-The Casting Of The Rebel Angels Into Hell-

The Moon through a Crumbling Window (Bodhidharma), woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi from the series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1887

Dante Running from the Three Beasts, William Blake, between 1824 and 1827

The Kiss of the Sphinx by Franz von Stuck (1895)

Dante Running from the Three Beasts, William Blake, between 1824 and 1827

The two passages quoted here are from the autobiography of Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe.

From Nairobi we used a small Ford to visit the Athi Plains, a great game preserve. From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog, and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it.

 There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,” say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no “new day” leading to “new shores” but only the dreariness of calculated processes.

 My old Pueblo friend came to my mind. He thought that the raison d’etre of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

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Further in this biography, Carl Jung explains what is the ‘destiny’ or the ‘task’ of human existence:

“Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song? 

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy

And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain 

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun

And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted

To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer

To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season

When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs 

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements

To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;

To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast

To hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemies' house;

To rejoice in the blight that covers his field and the sickness that cuts off his children 

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door and our children bring fruits and flowers 

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten and the slave grinding at the mill

And the captive in chains and the poor in the prison and the soldier in the field 

When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:

Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

William Blake

Eldorado

Gaily bedight,

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—

This knight so bold—

And o'er his heart a shadow

Fell as he found

No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow—

"Shadow," said he,

"Where can it be—

This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

Ride, boldly ride,"

The shade replied—

"If you seek for Eldorado!"

Edward Allen Poe

El Dorado, from The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edmund Dulac (1912)