(Extract from MDR, pp.217-220. Parts are cut out not to compromise copyright)
…The problem of Job in all its ramifications had likewise been foreshadowed in a
dream. It started with my paying a visit to my long-deceased father. He was
living in the country — I did not know where. I saw a house in
the style of the eighteenth century, very roomy, with several rather large
outbuildings. It had originally been, I learned, an inn at a spa, and it seemed
that many great personages, famous people and princes, had stopped there.
Furthermore, several had died and their sarcophagi were in a crypt belonging to
the house. My father guarded these as custodian […]
The Bible my father held was bound in shiny fishskin. He opened it
at the Old Testament — I guessed that he turned to the
Pentateuch — and began interpreting a certain passage. He did
this so swiftly and so learnedly that I could not follow him. I noted only that
what he said betrayed a vast amount of variegated knowledge, the significance of
which I dimly apprehended but could not properly judge or grasp. I saw that
Dr. Y. understood nothing at all, and his son began to laugh […] On the contrary, his argument was so
intelligent and so learned that we in our stupidity simply could not follow it.
It dealt with something extremely important which fascinated him. That was why
he was speaking with such intensity; his mind was flooded with profound ideas. I
was annoyed and thought it was a pity that he had to talk in the presence of
three such idiots as we.
The two psychiatrists represented a limited medical point of view
which, of course, also infects me as a physician. They represent my
shadow — first and second editions of the shadow, father and
son.
Then the scene changed […] We then
entered the house, and I saw that it had very thick walls. We climbed a narrow
staircase to the second floor. There a strange sight presented itself: a large
hall which was the exact replica of the
divan-i-kaas (council hall) of Sultan Akbar
at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a high, circular room with a gallery
running along the wall, from which four bridges led to a basin-shaped center.
The basin rested upon a huge column and formed the sultan’s round seat. From
this elevated place he spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along
the walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It corresponded
precisely to the real
divan-i-kaas.
In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep flight of
stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall — which no longer
corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs was a small door, and my
father said, “Now I will lead you into the highest presence.” Then he
knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor. I imitated him, likewise
kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead
quite down to the floor — there was perhaps a millimeter to
spare. But at least I had made the gesture with him. Suddenly I knew — perhaps
my father had told me — that that upper door led to a solitary
chamber where lived Uriah, King David’s general, whom David had shamefully
betrayed for the sake of his wife Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to
abandon Uriah in the face of the enemy.
I must make a few explanatory remarks concerning this dream. The
initial scene describes how the unconscious task which I had left to my “father,”
that is, to the unconscious, was working out. He was obviously engrossed in the
Bible — Genesis? — and eager to communicate
his insights. The fishskin marks the Bible as an unconscious content, for fishes
are mute and unconscious. My poor father does not succeed in communicating
either, for the audience is in part incapable of understanding, in part
maliciously stupid […]
Poltergeist phenomena usually take
place in the vicinity of young people before puberty; that is to say, I am still
immature and too unconscious. The Indian ambiance illustrates the “other
side.” When I was in India, the mandala structure of the divan-i-kaas
had in actual fact powerfully impressed me as the representation of a content
related to a center. The center is the seat of Akbar the Great, who rules over a
subcontinent, who is a “lord of this world,” like David. But even
higher than David stands his guiltless victim, his loyal general Uriah, whom he
abandoned to the enemy. Uriah is a prefiguration of Christ, the god-man who was
abandoned by God. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” On top
of that, David had “taken unto himself” Uriah’s wife. Only later did I
understand what this allusion to Uriah signified: not only was I forced to speak
publicly, and very much to my detriment, about the ambivalence of the God-image
in the Old Testament; but also, my wife would be taken from me by death […]
I had to submit to this fate, and
ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission
would be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept
me just a millimeter away. Something in me was saying, “All very well, but
not entirely.” Something in me was defiant and determined not to be a dumb
fish: and if there were not something of the sort in free men, no Book of Job
would have been written several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Man
always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees.
Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom
if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?
Uriah, then, lives in a higher place than Akbar. He is even, as the
dream said, the “highest presence,” an expression which properly is
used only of God, unless we are dealing in Byzantinisms. I cannot help thinking
here of the Buddha and his relationship to the gods […]
He has even been given the power to annihilate Creation in its essential
aspect, that is, man’s consciousness of the world […]
The dream discloses a thought and a premonition that have long been
present in humanity: the idea of the creature that surpasses its creator by a
small but decisive factor.
(Extract from C.G. Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, pp.217-220.)
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