I am now reading pages 11 through 20 of Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. These pages are not easy ones. They are dense, full of images that resist quick interpretation, and at times you may find yourself rereading a line again and again. That has been my experience too. But here is the gift of Jung: once the meaning begins to emerge, his words stay with you. They are not only ideas, they are experiences, images that work on the soul. I find myself underlining entire passages, filling the margins with notes, and realizing that these pages are food for the inner life.

In this section, Jung focuses on a truth that runs through scripture as well: there can be no ascent without descent. Growth does not come by avoiding the depths but by entering them. Before the mountaintop, there is the valley. Before resurrection, there is the cross. And before transformation, there is the confrontation with the shadow.

The Descent into the Gorge
Jung illustrates this by recounting a dream. A theologian dreamed of climbing toward a mountain on which stood a castle of the Grail. The image is powerful: the mountain and the Grail, symbols of ultimate spiritual fulfillment. Yet as he approached, he discovered a deep gorge separating him from the goal. At the bottom of the gorge, Jung says, there was “underworldly water rushing along the bottom” (CW 9i, §41).

The meaning is clear. Before one can ascend to the mountain of God, one must first go down into the depths. Jung comments, “The descent is the indispensable condition for climbing higher” (CW 9i, §41). That sentence alone is worth carrying with us. The way up is the way down.

This truth is everywhere in scripture. Paul writes of Christ, “Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him” (Philippians 2:6–9). Exaltation comes only after humiliation. Resurrection comes only after crucifixion.

Jung presses the point further. He notes that “the prudent man avoids the danger lurking in these depths, but he also throws away the good which a bold but imprudent venture might bring” (CW 9i, §41). How often do we choose prudence over courage? We avoid the descent into our own pain, our own unconscious, because it seems too risky. But in doing so, we forfeit the treasures that can only be found in the depths. The soul’s gold is never discovered on the surface.

Spirit and the Body
From here Jung turns to the nature of spirit, and he challenges a false way of thinking about it. Many people imagine spirit as escape, as something purely lofty, light, and detached from the earth. Jung describes it as “a soaring over the depths, deliverance from the prison of the chthonic world” (CW 9i, §41). This kind of spirituality seeks to fly away from the body, to deny instinct and passion, to be “pure spirit.”

But Jung insists this is not the whole truth. Spirit is not found only in escape but in entering the depths. The symbol of water, which represents the unconscious, is not just heavenly. Jung writes, “It is earthy and tangible, it is also the fluid of the instinct-driven body, blood and the flowing of blood, the odour of the beast, carnality heavy with passion” (CW 9i, §41). The spirit is not opposed to these things. It is discovered within them.

This is the very heart of the gospel. “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Spirit does not float above humanity. Spirit enters humanity. God does not remain aloof from our passions and sorrows. God takes them on, shares them, redeems them. Jung’s psychology and John’s gospel are saying the same thing: spirit is incarnation, not escape.

The Loss of Symbol
Jung then shifts to a critique that cuts close to home for the church. He writes, “We are surely the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage” (CW 9i, §28).

What he means is that the great symbols of Christianity—the cross, the resurrection, baptism, communion—were given as treasures of the soul. They were never meant to be dry ceremonies or abstract dogmas. They were meant to carry the full weight of the mystery of God into our lives. But when symbols lose their vitality, they no longer speak to the soul.

Jung warns that when this happens, “the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas” (CW 9i, §28). In other words, when people are not fed by living symbols, they will feed on substitutes. We see this everywhere today. People search for ultimate meaning in politics, in consumerism, in self-help slogans. None of these can bear the weight of the soul.

The wisdom of scripture agrees: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). When symbols die, the imagination starves, and the soul grows thin.

The Vessels That Hold Us
Jung makes his point vivid by recalling the story of Brother Klaus, a mystic who was nearly destroyed by a terrifying vision of divine wrath. The vision was so overwhelming that it almost broke him. What saved him was not denying the vision but giving it a vessel. Through prayer, ritual, and symbol, he was able to contain and assimilate what would otherwise have consumed him.

This is why we need symbols. They are not optional ornaments. They are containers strong enough to hold the fire of God. Jung notes, “It is necessary for man to assimilate the symbol, otherwise he will be torn in two by the opposites” (CW 9i, §44). Without symbol, vision shatters us.

This is why Moses had to hide in the cleft of the rock when God’s glory passed by (Exodus 33:22). Without that cleft, he would not have survived. Symbols are those clefts for us. They are the ways God shelters us from being overwhelmed.

The Mirror of the Soul
Finally, Jung gives us one of his most haunting images. “Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it lives something else… the mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it” (CW 9i, §43).

To look into the unconscious is to look into a mirror. At first, we see only our own reflection. Often it is not flattering. We see our shadow, our repressed desires, our hidden fears. But Jung says there is more. Behind the image lives “something else.” If we stay with the mirror, if we do not turn away, we begin to glimpse the deeper life that animates us, the presence of God waiting to be revealed.

Paul says, “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). For now the mirror confronts us with dim and difficult truths. But if we dare to keep looking, we prepare ourselves for the fuller vision of God’s face.

Why It Matters
Reading pages 11 through 20 of Jung has reminded me that faith is not about soaring above life. It is about entering it fully, even the parts we would rather avoid. It is about descending into the valley before we climb the mountain. It is about letting the Spirit inhabit our flesh rather than trying to escape it. It is about holding on to the living symbols that can contain God’s presence. It is about looking honestly into the mirror of the soul, even when the reflection is painful.

These are not abstract ideas. They touch everyday life. Descent looks like facing the grief you keep avoiding. Spirit in the flesh looks like discovering God’s presence in the middle of an ordinary argument or a kitchen full of dirty dishes. Living symbols look like slowing down enough in worship to let baptism, communion, or the cross really speak to you. The mirror looks like seeing yourself honestly in the words of your child, or in the pain of someone you have hurt, or in the dream that unsettles you.

A Reflection for the Week
Ask yourself this week: where am I being invited to descend? What mirror has been placed before me? What symbol have I taken for granted that I need to let speak again?

Write it down. Pray with it. Do not turn away too quickly.

The psalmist says, “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Psalm 139:8). Even in the depths, Christ has gone before us. And over the waters, the Spirit still whispers, “Let there be light.”

I have only just begun reading Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. At the time of writing, I am on page ten. Already, I find myself scribbling in the margins, circling words, and rambling thoughts that feel too alive to keep to myself. This blog is my way of sharing those thoughts, of putting into words what I often chase down in the quiet of my study. My hope is that as I read daily, I can also reflect daily, creating a kind of journal that others might walk alongside.

In some ways, I am treating this like lectio divina. Traditionally, lectio is a slow, prayerful way of reading scripture: lingering with the words, letting them speak, and asking how they might be lived out in daily life. I am approaching Jung in the same way. His books are not easy reading, but they feel like food for the soul. Jung himself once received a letter from a reader who told him, “Herr Professor, your books are not words, they are food.” That is exactly how scripture is often described—bread for the journey, manna in the wilderness.

I have come to believe that if a text, a film, a poem, or even a dream begins speaking to you, then you should listen. That is how the soul speaks. That is how the numinous breaks into ordinary life. Jung once said that “a truly religious experience has the power to heal the soul.” I know this from experience.

And so here I am, ten pages in, circling two words: soul and archetype.

The Soul: What is it, particularly as Jung sees it and how we might understand it as modern people? 🤔

The word soul is old. In Old English it was sawol, from the Proto-Germanic saiwalō, connected to the animating breath of life. To have soul meant to be alive, to be more than flesh and bone.

Jung writes, “Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life” (CW 9i, §56). For him, the soul is not a ghostly essence that drifts away at death. It is the living center of our inner life. It mediates between the ego’s consciousness and the depths of the unconscious.

This is much the same as scripture. Jesus asked, “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul (psyche)?” (Mark 8:36). Paul contrasts the psychikos person (soul-centered) with the pneumatikos person (spirit-filled) in 1 Corinthians 15:44. Scripture and Jung are both talking about the same thing—the core of our life, the center where meaning and transformation happen.

Think of soul in the moments that move you most deeply: the awe before a night sky, the grief that humbles you, the joy that surprises you. These are not just emotions. They are the stirrings of the soul.

This is why Jung insists myths are not primitive science. “All the mythologized processes of nature… are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche” (CW 9i, §7). When ancient people told of the sun as a god reborn each morning, they were projecting the drama of the soul onto the cosmos.

Fairy tales work the same way. They may sound simple, but they are some of the purest expressions of what stirs in the human heart.

And Rumi wrote,
“Don’t get lost in your pain.
Know that one day your pain will become your cure.”

That is soul-language: a reminder that even suffering can become food for transformation.

The Archetype
If the soul is the living subject, archetypes are the forms that shape its experience. The word archetype comes from arche (origin, ruling principle, beginning) and typos (pattern, stamp, model). An archetype is a first pattern, a primordial form.

Jung says the collective unconscious is “not individual but universal… it is identical in all individuals” (CW 9i, §3). It contains “primordial types… universal images that have existed since the remotest times” (CW 9i, §5). Archetypes are not our inventions. They are discovered within us.

Think of the archetype of the hero. We meet him in Moses leading Israel, in Hercules, in Luke Skywalker. Or the archetype of the mother. She appears as Mary, as Isis, as the fairy-tale queen, or as the shadow figure of the stepmother. Each is a different face of the same underlying pattern.

Scripture also uses this language. John begins his Gospel, “In the beginning (en arche) was the Word” (John 1:1). Paul calls Christ “the beginning (arche), the firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:18). These are archetypal statements. They describe Christ as the original pattern in whom all things hold together.

And Paul warns us in Ephesians 6:12 that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers (arche), against the authorities (exousia), against the powers (dynamis) of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” These powers can be understood as archetypal forces—patterns of fear, domination, or shadow that take hold of us if left unconscious. Jung would say they are archetypes in shadow form, demanding to be faced and transformed.

Soul Meeting Archetype ❤️
The soul is our lived inner life. Archetypes are the patterns that shape that life.

Jung observed that “primitive man has an irresistible urge to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events” (CW 9i, §7). We do the same. We speak of storms of emotion, a fire in the heart, or a light dawning on the mind. We cannot help but project our inner world onto the outer one.

Religion grows out of this meeting point. It is not only about creeds or doctrines. It is the psyche reaching for God through image and symbol. Jung wrote, “All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche” (CW 9i, §10).

Joseph Campbell put it memorably: “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (The Power of Myth, p. 38). And the psalmist said, “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts” (Psalm 42:7).

Living Examples: Rumi and Thomas 👥
For me, these ideas are not abstract. I have been drawn for more than twenty years to the story of Rumi and Shams. Rumi, the poet, is like the ego: seeking, longing, trying to make sense of life. Shams, his companion and disruptor, is like the Self: the numinous figure who shatters Rumi’s old life so that his soul can awaken. Their love and loss echo the archetypal drama of ego meeting Self.

Rumi once wrote,
“What I had thought of as God I met today in a human being.”

That is the archetype breaking through.

I see the same truth in the Gospel of Thomas. Thomas Didymus means “the Twin.” In John’s Gospel, he is the doubter, the one who must see and touch. In the Gospel of Thomas, his very name points to something deeper: he is the archetypal twin of Christ, the image of the Self within us. Jesus’ sayings in Thomas repeatedly point inward: “The kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known” (Thomas, Saying 3).

Thomas the Twin is not just another disciple. He is the mirror of the Christ within us, the archetypal double who reminds us that our soul must meet its other…the Self…to awaken fully.

Why This Matters 💡
Only ten pages in, I can already see that my life is not just mine. Every dream, every symbol, every margin note is personal, but also collective. The soul is intimate, but it is vast. Archetypes ensure that my story is always part of the greater human story.

Jung often used the word “soul” for this very reason. It is the part of us that experiences meaning, that dreams and suffers, that reaches for God. He was updating the vernacular of scripture—giving us new language for ancient truths. Where the Bible speaks of soul, spirit, and powers, Jung speaks of psyche, Self, and archetypes. Both point to the same inner realities, just in different tongues.

And Rumi whispers again:
“There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.”

That voice is the soul, speaking in the language of archetypes.

A Reflection for the Week 📝
This week, try reading your life as if it were scripture. Practice lectio divina with a dream, a story, or even a movie that has stayed with you. Write down one image that lingers. Ask: What does this say about my soul? How does it connect to the archetypal story of humanity? Where might it whisper of God?

Fairy tales remind us that even simple stories carry the depth of the collective. Psychology teaches us that the unconscious is shared by all. Myth shows us that cosmic energy flows through our imagination. Scripture reminds us that our true struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the powers and patterns that shape us from within. And Jung reminds us that “to have soul is the whole venture of life” (CW 9i, §56).

And here I am, still only on page ten, realizing that my scribbled notes are not just ramblings. They are the soul at work. They are food for the journey.

You can purchase the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Archetypes-Collective-Unconscious-Collected-Works/dp/0691018332

Learn more about the Collective Unconscious & the Archetypes here: