased to be of prime importance, the uroboros symbol will reappear as the mandala in the psychology of the adult.

The goal of life now is to make oneself_independent of the world, to detach oneself from it and stand by oneself.  The autarchic character of the uroboros appears as a positive symbol pointing in a new direction.  Whereas the uroboric incest of the neurotic and his pleromatic fixation denote an inability to break away from his origins and a refusal to be born into the world, the appearance of mandala and uroboros symbolism in the mature man is an indication that he must once more free himself from this world - for now he is “fed up” with it – and come to himself.  He has, by a new process, to bear himself out of this world, just as he had to bear himself into it with his nascent ego.

Hence the “perfect” figure of the uroboros, standing as it does at the center of the unconscious world of the primitive and the

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child,⁵¹ is simultaneously the central symbol of the second half of life and the nucleus of the developmental trend we have called self-formation or centroversion.  The symbol of the circular mandala stands at the beginning as at the end.  In the beginning it takes the mythological form of paradise; in the end, of the Heavenly Jerusalem.  The perfect figure of the circle from whose center radiate the four arms of a cross, in which the opposites are at rest, is a very early and a very late symbol historically.  It is found in the sanctuaries of the Stone Age; it is the paradise where the four streams have their source, and in Canaanite mythology it is the central point where the great god El sits, “at the source of the streams, in the midst of the sources of the two seas.” ⁵²

The uroboros, traceable in all epochs and cultures, then appears as the latest symbol of individual psychic development, signifying the roundedness of the psyche, life’s wholeness, and perfection regained.  It is the place of transfiguration and illumination (illus. 11), of finality, as well as the place of mythological origination.

Thus the Great Round of the uroboros arches over man’s life, encompassing his earliest childhood and receiving him again, in altered form, at the end.  But in his own individual life, too, the pleroma of universal unity can be sought and found in religious experience.  In mysticism, where the self-re-entrant figure of the uroboros appears as the “ocean of Godhead,” there is often a dissolution of the ego, an ecstatic surrender which is equivalent to uroboric incest.  But when, instead of the death ecstasy of the ego, the “Sturb und Werde”principle of rebirth predominates, and the theme of rebirth prevails over that of death, this is not a regression but a creative process. ⁵³  Its relation to the uroboric stage will be fully discussed e1sewhere, for the distinction between creative and pathological processes is of the utmost importance in all depth psychology.

51. Cf. the role played by the circle in the earliest drawings of children (Illus. 5)

52. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, p. 72.

53. See my “Der mystische Mensch.”

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For both processes the uroboros is appropriate as a symbol of origination.  In creative phenomena, too, and not only in religious phenomena, the life-spanning figure of the round signifies the regenerative sea and the source of higher life.  It is, however, this same figure whose clinging embrace prevents the neurotic from being born into life.  Then it is no longer the primordial figure of the uroboros, but, in the case of a more developed ego, the indication that a further stage has been reached, namely, the dominance of the uroboros over the ego, or the stage of the Great Mother.

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